How to Collect Baseball Autographs Through the Mail

If you’re a baseball fan, you probably have a few favorite players around the league, whether they toil for your local team, play for a favorite team that plays elsewhere, have a local connection, or just play the game you like to see it played. Autographs of your favorite players make a great collectible. Buying autographs on the secondary market can be expensive, however. When you’re paying good money for an autograph, worries about authenticity also come to the forefront. Can you trust that the signature you’re paying for is real? A better approach, and one that I’ve found a quite enjoyable hobby, is collecting autographs through the mail. For less than a dollar, you have a chance to attain a collectable that you can enjoy and that may even become valuable someday.

What can you get signed through the mail? Most people send baseball cards, team-issued postcards, or small pictures, but some people send larger items such as posters, books, and magazines. The key is to never send anything you can’t afford to lose...not all players honor autograph requests through the mail, and the postal service does occasionally lose things. If you don’t already have items to send, eBay or your local sports card store should have something that’d work just fine.

A note on selecting players to send requests to – the more popular a player, the less likely they are to sign autographs through the mail, simply because the number of requests they receive are overwhelming. For the highest success rate, stick to non-star players, prospects who have not yet made it big, and coaches. Also, some players are known non-signers…which is why it’s great to share successes and failures with your fellow autograph collectors. There are many online forums and web sites dedicated to autograph collecting that will help you avoid sending something you won’t get back.