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Informative Articles

A Guide to College Baseball Bats
In the mid 1850s, when baseball was in its infancy, players made their own bats. They experimented with flat bats, round bats, and heavy bats. They ultimately discovered that the barrel shaped bat was the most effective. Today, college baseball bats...

A Woman's True Confession: I Finally Understand the Male Obsession with Football...
Football season is here, which means that for the next several weeks - 90% of the male population of the US will spend an enormous amount of their "free time" watching games on TV (the bigger the screen, the better), attending football games...

Improving Your Golf Game, the Optimal Recipe
There are hundreds, probably thousands, of articles about how to improve your golf. Just pick up any weekly or monthly issue of any golf magazine. You will read page after page on how to get better at your driving distance, how to improve your...

Life As A Cincinnati Bengal's Fan
I started to watch NFL football when I was 12 years old, it was 1992. The Cincinnati Bengal's where the local televised game for my area, this is how the loyalty began. The Bengal's fit exactly what I believed in when I was 12 years old, which was...

Paintball-One of the Safest sports today!
Paintball One Of The Safest Sports Out There Today. While membership in the "Extreme Sports" category implies a whiff of danger, only Paintball is handicapped by a huge injury taboo--one that exists in the public mind, but not in the statistics....

 
How to Care for Sports Memorabilia

IT'S NOT JUST A HOBBY, IT'S AN INVESTMENT!

Many collectors of sports memorabilia have their collections in their homes or offices without really showing regard to the preservation and the protection of the items.

I was watching an old black and white movie recently and the scene was a newspaper guy's office in the fifties. A visitor walks in and as he chats with the news-guy, he casually picks up a baseball from an eggcup type of stand on his desk and turns it over in his hand and glances at it. I think the conversation went something like this " Freddy where did you get this, it looks like it's got Yankee signatures on it?" Freddy catches the ball that the visitor tosses over to him and says, "Yeah I think it's from the late forties, my Dad had it and I sort of inherited it." I'm watching and even though it's a movie I'm saying YIKES, Freddy, put that thing in a proper container, you keep throwing that ball around the office and before you know it, bingo, no signatures left!

WHAT'S AVAILABLE TO PROTECT COLLECTIBLES?

1. If Freddy had that ball in his office today, he could buy an acrylic display case similar to the ones found on www.sportsplayer.net, and he could then show the ball to visitors without fear of harming the signatures or the


ball itself. 2. Watch the lighting where you display your collections. If fluorescent lighting is nearby, consider replacing it with regular household lighting as fluorescent lighting has ultra violet rays that may damage your display, especially if it carries an autograph. Natural sunlight is even more likely to harm your display, so be sure to keep your collection as far away from direct sunlight as possible. 3. Store your collections in an area that is as close to normal room temperatures as possible. Have you ever been to a store that sells old books? Notice that smell? Often they will take delivery of books that have been stored away in a box in someone's dank and dark basement. Smells like mould, right? Humidity kills collections!

If your hobby collection is not quite a big investment yet, it has the possibility in the future of being worth quite a bit of money. Be sure to pay attention to the physical protection of your sports memorabilia. Also, talk to your insurance agent to see if he can offer a rider to you that will cover the loss or damage of your collection.

About the author:

John Paul writes for Sports Player Network (SPN). SPN specializes in Authentic Sports Memorabilia. For more tips and information, visit the SPN website at http://www.sportsplayer.net