![]() Padres star Tony Gwynn and Cardinals slugger Mark McGwire even assisted in the investigation by verifying their signatures for the FBI and pointing out fakes. The national pastime, after all, had inspired the operation’s name. And while the FBI was in charge of taking down sham dealers, leading to 63 separate charges and convictions, MLB, really, was at the center of everything. If you had what you believed to be a signed, game-used Mickey Mantle bat … well, no, the odds were that you actually didn’t. Investigators estimated that at least half of the items for sale across the industry were in some way counterfeit-possibly much more than that, even up to 90%. ![]() “You watch a game very differently than you’ve ever watched a game before.” “It’s in the way you take notes, the way you watch,” says MLB’s director of authentication, Michael Posner, trying to encapsulate his field. ![]() And it starts with the authenticators, embedded in every park, who try never to take their eyes off the ball. (The urinals, though perhaps historic in their own way, went to a private collector, not to Cooperstown.) Altogether, the program is part security initiative, part historical documentation, part revenue engine. Some of these keepsakes end up in the Baseball Hall of Fame, others go to individual club archives or players’ rec rooms, and many more are made available to fans. They have verified the legitimacy of at least one set of urinals (following the demolition of the Cardinals’ old Busch Memorial Stadium in 2005) and a few stalks of corn (from the Field of Dreams game last month in Dyersville, Iowa). The program’s legion of baseball detectives authenticate upwards of half a million objects each year, including jerseys, caps, belts, cleats, bases, lineup cards, stadium dirt-you name it.
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