Say some fan catches a famous home-run ball (a ball that involved breaking some record) and wants to sell it. How does a buyer verify that the ball is indeed the real one, considering that it won’t look any different from any other MLB ball?
There are authenticators at the ball parks
MLB will get to the person who caught it and authenticate the ball before the inning is over. Packed, sealed, certificated. They really are very good at it.
Ah, interesting. Thanks!
This year, MLB used specially-marked baseballs whenever Judge was at bat when he was close to tying and breaking the league record.
I kept wondering what would happen if - the pitch right before Judge hit his 62nd homerun - he fouled a ball into the stands.
That ball would have the same super duper high tech double secret “marking” that the homerun ball has, so how would they be able to tell the difference in the two balls, 20 years from now?
Presumably they have records of which ball was used for which pitch, so they’d know that one set of sooper sekrit markings corresponds to the foul ball and another corresponds to the record-setting home run.
It’s not all that complicated. Each ball has an individual authentication mark. For Judge, they also numbered each one in pen:
Another fact that one fan found out the hard way, you have to get it authenticated before you leave the game:
What an idiot. Stadium officials go down and tell these people what the process is when they catch these balls, too.