I have to agree with you Chris. I'd be surprised to see this ball end up at 100K, let alone the 7 figure price tag this Mr. Gazin mentions.

People like to collect memorabilia of entertainment figures they can relate to. I'm not aware of anybody who can relate to Bonds. The guy lives in "Barry World". He's arrogant, a cheat, and a disgrace to baseball. Yeah, it's a milestone ball. Too bad Bonds was the one who hit it.

Best of luck to the auction house and consignor.

Ned
Milwaukee

I agree Ned, this ball does have a strong risk for bringing under the original $220,000 sales tag. If the consignor wanted a profit that quickly, this type of item was probably the wrong route to go.

Ofcourse, you only need two serious customers to jack this thing up.

It may result in a loss, maybe he has a good accountant.

There's been a lot of discussion in the past about Coach's Corner, and the fact that they seem to routinely sell autographed baseballs of guys like Josh Gibson, Amos Rusie, Jim Thorpe, etc. -- balls that should be worth tens of thousands of dollars if real, but typically sell in the high hundreds. There's also been a lot of discussion in the past about the fact that SCD lends credibility to Coach's Corner by running their multi-page ads twice a month.

I had always assumed that SCD agreed to run Coach's Corner's ads for one simple reason -- SCD needed the money. But I noticed today that the connection between SCD and Coach's Corner appears to run much deeper.

Coach's Corner's autographs are usually authenticated by Stat Authentic. The Amos Rusie in their current auction is authenticated by Stat, as are dozens of others. Who operates Stat? It turns out that one of the two owners / authenticators is Ted Taylor. Ted Taylor writes for SCD. In fact, he writes "news" stories for SCD about Coach's Corner's auctions. The stories he writes are full of fawning praise, using phrases like "fully certified" to describe the autographs in the auction. Coach's Corner uses the same phrase in its ads, so it may be that the "news" stories are actually written by Coach's Corner, with Ted Taylor's name just added by SCD. There's also a link on Stat's website to Coach's Corner's auctions.

So, the bottom line is that we have seemingly fraudulent material, authenticated by an SCD writer, advertised in SCD, and promoted by the authenticator in SCD's "news" stories. Am I the last person to notice this?

There may be a good explanation for all this. I'd sure like to hear it. I had always assumed Ted Taylor was one of the good guys.

eat more beans