Signed Ball of the Day : Don Drysdale ( ONL Sweet Spot PSA Graded 8 )

Chips and salsa, peanut butter and jelly, Koufax and Drysdale. Singularly they are very good but together they are great. Koufax and Big D combined to form one of the most dominant and intimidating pitching tandems in history. While Koufax was the surgeon with precision techniques on the mound Drysdale was the big guy with the attitude of not putting up with crap. If you went after our guy he would go after yours twice. One time he was asked why do you hit batters and his response was " why waste 4 pitches to walk him, just throw one and be done with it ". Headhunting would not go over well in this age of baseball but back then it was expected to some extent.

Though Don was a big part of World Series teams, a Cy Young award and lots of All-Star appearances in the autograph collecting community he is just not as popular of a signature to acquire as Koufax is. I can understand that but there is no way I was not going to acquire Don's signature at some point. Well once I had Koufax's in hand I wanted to add Drysdale's but a lot of the balls that were out there were toned too much for my taste. This can be attributed to the fact that he died at a young age so the balls he signed were on the older National League version and not the newer ROMLB ones that are commonplace now. Older the ball the more toned it can and will get to a point. I actually went ahead and bought a PSA authenticated TOPPS card with his signature. Even though it was a great looking card it just wasn't the same as having a ball next to all my other Dodger balls. I sold the card back and thankfully at the same price I paid for it. No money lost. I just kept my eye on ebay for a decent looking ball and for a least a year nothing tickled my fancy til I saw a PSA authenticated one that was also graded an 8. Considering the age of the ball an 8 is not too bad. Problem was that the seller wanted $300 on a buy it now auction. I was not going to pay for that so I just kept it on my watch list just to see what it would sell for in the end. Well months past by and no one bought it and the seller kept dropping the price. 275, 250, 220 and so on. Didn't know why no one was buying it but I still didn't want to spend that much and just was content to watch the auction til the day I glanced at the again and the seller had dropped it to $150. Couldn't believe it as I thought that was a great bargain considering other non graded balls of Drysdale that looked like an 8 were selling for close to $200. I jumped on it and bought the ball. I want to believe that I got a great deal but either way I got to acquire a signed Drysdale ball to go along with my Koufax ball. Two links from Brooklyn that made it out to Los Angeles to become great pitchers and achieve multiple accolades and now I had both on individual balls.