Vintage Baseball Glove Forum

I just saw the Warren Spahn glove in the Glove of the Week section, and it is a truly lovely glove. The Spahn endorsement got me to thinking, though ... either he had REALLY good penmanship or that was a stamped endorsement not meant to look at all like his autograph.

When did "autograph" facsimiles become de rigeur for glove endorsements? Were there some endorsers whose "autograph" stamp was preceded by a generic type stamp? Does the autograph style make the glove more desirable to a collector?

Kind of a nit-picky question, I know ...

Tres Bien Cowboy. Good question I think. I'll try to help with some spotty information.
I believe there block letter names were stamped on the gloves in the earliest of days because this was probably easier. Then, someone discovered that dies could be made of script signatures and these emerged about 1910-1915.
It's funny but the only discussion I heard about the signatures being used for stamping was about Mantle. Elmer Blasco, who was the marketing guy for Rawlings at the time Mantle was signed, said that Mantle's first signature was so bad that they had a secretary to emulate it and used that on the early gloves.
Somewhere along the line Mantle improved his autograph using the now famous bubble or looped "M"s. This was then used.
I would suspect that this happened perhaps with other player autographs where the penmanship was a little rough early on or maybe the player changed his autograph. It's interesting sometime to get a glove personally signed by the player close to his stamped version.

I've wondered about this mysef. While the "facsimile signature" endorsement gloves are considered more collectible than generic "block letter" endorsements, Rawlings produced a lot of gloves in the 60's and 70's with that "fake signture", script-looking font.

The stampings aren't true "hand-written" copies of the players actual autograph, rather they are essentially "block letter" names using a font that emulates cursive letters.

Since the style of endorsement is one of the factors in determining a glove's collectibility and value, on which side of the fence do these gloves fall?

Technically, they are not true copies of the player's signature, nor are they what we would typically call block letters.