Moving the Collection Backwards

I'm totally relatively kind of fine when I add newly debuted Orioles to my need list. While I try to collect as many Orioles minor league autographs as possibly, sometimes players bypass the two affiliates closest to me (the AA Bowie Baysox and hi-A Frederick Keys) and go directly to AAA Norfolk and on to Baltimore as was the case with two of the newest Orioles, Luis Exposito and Bill Hall. I will gladly trade for autographs of players on the Tides' roster, but I refuse to buy autographs of AAA guys who might never make it to Baltimore. Even though I'm highly-focused on my Orioles autograph collection, I won't take it that far.

 Anyway, moving along to the point of this post, I recently found out that two of my rarer Orioles signatures  seem to not be of who I thought they were. A knowledgeable long-time collector of rare baseball autographs recently alerted me that my Carl Powis and Dick Luebke autographs are no good.

Many of the long-ago Orioles' autographs are tough to come by, and tougher still to find another signature to compare them with if I do happen across one for sale, so many times I'm flying blind when it comes to knowing if a signature is actually that of the player. I always do a google search to see if I can find a comparison, but when I can't I'm generally left to rely on the honesty of sellers. Most of the time it works out for the best, but occasionally, it doesn't. I think sometimes it's an honest mistake while other times I come across an under-handed dealer.

According to the collector who knows these things, Carl Powis's autograph looks nothing like this, so this is likely a forgery.

While this is an authentic autograph of Roy Luebke, not Dick Raymond (or as I thought) Ray Luebke.

Long story short, these guys are back on my need list and my collection is likely to be under 100% again for some time. While Luis Exposito and Bill Hall should be easy enough to knock off, I have no such hopes for Luebke or Powis.