In this hobby, we always spend so much time on our collections. Whether it's cards, bats, signed baseballs, tickets, etc. Whatever your niche in this hobby, we spend a lot of time and money making it into something we are proud of. Lately, I've jumped outside the hobby and have started getting interested in single-signed baseballs from people outside the world of sports. Now, as you may know from past blogs, I'm a game-used bat collector. I'm not really into signed baseballs, but these non-sport ones are pretty darn cool.

There are so many ways you can go with it too. Obviously, there's a huge market for presidential balls, but they carry a lofty price tag also. I tend to look for interesting conversational pieces, like Edmund Hillary, the first guy to climb Mt. Everet, or Frederik De Klerk, the ex-president of South Africa, who freed Mandela and won the Nobel Peace Prize with him for ending Apartheid. Now that's interesting stuff to me and they are pretty affordable. The Hillary ball goes for $150-200, while the De Klerk one goes for...I have no idea...I said I'm looking.

Another very cool one is the Dalai Lama. I've seen a few of them in the past year, but haven't pulled the trigger yet. One sold in an American Memorabilia auction for $490 (pictured, top right). It's an incredibly rare thing and the whole story about how they become the Dalai Lama is pretty interesting. Mikhail Gorbachev and John Glenn are two other that I must have in my collection. A nice Gorbie ball goes for $700-$1000, whie Glenn is more affordable, but always personalized at $100-150.

That reminds me, there's very cool lot that I've been bidding on in Memory Lane's auction, with six single-signed baseballs for historical people, like Hillary, Glenn, Roger Bannister, Chuck Yeager, Paul Tibbets, who dropped the first A-bomb and two others...with inscriptions of their accomplishments. Very cool stuff. I'm off to bid.