1) re: usage. without speaking for mark, i'll say that, for the most part, use is often qualified. championship use trumps regular season use and regular season use trumps practice use. simply put, i think collectors view many game-used items as tangible pieces of history and culture. to that end, the "provenance" of the use (where specifically the use came from) adds or detracts to the value/quality of a piece. it simply refers to the entire notion of what the piece has "seen"/been through that adds or detracts to it's historical and collectible value. relatively speaking and compared to the regular or post season, practices aren't of great significance so any wear achieved through them would be "inferior" to wear achieved through the more important regular post season. having a tear that occurred from brown half-heartedly slamming into a teammate during practice wouldn't be as interesting/valuable/historical as a tear that occurred from having that tear occur during a more significant event. it's one big reason, for example, why BP shirts go for so much less than actual gamers.

2) i've been thinking about this entire concept of promo shirts and i think it's an overly vague term that ought to be qualified. at times, teams have ordered and made up shirts for the sole purpose of donating to charity. i imagine they've also had them made up as gifts for VIPs. i'm not sure how close these types of shirts would be to their real game-issued/used counterparts.
it's well-known that players trade shirts amongst each other and have done so for awhile. i think they have extra shirts made up for the sole purpose of trading without actually wearing these shirts. (not sure what the point of trading non-issued/non-worn shirts is). jeff scott posted an excellent article a long time ago that showed that many players were trading shirts that hadn't even really been "issued" per se much less worn. they'd simply been ordered from the factory for the sole purpose of trading. a 1994 griffey shirt i saw once came with a letter of provenance from a former major league pitcher who said that he obtained the shirt directly from griffey. i believe the jersey really did come from the pitcher, i believe the pitcher really did obtain the jersey from griffey, and i believe the pitcher really believed it was a griffey gamer. in 1994, griffey was one of the game's biggest stars and i'm sure he had dozens of players all around the league requested his shirts. to meet the demand, i'm sure he had boxes of shirts ordered for the sole purpose of giving away to fellow players. unfortunately, the '94 shirt was missing a nameplate. i doubt his real gamers were missing nameplates. it was also missing his extra length customization. i think griffey just ordered some very generic blanks and had them done up (at times, improperly) to give away. again, i'm not sure how close many of these "player traded" shirts are to their real game-issued/used counterparts.
then you've got these "photo shoot" shirts. i've mulled this over a little. wouldn't a team photo-shoot shirt most likely come from the team locker room and be a legit game-issue? that is, most of the teams, especially back then, were pretty cheap. why order a shirt strictly for photo-shoot purposes when you could kill 2 birds with 1 stone and order a legit game-issue shirt, use it for the photo-shoot, and then carry it over for actual game-use? i'm just thinking to all of the "staged" blue jays team photo-shoots i've seen and the jerseys and bats and gloves all appeared to be legit game-issues. of course, they might use the same bat for all of the player photos, for example, but chances are it's a legit game bat and not a retail bat simply ordered for the shoot. it's a whole different story if we're talking about a commercial photo shoot (eg: from a sponsor or manufacturer) but if we're talking about a team photo shoot, i'd think the jerseys shown would most likely be legit game-issues from the locker room as opposed to shirts ordered solely for the shoot. conversely, in many of the commercial shoots i've seen, the jerseys pictured are usually look like retail shirts and not legit-game issues. i think a debate involving the notion of "promo shirts" ought to delve deeper into the specific sort of promo in order to more accurately ascertain the nature of the shirt pictured. that said robert, i understand you're not calling the brown jersey a retail shirt. from what i understand, you're simply saying that its use might've been wholly relegated to "promo" purposes and that the photos troy used to establish it as an actual brown gamer weren't of brown actually in a game and therefore call into question whether such a lightly-used shirt might've actually seen genuine game action. makes sense to me. if every single actual game photo i saw of joe carter showed cleat marks on his bat and then i saw obvious team promo photo of him holding one of his bats without cleat marks, i think it'd be idiotic to infer from that promo photo that carter therefore didn't always rap his cleats against his bats in games. rather, the more likely story would be that carter was simply holding a new bat that hadn't yet seen game action.

3) as i understand it, when the brown jersey was consigned to REA it was owned by troy and dave. by all accounts, the jersey seems to have sold and is now being consigned to Mastro. i don't believe troy and dave own it anymore. of course i could be wrong but that's what it seems like at first glance to me.

rudy.