The exclusive Upper Deck baseball card with autographs from Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Babe Ruth and Honus Wagner might not be so rare after all. The card was drawn from a 2005 Upper Deck SP Legendary Cut Pack and features four of the five members of the inaugural class of the Baseball Hall of Fame. A big jerk, if it were real.
This card (shown here) first attracted attention in November 2005 when collector Barry Scott of Guntown, Mississippi put it up for auction and sold it for $85,000. But then (this article appeared recently.) It appears that Kevin Demitros, the 50-year-old airport planner from Milwaukee who purchased the card, was watching an HBO special on Sports Memorabilia Fraud and surprisingly saw the authenticity of his card being questioned. The same card I had thought was a “retirement investment” And why wouldn’t I?The Upper Deck ERA card.Upper Deck!
Below is an excerpt from the article:
Demitros watched an HBO special on fraud in the sports memorabilia industry and saw a scan of his card being examined by someone convicted in connection with a federal forgery investigation. The man claimed that two of the autographs on the card were fake
Demitros is now involved in a dispute with the card’s maker, Carlsbad-based Upper Deck Co., which stands behind its products, but said he is willing to have the card reviewed by an independent third party to determine its authenticity.
Three authentication companies that studied a scan said they believed Ruth and Johnson’s autographs might not be genuine.
“It’s a great question. It’s an opinion,” Fitzsimmons said of trying to verify such old autographs.
First of all, I hope the signatures are real. Any false memory is bad for the hobby. It certainly looks like Upper Deck will do the right thing here and take care of Kevin if the signatures turn out to be fake (they better have a PR nightmare and probably a lawsuit). However, there is an important lesson to be learned from all of this: no one can say with 100% certainty that an autograph is real.
Hopefully Kevin’s story will draw more attention to the issue. Upper Deck, the leading card manufacturer, a company that has its own authentication service employing industry experts, may yet have missed a counterfeit…on one of their most valuable cards!
On the Upper Deck site they state:
Autograph forgeries victimize unsuspecting fans. Upper Deck Authenticated ® became the first company to find an answer to the counterfeiting problem by creating an airtight five-step authentication system that ensures fans get genuine autographs. Today, the company has autograph relationships with the biggest stars in the game and produces some of the best memorabilia on the market.
And yet, arguably his most important card, one that sold for $85,000, included 2 alleged counterfeits!
This isn’t something new – I was exposed firsthand (on a much smaller level, of course) to this last year when a friend of mine got an autograph from Mike Vick at the Pro Bowl only to be accused by the purchaser of the item. that PSA said was fake, costing it a sale and damaging its reputation. He illustrated to me first hand that you will never know for sure, that the best thing you can do is pay for an opinion. I went on to make an argument about the damage autograph authentication is doing to the industry, not because experts are giving their opinion on the authenticity of an autograph, but because people were being led to believe that they should treat that opinion as FACT. , raising autograph prices to unreasonable levels for the average collector.
This story just adds to the argument made in that article: The only way to really know if an autograph in your collection is real is to get it yourself. Anything else, a certificate of authenticity or even a PSA/DNA certification, does not guarantee the authenticity of an autograph, it simply increases the likelihood that it is real.