Hi All,

In my experiences with GU so far, I have found that it is near impossible of getting MLB/Club authenticated bats of the "common"/minor league players I collect. So far everything in my collecting has an MLB holo or a letter from the team to go with it. This is very important to me as I only have very limited funds so I want to get the absolute purest items.

However, the market price for "GU" bats of the players I collect is very low, $15-$50 generally (there are 2 on ebay now at $17!), and this is very tempting. However this temptation is outweighed by the fact that none of these items have any kind of certification or provenance with them. Even photomatching is very hard as most bats are from the minors or the main photo houses don't stock many pictures of these players. I would love to be able to trust every seller on ebay, but how do they even know if the player used the item or it was used by someone else?

I guess my question is two fold:

1. People that collect "minor" players, how do you trust that the bats you receive are genuine? Do you just put the faith out there that no one would go to the effort of forging that player? I mean just because it has your players name on the barrel, does that make it a target for your collection?

2. In the case of minor players, how often would their bats get used by other players? Does this happen a lot in the minors but not so much in the majors?

Thanks all!
Mark.