Did Babe Ruth really sign that bat?

Joe Orlando's baseball-card career didn't begin with much promise. It began, instead, with a 1975 Topps Jay Johnstone card.

He was just a kid, and didn't really know that the card he was pointing at under the card-shop glass was next to worthless.

He doesn't make that mistake anymore.

Today, Orlando oversees one of the most prominent card- and memorabilia-grading services in the country. Thousands of cards and autographs pour into his company's Santa Ana headquarters every month, sent by collectors who want to know that their piece of the game is the real thing.

Most of the time, the cards and other memorabilia are common enough, worth a $20 or two. But sometimes . . . well, sometimes Orlando gets reminded that he's come a long way from that 1975 Jay Johnstone.

"The collector in me would love to just sit down here," Orlando says as he walks through a basement hallway. He leads the way past a security desk, past the heavy door of a vault, and into a dimly lit work room.

It's late in the day, and most of the card graders have gone home. But a few are still at their desks, turning over baseball cards in their hands under bright-light magnifiers the way a jeweler might study a diamond.

This is the dream job that some fifth-grader might conjure up for a what-do-you-want-to-be-when-you-grow-up essay: Shuffling through early Ken Griffeys and Albert Pujolses, maybe the occasional Mantle or Gehrig. Squinting at the fountain-pen flourishes on an old ball and knowing that, yes, the Babe himself once signed it.

One of the graders, 33-year-old David Lin, looks up from a stack of Griffey rookie cards just long enough to offer: "I love this job."

Orlando is the president here, in a plain office building in an equally plain Santa Ana office park. Nothing but a sign in the lobby says that this is where Ted Williamses, Michael Jordans and Muhammad Alis come to be judged: "Professional Sports Authenticator."

Collectors know it as PSA. It graded more than a million trading cards last year. Authenticated nearly 200,000 autographs. And made $9.7 million in net revenue for its parent company, Collectors Universe.

The company is one of the "most trusted and respected third-party authentication companies" in the industry, said Ray Schulte, a spokesman for the National Sports Collectors Convention and owner of SchulteAuctions.com.

As president, Orlando can spot the difference between the confident lines of an authentic Mantle autograph and the laborious script of a forgery. But he leaves the authenticating to experts who can trace a baseball bat to a player based in part on the pine-tar patterns on its barrel. He works upstairs, in an office decorated with a life-size cutout of Babe Ruth.

Orlando is just 39 years old, a former college catcher who speaks of baseball cards and sports memorabilia as if they were works of art. He calls them "pieces." He's a lifelong collector who still rattles off stats and facts when he talks about some item that's come through for grading.

Say, the bat that Kirk Gibson used for his arm-pumping home run in 1988.

"There's something magical about the game equipment," Orlando says. "These are the tools that they used to make history. It's pretty neat stuff."

Orlando doesn't have many of his own cards or collectibles anymore not even that 1975 Jay Johnstone that got him started. He sold off most of his collection when he got the job as PSA president in 2002, to avoid the appearance of any conflict of interest.

But being president of a company like PSA puts him in contact with pieces of sports history that most collectors could only dream of.

When Mark McGwire slammed his then-record 70th home run in 1998, it was PSA that endorsed the authentication on the game ball. When "Shoeless Joe" Jackson's game bat went to auction in 2001, it was PSA that marked it as real.

The company has certified Super Bowl game balls, World Series rings and more Mickey Mantle baseball cards than Orlando can remember. It once authenticated an autographed handprint from Babe Ruth.

But its most famous call involved an exceptionally rare 1909 Honus Wagner baseball card, often called the Holy Grail of card collecting. PSA graded the card's quality an 8, on a scale of 1 to 10. New York Daily News reporters investigated and later published a book concluding the card had been cut from a sheet long after it was printed.

Orlando wasn't yet at the company when that card came through. But he defended the grade: "In our opinion, it's completely authentic. We stand by it, absolutely."

The flat-out coolest item he's ever seen had a much more obvious history.

On April 18, 1923, Babe Ruth slapped a three-run home run to lead the Yankees over the Red Sox on the first day of play at Old Yankee Stadium. Ruth signed the bat and delivered it to a boy who had won a Los Angeles youth home run contest.

Orlando was at a sports convention several years ago when an auction house approached him with a club of old wood. It weighed at least a dozen ounces more than even the heaviest modern bat, and it still had that signature.

It was Ruth's game bat from Opening Day of the House that Ruth Built.

"When you pick it up and hold it in your hand," Orlando says now, "that's when you say my job is pretty great."