Checking that home run ball you bought on eBay
Major League Baseball has installed a new counterfeit detection tag on every baseball so that a home run ball being sold may be verified.
After a player hits a home run, a security guard will approach the fan who catches the ball with a handheld computer. The guard will scan the electronic tag and enter details of the game, the name of the player who hit the ball and the identity of the fan who caught it.
That information is entered into a database that can be used to authenticate the ball, IBM said.
“If you ever see on eBay that some ball by a particular player is on sale, you can now go on the database and see that this ball is actually not a fake,” Larry Bowden, a vice president for IBM, said in a telephone interview.
