Baseball Collections - sydrogerdavid's Blog

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Baseball Collections

Posted on November 1, 2013 at 11:04 PM.

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Journal 5

I think it should be noted that many, if not all the items in the Barry Halper Collection are disputed upon as to whether or not they are authentic or fake. I�m not going to go into details because I�d rather not research this topic too deeply just for a journal entry.

Everybody has been told not to believe something that sounds too good to be true. This saying most certainly applies to many of the items in the Halper Collection. Items in the collection range from game worn jerseys, game used gloves, and personal effects such as diaries or dentures. I for one, find it hard to believe that any memorabilia items that date back before the Dead Ball Era should be taken as legitimate.

Think about it. Nobody would have saved a World Series ticket from the 1903 games. How in the world could a Cap Anson jersey survive 100 plus years even when the St. Louis Cardinals have a hard time scrounging up jerseys from their 1926 season? Back then, baseball was just a game. People didn�t care about saving things to sell farther down the road. Jerseys were regularly thrown out after they were used for many consecutive years. Even at the time of Ty Cobb�s death, people wouldn�t scrounge his house for useless artifacts (diaries, dentures) to keep until the 1980s when selling memorabilia items took off.

Personally, with all the controversy and some solid evidence that what Barry Halper had was fake, I find it hard to believe that anybody would consider it a great purchase by the Hall of Fame. I�m rambling on about this because the book praised the collection. I give the book the benefit of the doubt though. It was published in 2003, a few years before people started to question and try to prove the collection false.