game-used bat
Collecting Game-used: No MLB Authentication ... Part V
Not every item in every MLB game gets one of those special little silver stickers and not every moment is captured on film ... or at least film that is easily found. (Video? Maybe.)
In a nutshell, that sums up this month's item in this Collecting Game-used series. You can see a teaser of what's left of the pice above with pine tar and shards of what looks like maple left behind. Thankfully, while there's a lot of mystery to this one, the identifying side of the barrel remains in play ... and that is why I grabbed this piece for my personal collection.
You can keep reading to see the details.
Collecting Game-used: No MLB Authentication? No problem ...
This zoomed-in crop of a publicly available Getty Images preview photo taken by Lisa Blumenfeld shows four spots of wear that can all be seen on this Nick Swisher game-used SSK bat from 2012 that Buzz owns today.
Most of the time, your safest way to pick up a piece of game-used memorabilia from Major League Baseball action is to look for the sticker.
You know, the MLB Authentication sticker that has a code to tell you exactly when and where an item was used -- an ironclad way to know something is legit as it's stickered immediately after an item is pulled from play. But there are limitations to collecting game-used memorabilia.
Not every item that gets used gets a sticker -- and that's where you can find gems.
If you can take that risk and do the research, you can find an item that's better than stickered -- you can find pieces if you know how to photo-match. Not every item can be matched every time for sure, but that's part of the fun of collecting -- the hunt for the items and the hunt for images to show that they are, indeed, 110-percent legit.
You can keep reading to see the details this time.
2 Item(s)