Per more on-line research of exemplars, I know that it is NOT:

Tom Gordon or Tommy John...

The ball has a NICE Tino on it already, and researching his sig, I didn't see any rushed exemplars that looked close to this...

I do appreciate all of the help - and, like I told Cap Sports, I'm not going to cry if I can't figure out ONE auto out of 35 on the ball... especially considering what I picked this ball up for - this was TRUE eBay steal... I bought this about 2 years ago and the seller only knew that Torre was on the sweet spot, so he guessed it was a Yankees ball of the 1996 - 200? era... I had to bid against 2 guys - it closed at like 2am here in Denver - I won the ball for $52 + $5 shipping...

I just started going through my team balls and making detailed pages of how many autos are on the ball, who they are, and the panels and order in which they appears for future reference and this ONE auto is the only one I can't seem to find.

I narrowed it down to the 2000 team based on the players on the ball and the players that are NOT on the ball (Soriano - LATE 2000 call up for the WS)...

At one point (based on the various versions of his autos) I thought I might have lucked into it being a quick Steinbrenner - I have seen some that his G looks similar to the start of this and some that the S looks similar to the 2nd half, but I cannot find any that have the two together to conclusively make that judgement... he does have many versions where the end of Steinbrenner is just a squiggly tail like this auto...

Any other thoughts???

Thanks again for all the thoughts and insights...

- Chris