Care and feeding of your autographed baseball collection

[Soldan]

My buddy in Chicago wound up with a David Ross ball (super awesome IP story, but that's for another day)

I was explaining to him how to take care of it, because he's never collected autographs before. And that kind of lead to blog post. I want to drop the post here and see if anyone has any suggestions for stuff I need to add?

Thanks,

Dave
http://www.davemitchner.com/caring-signed-baseball/

[Akweldadam]

Great write up. Couple things though, where the heck are you getting ROMLB for $12?! Cheapest I have found is AndersonKPT at $15 a piece, $13 a piece if you buy them by the dozen. Another thing that I have found extremely helpful, though some players don't like it, are the sweetspot jackets. They are usually either neoprene or a softer type plastic and have an opening to expose a section of the ball. These make it much easier to carry a ball around , I even use them for paid signings so I make sure the ball is signed where I want.

[Soldan]

Typo, thank you.

That should have read 15, but I mistyped. Thanks for pointing it out. :)

[OC22]

One thing I'd suggest is to only use blue ballpoint. While the pic below doesn't do a great job of showing this due to the lighting, black pen tends to brown out over time. Both the baseballs below were signed within a year or two of each other and stored in the same (less than optimal) conditions, but both in a ball cube. The blue may fade a bit, but it will hold its color. The black fades into a brownish red and will continue doing so over time.

[Akweldadam]

Typo, thank you.

That should have read 15, but I mistyped. Thanks for pointing it out. :)

Well shoot, I was hoping you found a secret gold mine lol!

[Soldan]

Do you mind if I use your photo to show the reasoning behind it? I don't have a similar set that I can vouch for. (I only started seeking out signed baseballs in the last year or so. I was all flats and cards before that.)

One thing I'd suggest is to only use blue ballpoint. While the pic below doesn't do a great job of showing this due to the lighting, black pen tends to brown out over time. Both the baseballs below were signed within a year or two of each other and stored in the same (less than optimal) conditions, but both in a ball cube. The blue may fade a bit, but it will hold its color. The black fades into a brownish red and will continue doing so over time.

[cyberer]

walmart had ROMLBs for like $5 for much of the summer. There was something of a buying frenzy among autograph social media enthusiasts. I only managed to get about a dozen, but some people got many, many, more than that.

[OC22]

Do you mind if I use your photo to show the reasoning behind it? I don't have a similar set that I can vouch for. (I only started seeking out signed baseballs in the last year or so. I was all flats and cards before that.)

Feel free. Both were signed in the late 90s (Thome around 97, Henson around 99). Both have been in cubes since then. For the first 10 years or so, they were in my bedroom out of the sun, followed by another five or so in my parents' basement in a large Rubbermaid container. Just dug them out this summer. So, not optimal conditions, but you can see how each color holds up.