Two trademarks of BBM's authentic autographed cards is that they are serially numbered and they have a "BBM" logo embossed into the card. It's hard to tell from the scans but the card does not have the embossing on it. It's a little easier to tell that the card is not serially numbered - it should be /100 - and that's what I should have noticed before I bought the card.
This sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole. What's the story on this? I can't imagine that it's fake as that's a lot of effort to fake something for only $10. One thought I had was that it was some sort of promo but BBM is almost always really good about clearly labeling their promos as "Promo" or "Sample" so it seemed unlikely.
I did a search on "2011 BBM Bobby Valentine" and was kind of surprised when an answer presented itself to me rather quickly. To confirm it, I reached out to the seller and asked where they had gotten the card from (after reassuring them that I was not upset about it or accusing them of selling me a fraudulent item). They responded with what I had suspected - they bought the card from JapanBall!
JapanBall is still selling autographed Bobby Valentine cards but they're sold out of this particular one (although it still appears on the web page). I did find an archived web page for cards like this though. JapanBall claims (and I have no reason to doubt them) that "the card came from Bobby’s personal collection". My best guess at what happened is that BBM gave Valentine a handful of unsigned cards or perhaps signed cards that were extra and that he sold them to (or through) JapanBall. He also signed some other cards from both BBM and Topps and sold them the same way.
I reached out to JapanBall to ask them about it but I haven't gotten a response. They're running their tour of Japan right now so it's probably not a surprise that I haven't heard back from them. I'll update this post if they get back to me. But at least I think I know why the card is unusual and that it most likely is authentic.
2 comments:
Another third trademark of BBM autographs is that they are ALWAYS stickers whereas this looks on-card. For the longest time EPOCH's claim to their share of the market was through selling on-card autographs before they too switched to mostly stickers (although they do still try with on-card sigs, mostly with retired players).
True although the couple other autographed cards from this set I found on YJA also appeared to be on-card rather than sticker so it didn’t stand out like the other trademarks
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