Autographs are valuable for many reasons.
The primary reason is because a person is particularly famous. There's also a group of people who have extremely rare signatures.
Combine those two factors with "completionists," who take pride in collecting all autographs of a certain group, and you get wild prices being paid for people who 99.9 percent of the world has never heard of.
It's why signatures of Button Gwinnett, a Declaration of Independence signer who died in 1777, often go for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
It's why an autographed letter from Frank Selee went for $55,200 this weekend at Heritage Auctions.
The auction house said that, according to its research, it was only the third Selee signature to ever sell publicly
The letter is from 1908, in which Selee thanks White Sox president Charles Comiskey for inviting him and his wife to Chicago, an invitation he must decline because "the flesh is weak." Selee died 14 months later of tuberculosis at the age of 49.
Selee became a Baseball Hall of Famer in 1999, having never played an inning of baseball.
In 1884, Selee left his job at a watch factory and raised money for a minor-league baseball team. After being recognized as a savant, whose teams focused more on fundamentals such as bunting and the double steal instead of brute power, he was hired to manage the Boston Beaneaters of the National League in 1890.
In his second year, the team won the first of three straight NL pennants. He went on to manage the Chicago Cubs and put together the famous double-play trio of Joe Tinkers, Johnny Evers and Frank Chance.
PSA lead autograph authenticator Kevin Keating told cllct despite the rarity of Selee's signature his department was able to authenticate and slab the signature as authentic. How? Well, PSA made a comparison with another known real signature from the entire 1898 Boston team that was found in the Louisville Slugger archives.
Keating said his database also had a paltry three other Selee signatures that allowed him to authenticate.
For most people, securing a Mickey Mantle or a Willie Mays autograph is enough, but for those who hunt the obscure Hall of Famers such as Selee, King Kelly and Charles Radbourne, it's the fun of duking it out for a needle in a haystack.
You think $55,000 for a Selee is a lot? Keating says there are a handful of Negro League Hall of Famers whose autograph has never been seen.
If a Frank Grant, Pete Hill, Jose Mendez or a Cristobal Torriente ever surface, the prices will climb even higher.
Darren Rovell is the founder of cllct.com and one of the country's leading reporters on the collectibles market. He previously worked for ESPN, CNBC and The Action Network.