Did you know there are law enforcement professionals assigned to each ballpark to authenticate items used in a game before they are sold?

The 49-year-old Chicago police officer is not there as a fan — although he does love baseball — but as part of Major League Baseball’s program to guarantee the authenticity of game-used jerseys, balls, bats and other memorabilia it sells to fans.
At the end of the White Sox game, Cunningham will assign each item an identification number, attach a tamper-proof hologram and record its details.
Fans who pay hundreds or sometimes thousands of dollars to buy these items — usually via the Major League Baseball website — can be sure that they are getting what they pay for.
“It’s put integrity back in collectibles,” said Cunningham, one of baseball’s 130 authenticators, who also witness and authenticate the signatures of players who sign items for sale.
The program was set up after a Federal Bureau of Investigation probe into sports memorabilia in 2000 that concluded that as much as 75 percent of sports and entertainment memorabilia was fake.

I still think it’s not that difficult to fake one of these things. How many people look at the hologram and do the research to determine it’s the hologram as opposed to a forgery?