Nationals selling Span 1000th hit ball

[danesei@yahoo.com]

I'm not positive that the ball will go up for sale, but I'm pretty sure they just showed one of the ball boys handing the ball to a MLB rep... with a roll of authentication stickers.

[coxfan]

Good to watch for, but my research through MLB authentication hologram numbers has found a lot of authenticated items that are never put up for sale. For example, the last ball used in the Rangers' 2010 ALCS game 2 win, their first- ever postseason home win, was sent by Nolan Ryan for authentication, but apparently returned to him to keep.

[allstarsplus]

The ball was given to Span. Most milestone balls are MLB Authenticated these days.

[Roady]

I have Garret Anderson's 2500th hit ball.

[Roady]

.

[helf35]

The Royals have Ichiro tied for most career singles hit up for auction.

[coxfan]

The ball LH419797 from Garret Anderson's 2500th hit game isn't necessarily the one he hit for the milestone. I own LH419802, which has the identical inscription. So do several balls from the same sequence: eg 41976, etc through the number sequence of holograms.

Unfortunately the MLB authenticators sometimes gave the milestone game, implying that the ball was the actual one. But if one looks through the whole number sequence, one can often find it is only a ball from that game, rather than the actual milestone.

Fortunately, modern authenticators rarely use these misleading hologram descriptions.

[coxfan]

I had a typo in my last post. The hologram number sequence runs from LH419794 up through my LH419802, etc. for this game.

[allstarsplus]

The ball LH419797 from Garret Anderson's 2500th hit game isn't necessarily the one he hit for the milestone. I own LH419802, which has the identical inscription. So do several balls from the same sequence: eg 41976, etc through the number sequence of holograms.

Unfortunately the MLB authenticators sometimes gave the milestone game, implying that the ball was the actual one. But if one looks through the whole number sequence, one can often find it is only a ball from that game, rather than the actual milestone.

Fortunately, modern authenticators rarely use these misleading hologram descriptions.

That's a real shame when they did it that way. I'm surprised they never went back to clarify it.

[allstarsplus]

Here's a small part of my collection of the real milestone baseballs that I got from players as part of my Washington Nationals collection.

The Adam Dunn 1st HR ball in particular you will note that it went into the stands and the team retrieved it. Those go into a special database called PLAYER COLLECTED HR BALL.

The Ivan Pudge Rodriguez 1st HR ball went into the bullpen and retrieved by the authenticator so that went into the regular GAME-USED BASEBALL database.