A Card Slabber's Nightmare
To grade, or not to grade, that is the question.
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of inconsistent grading, or to take arms against a sea of slabheads.
To grade, perchance to dream, ay, there's the rub;
For in that submission lot what tens may come?
But that dread of what the graders do, the packs we bust from whose bourn an altered card somehow returns;
It puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have with raw cards
than pay some jackhole a damn fortune just to misgrade our stuff.
Thus conscience doth make raw card men of us all.
--If the Bard collected cards, with an assist from Robin Williams...
For as long as there has been grading, there has been controversy. When PSA came into existence and started its blitzkrieg of advertising and promotions, a wonderfully curmudgeonly screed against grading was published in The Vintage and Classic Baseball Collector by editor Dennis Purdy, which famously labeled PSA a smoke detector without batteries, and made the issue an instant collector’s item. I myself penned two anti-PSA pieces for VCBC, both attacking the blatant misrepresentation of price data in PSA’s price guide, the SMR (since VCBC is hard to find I will fill in the blanks: PSA not only priced cards in PSA holders that had never transacted or in some cases even existed, PSA increased the prices month over month as if there were sales when there were not). Well, VCBC is long gone, PSA is still here, bigger than ever, and the third-party authentication (TPA) field is more vibrant than ever. Besides PSA there is SGC, CSG/CCG and Beckett (BVG, BGS). Those are the marketable TPAs. There are also several others that are a waste of plastic.
The appeal of grading can be summed up in one phrase: spontaneous wealth creation. Buy a card for $15, sent it to PSA, get back a PSA 9 worth three figures or maybe even a five-figure PSA 10. A collector with a good eye for PSA standards could buy raw cards, get them slabbed, and make out like a bandit. Many do.
Speaking of banditry, whenever money is in play, the scammers, con artists and thieves come out to play, and card grading is a prime example. While the TPAs market themselves as bulwarks against fraud—PSA’s early marketing campaign was entirely geared to generating fear over card doctors—in reality, they are playing a game of whack-a-mole with card doctors and counterfeiters, and they lose regularly. I won’t re-hash the PWCC scandal here—lots of info on the ‘net if you want to read up at Blowout Cards or Network54—but will simply remark that the TPAs have gotten their heads handed to them hundreds of times (that we know of) with trimmed, recolored, rebuilt, and sometimes just plain ol’ fake cards. I myself was nearly burned with a trimmed PSA card, courtesy of PWCC. I bought a Tabay boxing card (a rare Spanish set) in a PSA holder on eBay and when I compared it with the few I already had it was obvious trimmed, so I sent it back (with a fair degree of pushback from PWCC) and got a refund. Eventually. Now that Fanatics has taken over PWCC perhaps it will rebuild its sullied rep, but I am not gonna play in its sandbox until I see more.
The most glaring example of a doctored card in a TPA slab is, of course, the famous Gretzky-McNall PSA 8 T206 Honus Wagner. The rumors about the card being altered were definitively confirmed by none other than the card doctor himself, Bill Mastro, in his allocution while pleading guilty to Federal criminal charges. That sleazy scumbag (and I can call him that because he is a convicted felon) admittedly cut down the Wagner and sold it as an original card. Mastro went to prison, but the card remains certified as a PSA 8, despite PSA’s expressly-stated policies to the contrary:
“PSA will not grade cards cut from sheets that can be obtained in a normal fashion” and “PSA will not grade cards that bear evidence of trimming, re-coloring, restoration, or any other forms of tampering, or are of questionable authenticity.”
I suppose the addendum to that policy is ‘unless it is really, really, really good publicity for us.’ What is even worse is that among the group grading the card, it was known that the Wagner was not original as issued at the time it was presented to PSA, but they slabbed it anyway. In the book “The Card” (2007), reporters Michael O’Keeffe and Terri Thompson detail the doubts of some of the PSA graders at the time the Wagner was being slabbed. PSA grader Bill Hughes told O'Keeffe that he knew the card had been trimmed when he graded it, but that had PSA rejected it as trimmed, it would have destroyed the value of the card (PSA did not have an “authentic” option at the time), so the powers that be at PSA opted to make PSA certification number 1 a trimmed card. In other words, the Gretzky-McNall T206 Wagner was put into and remains in a PSA 8 holder because of a willful turning of a blind eye to criminal card doctoring, all in pursuit of publicity and profit. That sort of special treatment is not reserved for mere mortals like me. I’ve personally seen PSA decertify items that were debunked as counterfeit or wrongly identified, without compensation to the non-celebrity owners whose investments were destroyed due to their misplaced reliance on PSA’s expertise, yet the Wagner remains certified as a PSA 8 because it is a heck of a marketing tool.
Now, I am strictly non-ecumenical about TPA blunders, so let’s throw in some lowlights of the other services. My favorite SGC mistake is its now-defunct autograph arm’s authentication of multiple forged autographs on T206 cards. That series of blunders was so bad that it led to the termination of the autograph department. Beckett (BVG and BGS) has not graded the caliber of vintage cards that PSA and SGC have, but it managed to catch its corporate tit in a wringer with its Pristine 10 black label. Apparently, a former BGS employee scored an unreal number of 10s in his submissions.
I can also give you a personal anecdote illustrating the randomness and stupidity of the entire slabbing endeavor. I bought a raw 1955 Topps Clemente years ago from a friend. He had owned the card for decades. It was an off-center lower grade card. OK for my collection (call me “Mr. VG”) but not an investment grade card at the time. I took it with me to the National in AC to have it slabbed on site. PSA was my first stop. It came back as not meeting the minimum size requirement. I measured it against other 1955s at the show and it was the same size, so that was weird. I was having a modern card slabbed at Beckett, so I gave it to them. They came back and told me that the card had been soaked, pressed, stretched, then trimmed with a laser cutter. Yeah, then why is it still a g-vg card with 75:25 top-bottom centering? Talk about seeing little green men, that bit of sci-fi made no sense. SGC finally slabbed it a 2.5, which was spot-on. My point is, same card, three divergent opinions from three supposed experts.
The cost of grading has become significant. Quite the pound of flesh these services extract from collectors. The days of being able to get a card through PSA for $6-$10 are over, and they ain’t coming back. As I write this, the lowest rung on the PSA ladder, the bulk collectors club special, is $19 for a card valued at $499 or less, and as the value increases, the rates soar into the thousands. A possible T206 Wagner will cost you a cool $10,000 to slab. This messes with the math of resale. Many auctioneers will charge a 10% commission plus the 20% buyer’s premium to handle raw cards, but will forego the commission if the card is slabbed. If it costs $19 plus shipping to slab a card, the break-even point is a $200-$225 hammer price (the 10% commission ($20 to $25) = the shipping costs + the cost of grading). That means a huge swath of cards are just not worth slabbing. So, has PSA priced its services out of reach? I don’t think so. It has a whole team dedicated to marketing its services and they are going to both figure ways to drive demand and watch the numbers to see where tweaks are needed. Slow month? Offer a few bucks off. The next thing we are going to see is permanent dynamic pricing: prices that go down or up continually as demand rises and falls. We already live this in airline and hotel prices, and it has started to creep into other areas like entertainment. Ticketmaster used dynamic pricing to jack up the prices of tickets for Springsteen’s 2023 tour, with some seats running as high as $5,000 when demand was particularly fierce. Sure will be fun times when the cost of slabbing your card rises and falls as it is mailed to the grader.
I realize that I am relitigating a lost case here when it comes to criticizing grading. There are some grading resisters out there, but they are lonely voices in the night, so to speak. You would have to be a complete idiot to sell marquee cards raw and leave all that money on the table, right? So long as there are people willing to pay for that label on the plastic, there will be a market for graders. After all, as Gordon Gekko said: “It's all about bucks, kid. The rest is conversation.”
So, in two weeks is the big Anaheim show over Labor Day weekend. I will be there all four days (Thursday-Sunday) at table #1456. I am considering posting from the show every evening with views and takes on what I see. Should be fun. Come on down and say hello, debate me on my takes, maybe even buy a card. I will have a lot of bric-a-brac.