How baseball authenticates memory

I got Salvy sweat on me …

We were in the bowels of Kauffman Stadium on an absolutely blistering Sunday afternoon. The Royals had just beaten the White Sox 6-2 to complete a series sweep. In a room packed with equipment, merchandise and coat racks overstuffed with blue and white uniforms, Eric Winebrenner, an authenticator for Major League Baseball, was carefully putting stickers on game-used gear.

Tall, with close-cropped silver hair and a trim goatee, Winebrenner wore khakis, blue sneakers and a white polo. He held up the jersey Bobby Witt Jr. had just played in, replete with dirt from a slide into second. He knew it was Bobby’s because he had watched the player take it off in the locker room just moments before. 

Winebrenner showed me more stuff: game-used balls, bats and cleats. The latter two were in wild colors and themes as a part of baseball’s Players’ Weekend, an annual event where Major League Baseball celebrates the players’ personalities and charitable causes through custom gear. Winebrenner then showed me Salvy’s No. 13 jersey. It was completely soaked with sweat. 

Almost instinctively, I put my hand on it. Then, rubbing my thumb and forefinger together, I felt the wisps of moisture on my skin. A second later I wondered, why on earth did I do that? 

Sure, Salvador Perez is a legend. He’s one of the greatest baseball players of his era, arguably of all-time, and by all accounts an absolutely delightful human being. But that doesn’t explain why I’d want to touch his bodily fluids.

The answer speaks to why Winebrenner’s job exists in the first place. Sports memorabilia is ultimately about connection—not just to the players or games we love, but to ourselves. Yes, we buy souvenirs because we want a connection to baseball. Ultimately, though, it’s about connection to our own past—to the memories that make us who we are—and baseball provides those connections in ways that feel increasingly rare. 

In his ninth season as an authenticator, Winebrenner is calm, confident and unfailingly kind. He speaks with the measured poise of a man who has dealt with the nastier side of life. Appropriately so. Winebrenner is retired from the KCPD. 

Retired cops are the norm, says Michael Posner, vice president of authentication and trading cards for the MLB. Speaking via Zoom, Posner says that MLB’s authentication program almost exclusively hires current or former law enforcement. 

“What we’re doing is really evidence collection,” Posner says. 

At a basic level, he says, the program uses the same processes and philosophy as law enforcement and the courts: meticulous recordkeeping and carefully maintaining a chain of custody. Which makes sense. MLB’s program, the most comprehensive memorabilia collection system of any sports league, originally came into existence as a means of fighting fraud.

The impetus came in the 1990s. The great Tony Gwynn walked into the Padres’ official gift shop and saw a bunch of items for sale that he had supposedly autographed. Gwynn explained that, no, he’d never laid eyes on the stuff. The FBI’s San Diego field office was alerted, and Gwynn ended up participating in a probe of forged autographs and fake sports memorabilia known as “Operation Bullpen.” Ultimately, more than 50 people were convicted. 

Baseball realized it needed a better way to authenticate memorabilia than the old “trust me, bro” method. Today, they have one. Two guys like Winebrenner are at every Spring Training and regular season game, with more manning big events like the All-Star Game and playoff games. For Players’ Weekend at Kauffman, there were three—Winebrenner, Mike Perne and Dan Mairet. In all, MLB uses more than 200 official authenticators to verify the gear they sell, give to players or donate to various halls of fame, including the Royals’ Hall of Fame, which Posner calls “one of the finest in the league.”

Typically, the authenticator’s day starts with a list of potentially historic moments to look for. On that hot August afternoon at Kauffman, for instance, Winebrenner’s list noted that Witt Jr. was sitting at 99 homers. The 100th would be a big deal.

Step two is for the authenticators to station themselves near the dugouts, documenting what happens to every single game-used ball—who throws it, who hits it, who fields it. Everything. It’s a lot to track, especially since the balls don’t stay in play very long.

“They’re trading balls out every three or four pitches,” Winebrenner says, “So we’re always watching the ball.” 

As soon as one comes off the field, they’ll get it from the ballboy and affix a small silver sticker. On that sticker is a tamper-proof hologram and a unique letter code. That code is matched in a database where the authenticator has carefully chronicled the use of the ball in question. The stickers, not incidentally, also create a way for fans to look up a given item on the internet and get the details of how it was used. 

Posner explains: “Say you get a ball that was hit by Jac Caglianone for a double. You’ll be able to look that ball up and it will say who the pitcher was, who the hitter was, the inning that it was pitched in. You can see how many pitches were thrown with that baseball, how hard they were thrown.” 

It goes on. You can find the exit velocity and the launch angle, too. It’s just … cool. 

It’s also popular. “To date,” Posner says, “we’re over 11 million unique items in our database. There’s about half a million to 600,000 done a year now.”

And it’s not only baseballs. Witness those sweaty jerseys.  

“Baseball is tremendous at creating stuff,” Winebrenner says. “There’s bats, and they break bats, so there’s more bats. There’s helmets. There’s jerseys, and there’s pants. There’s cleats. Just the multitude of stuff that’s available for authentication is kind of overwhelming.”

Some of it, to be sure, is delightfully goofy. Going into the gig, Winebrenner knew he would be authenticating a lot of baseballs. “But I didn’t know I was going to do fountain water,” he says. “I didn’t know I was going to do infield dirt.”

Posner agrees. Asked about the weirdest thing MLB has ever authenticated, he ponders, then smiles.  “We authenticated corn stalks from the game in Iowa, from the Field of Dreams game in Dyersville. And some of them ended up in trading cards—a very limited edition trading card. We even sold a couple of ears of corn at auction just for fun. And the fans loved it.”

Weirdly, for all the corn stalks and fountain water, MLB usually can’t authenticate something that fans and players want most of all: home run balls. 

“Once it leaves the field of play, we can’t, because we have to be able to maintain chain of custody,” Winebrenner explains. 

That doesn’t mean, however, that MLB can’t commemorate the event. Take Witt Jr.’s aforementioned 100th homer, which he hit a few days later, blasting one 448 feet to center—way outside the authenticator’s purview. “Even though we can’t authenticate the home run ball itself, we can do the bases on the field,” Posner says. “We can do cleats and the bat and batting gloves.” They might even do dirt from the batter’s box. 

The point, Posner says, is to create something fans can touch and hold that connects them with the experience.

“It’s a fantastic byproduct of the program,” Posner says. “You can take your kid to their first game, get a ball that was used on the field and forever be able to tell the story. You can put it on your mantle and you can always go back to it, time and again, through that hologram.”

And that’s the essence of it. That’s why people pay serious cash for used batting gloves and stinky shoes. That’s what compelled me to put a hand on Salvy’s sweaty shirt.

Sure, part of it is just wanting to touch greatness. Perez is awesome, and being close to that is cool. Yes, part of it is financial. Memorabilia is big business, and tons of collectors are just in it for the money. 

In its essence, though, memorabilia is about memories—hence the name. It’s a way to connect to our past, helping us to better understand who we are and who we will become. Best of all, it’s tangible.

These balls, caps and cleats aren’t like the pictures we take on a cellphone and never see again. They aren’t like social media posts that are forgotten almost as soon as they’re made. These are actual, physical objects that live in our homes. They can be touched. That matters.

In a world of glowing screens, artificial intelligence and digitalized everything, we need that concrete, physical reality. We long for it. We crave it. Even if the stuff is dirty and soaked with sweat. Or maybe especially if the stuff is dirty and soaked with sweat.  

The post How baseball authenticates memory appeared first on Kansas City Magazine.