Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Sunday, August 28, 2022
It’s shocking that a 44-year-old who bowls over little kids to get baseballs isn’t popular. Baseball’s most obnoxious fan lived up to his reputation.
Zack Hample, the widely-loathed adult baseball collector who attends hundreds of games in pursuit of obtaining stray balls, brought his act to Coors Field during the Rockies’ series with the Cardinals.
The 44-year-old claims to have collected more than 11,000 stray balls from MLB stadiums, growing his reputation after snagging Alex Rodriguez’s 3,000th career hit and Mike Trout’s first career home run. Hample studies spray charts of hitters in the games he attends, in order to know where best to sit and position himself for home runs and foul balls.
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1. John Northey Posted: August 28, 2022 at 10:47 PM (#6093545)However if I were going to go through life again and wanted to mimic a lifestyle and attitude to impress the ladies; I'm convinced this would not be it.
Forget it, Jake. It's New York Posttown.
Once you open that can of worms, you're volunteering to be the jerk-police. That can't end well.
was reading the latest issue of AARP The Magazine tonight (cable TV guy can't come til Wednesday; these are the times that try men's souls), and they have a friendly fan named "Zack Hample" explain how to get a ball at an MLB game !
- arrive early; sometimes you'll find balls under OF seats from the start of batting practice (seems up there with catching a dead fish, but whatever).
- go to the first game of a series. Hample says the visiting team batters seem to take more swings so they can gauge the difficulty of hitting the ball out of various portions of the park. ironically, he adds that "plus, they haven't been hounded for days by collectors, so they're more likely to toss you a ball."
- wear 2 baseball caps to each game - home and road teams. visiting players notice, he says, gear of their own team and may want to reward your (in his case, fake) loyalty.
Despite being a lawyer, and quite unlike Zack Hample, Marlins Man sounds like a pretty chill dude.
Moreover, eBay now has an authenticity guarantee where any card over, I think it’s like $250, goes to CSG or PSA to be authenticated before being shipped to the buyer. It’s drastically cut down on the shady listings (which were pretty obviously shady to begin with). Even before that, eBay would force a refund if a buyer claimed the card was fake after receiving it.
I’ve bought at least 1000 cards of pre-1980 Hall of Famers since I got back into collecting in the last few years, about 99 percent of which are raw. I can think of about 5 where I’ve taken a flier on an eBay listing with blurry photos or otherwise questionable info, and the card turned out to be fake. After the first one (1968 Topps Mantle), I was easily able to spot them all and get a refund.
Seriously, who does that, for those who didn't watch the video, a 15 year old catches the ball, the guy reaches into his glove and pulls it out and puts it into his own glove. And this is a youTube personality. (man vs impossible)
Seriously, who does that, for those who didn't watch the video, a 15 year old catches the ball, the guy reaches into his glove and pulls it out and puts it into his own glove. And this is a youTube personality. (man vs impossible)
I'm shocked the guy wasn't immediately surrounded by an angry crowd and made to fork it over. And why couldn't security do something? It's theft once the kid has the ball in his possession.
John – faking cardboard is much more complex than you think. Though I don't have much inside information on practices surrounding vintage sports cards these days, I do know that there are Magic: The Gathering counterfeit cards out there of high enough quality to fake all but the most astute observers. Just a glance over at the BootlegMTG subreddit will give you an idea of the scope of the problem. We're talking about something much larger than your hypothetical home printer duplicate. We're talking about large-scale Chinese industrial printers devoted to creating counterfeits.
#14: I would strongly suggest caution if you continue to purchase raw pre-1980 cards of well-known players. There are a lot more bootleg and trimmed cards out there than you realize, and relying on eBay's "authenticity guarantee" is a joke. Remember that PSA and the other major grading companies have been known to get things wrong on multiple occasions; in fact, even the most famous baseball card of all time was clearly trimmed. If you don't believe me, spend some time on this Blowout Cards Forum thread and see for yourself.
The collectibles industry is filled with very sketchy people who are trying to make a fortune off of nothing. It's always been this way, and will not likely change in the future. Fakes are harder to detect than you think, and even "authenticated" collectables should be treated with suspicion – don't forget the Logan Paul Pokemon fiasco. The recent pump-and-dump scheme in the video game collecting industry is almost a step-by-step copy of the explosion of the baseball card hobby that started in the late 1970s – you're likely getting far less "value" than you are paying for, even if the cards are authentic.
And remember that Upper Deck's raison d'être was to affix holograms to cards to supposedly make them impervious to bootlegging attempts. Perhaps your "pretty easy to spot" fakes aren't the only cards that should be treated with suspicion.
I would strongly advise anybody against investing in baseball cards, or in any other collectible for that matter. Even buying PSA graded cards is no guarantee of authenticity, and you are likely to get burned more than once.
fwiw, people who would "know" strongly suspected that the case paul bought was a fraud before he opened it. in fact, that's one of the reasons why he opened the case, and why it was a "thing" that he opened the case. if he had just kept the damn thing closed, it would still be worth 3.5+MM, which goes to show that there can be a very real incentive to not know whether or not something is legitimate.
"proxies". they're large scale chinese industrial printers devoted to creating "proxies".
noone's printing power 9 counterfeits and trying to pass them off as authentic.
collectibles are a reasonable inclusion to a well-rounded portfolio. as long as you don't throw your entire life's savings into it, you'll probably be fine.
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