Himself, his sister, a clubhouse boy, and a forger

There are at least four separate sources of a signature reading Joe DiMaggio, and only one of them is Joe DiMaggio. That is not a scandal and mostly not even a crime. It is what happens when a private man becomes a public commodity for six decades.

The first hand: DiMaggio

He signed a great deal. PSA describes him as one of the more prolific signers in the history of the hobby, a private person who nonetheless made time to sign for fans, and that is the correct starting point. The supply of genuine DiMaggio material is enormous.

He was also, in a real sense, present at the creation. Sports Collectors Digest credits him as one of the founders of the modern autograph show and later the private signing. Before that, signings were mostly current players appearing at a local shop as a promotion. DiMaggio's demand was large enough to build an industry around, and the industry got built.

He answered mail too, generally one signature per request, and he signed almost any medium: photographs, Hall of Fame plaque postcards, gum cards, government postcards, and a great many baseballs.

The second hand: his sister

Here is the part almost nobody mentions, and the hedge in it is deliberate.

PSA's own reference on him records that his sister allegedly signed fan mail on his behalf during the 1970s and 1980s, and on rare occasions signed his cheques.

Allegedly is PSA's word and it stays. But sit with the implication. For roughly two decades, some proportion of the mail-in DiMaggio signatures reaching collectors were written by a member of his family. Nobody was defrauded in the sense that mattered to anyone at the time. The letter arrived, the family handled the volume, the fan was delighted.

Those signatures are now in the market with everything else.

It is worth noting where that material would sit. On this index, DiMaggio's documents and cut signatures together account for a substantial share of his tracked items, alongside a large run of first-day covers. Those are exactly the mail-order categories, which is where a secretarial hand would naturally be found.

The third hand: the clubhouse

PSA warns collectors directly that there are many clubhouse DiMaggio signatures on team-signed items in the marketplace.

We have written about this practice separately, and DiMaggio is a textbook case of why it happened. The clubhouse boy signed the stars, because the stars were the ones never available, and DiMaggio was the least available man in the room.

A team-signed Yankees ball from his era is therefore a document with several authors, and the authenticators identify the clubhouse signatures when they find them.

The fourth hand: the forgers

And then the deliberate ones.

DiMaggio, Mantle and Ted Williams are known in the hobby as the Big Three, and they were the Big Three for forgers as well. Sports Collectors Digest puts the mechanism plainly: it was in part their prodigious signing habits in the 1990s and before that provided the cover for the forgers.

Read that again, because it inverts what most people assume. His signature was easy to fake commercially because so many real ones existed. A dealer with two hundred signed photographs of an inaccessible man invites questions. A dealer with two hundred signed photographs of a man who spent the decade at card shows does not.

The volume was the vulnerability. When the FBI broke Operation Bullpen in 1999, DiMaggio material was among what they seized, and that investigation is why third-party certification exists in its modern form.

The one thing he would not sign

There is a detail in this story that has stayed with me.

After Marilyn Monroe's death, DiMaggio refused to sign anything related to her. Photographs, memorabilia, anything. For the rest of his life.

PSA records that some autograph seekers tricked him into it anyway, by concealing what he was signing.

The refusal is corroborated outside the hobby. His obituary in the Seattle Times, published the day he died, notes that for years after her death he sent roses for her grave but refused to talk about her. He kept sending them, reportedly twice a week, for the rest of his life.

Whatever you think about celebrity and privacy, that is a man declining to monetise the worst thing that happened to him while privately marking it for thirty-six years, and people working around the refusal. If a Monroe-related DiMaggio signature exists, the circumstances in which it was obtained are worth asking about.

The end of the supply

He had lung cancer surgery on 12 October 1998 and, according to Sports Collectors Digest, essentially stopped signing from then on except for close friends. He was hospitalised for ninety-nine days and died on 8 March 1999, aged eighty-four.

Work out what that leaves. From the October surgery to his death is under five months, and he spent most of it in hospital. Anything presented as signed in that window deserves more scrutiny than usual, simply because there was so little opportunity for it to exist.

What this means if you are buying

Three things, and none of them is a reason to avoid him.

Get the certification and read what it says. Nearly all the certified DiMaggio material on this index carries an authentication rather than a numeric autograph grade, which is normal for a signer of his era. What matters is that a company examined it and said so, and that clubhouse and secretarial signatures are identified when found.

Be careful with paper. Letters, cheques, index cards and correspondence are the categories where the secretarial hand lived. Typed letters bearing his signature are described in the hobby as mostly secretarial, which is a striking thing to know before buying one.

And treat a team-signed ball as several signatures of uncertain authorship. That is not pessimism, it is how those objects were made, and the certification letter is where you find out which names were written by whom.

The thing worth sitting with

DiMaggio helped build the autograph show. The autograph show built the supply. The supply gave the forgers their cover. And somewhere in the middle of all that, his sister was signing his post so the mail did not pile up.

Four hands, one name, and a market that has been sorting them out ever since.

This index tracks every certified Joe DiMaggio item currently listed, by item type, certifier and grade, with what has verifiably sold. You can read how we work the numbers out.

Sources