Atlanta Braves weekend memorabilia sale

[skipcareyisfat]

Some of you may have heard about the Braves' memorabilia sale this weekend at Turner. I had the chance to go on Friday. (Sorry, didn't bring a camera.) I got there about a 1/2 hour after the gates opened and headed straight for the Hank Aaron room, which is where the sale was held. The Cards were in town and the crowds each day were huge, so the place was already packed when I got there.

The first thing I saw when I walked in was a table loaded with signed, home-white jerseys. They had guys like Lemke, Charlie O'Brien, Mike Deveraux, Dave Justice, plus Chipper, Smoltz and dozens of others - new and old. I asked about the Chipper and Smoltz and the guy said $300 for each. There was a sign hanging above the table that read "game used jerseys," so these prices got me pretty excited. Then I looked at the tagging and realized that they were just retail shirts with names and numbers. Turns out, the only gamers they had that day were Tyler Yates, Matt Diaz, Mike Remlinger, Kelly Johnson and one or two others, and they were in the $250-300 range.

They had just a handful of g/u bats (Chipper, Andruw, Francoeur, Scott Thorman, Tim Hudson, and one or two others) and each was $300. Lineups cards (signed by Cox) were $100. Signed, (mostly non-fitted) hats started in the $60-70 range. I only saw two gamers and they were Antonio Alfonseca and Mark DeRosa. Tons of signed baseballs were available. Again though, no good buys unless you consider a smudged Leo Mazzone for $70 a bargain.

As for the auction items, a $500 min. bid would have put you in the running for a Frank Robinson signed ball; $4,000 was the min. for a signed clubhouse chair; and $1k might have gotten you game used jerseys from either Cox or Smoltz.

For game used collectors this would have been a disappointing event. Plus, IMHO, most of this stuff wasn't priced to sell, which seemed to defeat the purpose of raising money for charity. Did anyone make it out Saturday or Sunday?

[hiramman]

I beat Jason to the game and was about the 2nd or 3rd person into the Hank Aaron Room. I had already been through the same spill with the people there about the jerseys. I had already just about scooped up a Brian McCann jersey for $300 when I realized it wasn't game-used. I had a nice Chipper Jones bat in my hands and was ready to buy it before realizing that it was just a Batting Practice-Used bat for $300. They checked to see if they had any game-used Chipper bats & I was told that there were none at the sale or upstairs where they had other bats stored. I asked one of the woman in charge of the charity sale how they could tell which bats were game-used and which were just BP-used bats and was told that they sent them over from the team seperated and given to them in seperate boxes which were marked game-used bats and batting-practice bats. Good in theory, but the bats contained no tags or labels of any kind on them and they had all of the bats either displayed on hooks (8 or 10 bats) or piled under the tables. Their only reference was that the game-used bats had team certificates that were to go with them and the BP bats did not come with a letter. I had them go through the stack and when they couldn't come up with a certificate for Chipper Jones, I had to pass. Unfortunately, they did have multiple bats of some of the lesser known players, but only one certificate, so I guess it was a lottery to figure out which of the bats were game-used or BP. Though some of the bats were clearly BP bats (tons & tons of ball marks and even some still taped up) others could clearly have been gamers, but $300 for Ryan Langerhans or Adam LaRoche seemed a bit much. I was very dissappointed in the prices and organization of the deal.

I did go back after the game and there seemed to be almost all of the game-used jerseys still there and many of the bats, though I'm sure some fans unknowingly went home with some expensive BP bats.

I, too would like to know if anyone attended the games Saturday & Sunday. Hopefully they had better luck than Jason & I did.