Lies, Damned Lies, And Elections

Don't get your knickers in a twist, I'm not going political

Fear not, my friends, I am not going political here.  What I want to discuss (like the reasonable adults we are) is how the election results are likely to affect the Hobby.  After that, I got good feedback on my truthiness column, so we’ll go over more of my favorite hobby gibberish and nonsense.

First, the election.  The result is likely to have a very specific outcome on anyone who sells cards as a side-hustle or main gig. Part of the 2017 tax package that is supposed to sunset (end) next year is the “Section 199” deduction.  Basically, this cuts the tax rate on most pass-through businesses to match the massive tax cut given to big corporations.  The first year it kicked in, my wife and I were shocked at what it did to our pass-through entity businesses and investments, so much so that we thought the tax software had messed up when it barfed out a giant refund.  I went on a deep dive research project to validate the outcome and when I finally understood what the sphincter boys in Congress had done, we laughed all the way to the bank.  As far as card selling goes, if you run your business as a sole proprietorship (Schedule C business), partnership, LLC or Subchapter S corporation, the first 20% of the profit you earn is excluded from taxation at the Federal level.  This is a very big deal if your card side gig is profitable or if you have multiple profitable investments and businesses.  If your marginal Federal tax rate (the amount of tax taken off each additional dollar you earn) is 24%, that $100K of profit you earned in your side hustle pushing out cards costs you $24,000 in Federal taxes.  Under Section 199, you don’t pay that tax at all on the first $20,000 of that profit, saving you $4,800 in Federal taxes.  That’s like Uncle Sam handed you a 1933 Goudey Ruth.  OK, a low grade one, but still.  Given the outcome of the election, it is very likely that the Section 199 deduction will be renewed instead of sunsetting, and that the deduction will be preserved.  It also affects the strategy on how you get your money out of an S Corporation but that is too far into the weeds for this column.  As usual, this ain’t tax advice and I don’t take any responsibility for it if you are stupid enough to rely on it instead of treating it like the gasbag nonsense I normally fart out, so talk to your CPA or finance guru if you want to learn more. 

And now, more Hobby nonsense that makes my teeth grind:

Historical Anachronisms.  I love oddball and rare cards and memorabilia and this is one of the great pitfalls of collecting undated obscure cards and items like postcards, memorabilia, and Exhibit cards.  They are frequent subjects of hype and lies that evidence can debunk…if you look for it.  For example, JD McCarthy made an early Bob Gibson postcard.  I have seen the card advertised for sale as a rookie era card or from various specific years from 1959-1961.  Not possible.  The card shows Gibson in a home uniform with his #45 on the front.  The Cardinals did not use front numbers on their uniforms during Gibson’s career until 1962.  The photo cannot predate the introduction of the uniform it is on, so it cannot be made earlier than 1962. 

The Slab Says So.  Unthinking isn’t just limited to dealers; the mental midgets at the grading companies excel at enshrining nonsense as fact and never fixing it.  The most infamous example of this sort of garbage-out grading is the “1948” Leaf Jackie Robinson.  The card has a 1949 copyright, and the back even recites that Robinson hit .296 in his second season, yet PSA puts “1948” on the flip. SGC hedges, calling it a “1948-49” issue, which is still wrong.  Another example from the same set: the “1948” Leaf Warren Spahn card talks about his 1948 World Series record and says he is 28; he was born in April 1921…anyone who can do math really think it’s a 1948 card?  The PSA poobahs also have decreed that an Argentinean Cassius Clay card is a 1962 issue, which is significant because it would have been the first stand-alone Clay (Muhammad Ali) card (the 1960 Hemmets issue and the 1962 Rekord issue must be cut out of publications).  Only one problem: I did some research and photo-matched the image, and the card shows The Greatest of All Time entering the ring for a June 18, 1963, bout with Henry Cooper in London.  Oops.  More debunked PSA nonsense: it lists the Sporting Life Cobb postcard as a 1913 issue; a card with a 1912 postmark sold in the August 2023 REA.  Oops. 

Sloppy Terminology.  This drives me crazy and is especially prevalent when it comes to card production materials and errors.  On the production end, BD (Before Digital), everything that went into making a card had to be physically made.  For example, to make an Exhibit card, the original artwork must be prepared and photographed through a halftone screen onto a medium for printing, a printing plate.  The plate is used to make the cards themselves.  Interim prints are often run to test for quality; these are proofs.  This process creates three types of potential artifacts: the unique original artwork (typically, a hand-annotated photo), the printing plate, and the proof(s) used to test the plate.  Sellers and TPAs often confuse them, even when they should know better.  PSA recently slabbed the original artwork for the Cassius Clay Exhibit card as a ‘proof’.  Another example is the number of offers for sale of error cards that are characterized as proofs.  Just because a card has a blank back, it does not mean it is a proof.  I’ve pulled blank backs from packs.  At least in terms of Topps, proofs are sold via its Vault program and are typically enclosed in a sealed holder or raw with a Topps hologram on the back.  A blank back is an error card that went into retail packaging, until proven otherwise. 

Proof, Trash or Stolen Goods:  Another common misnomer is to label scrap as proofs.  Printing is a messy operation and card sheets get mangled in the process.  Before this stuff became so valuable, when quality control caught a bad sheet, standard practice at the factories was to toss it in the trash, and workers at the plants were known to pick the scraps and take them home to the kiddies to play with.  It not uncommon to find cards that are hand-cut and missing one or more printing characteristics.  If they are post-war Topps, odds are they came from scraps that were picked from the trash.  Check out this 1971 Topps hockey card I got:

It is missing a layer of black print and back printing. Odds are that the wizard with the scissors who cut it out, little Carmine, had a family member who worked at the Topps printing facility and got him a partial sheet of rejected cards.  Hey Carmine, I got your card.  Stolen goods are an entirely different matter.  In recent years, some factory workers have stolen stacks of insert cards at interim production stages and sold them to collectors…and gotten arrested for it.  The most infamous of the cards that have gotten into the market are blanks for Topps certified autograph inserts that went out the factory door without the signatures but with the identifying gold embossing already applied.  So many of the 1997 Topps Peter Max football inserts went out the back door and were sold as proofs or errors or even as regular issue cards that were erroneously stamped with the autograph certification that it has damaged the market for the actual cards.    

Physical Anachronisms.  OK, I kind of made up this phrase, but when it comes to the physical characteristics of certain items, you can determine that it isn’t what they say it is just from the item itself, if you know what you are looking at.  I once saw an Eddie Collins signed HOF plaque on eBay.  Only issue is that Eddie died before that style of plaque was printed; maybe he signed on Halloween?  Yeah, that’s it.  He rose from the pumpkin patch with the Great Pumpkin and signed a few HOF plaques.  I’ve had the same argument multiple times over Exhibit cards of Jackie Robinson.  The (usually irate) card owner is adamant that his Robinson is from 1947.  Never mind that the printing markings on the card disprove the idea of the earliest date.  I’ve even had people vociferously argue against a company checklist or an uncut sheet.  Talk about wanting to believe. 

Inductive Reasoning.  I read a lot of Sherlock Holmes as a kid.  His most famous line was: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”  Wrong!  Just because you have eliminated the impossible does not also mean you have eliminated all possibilities to arrive at the single answer UNLESS you are taking a multiple-choice test.  In life the possibilities and permutations are endless.  Just as the elimination of the impossible does not eliminate all other outcomes, a specific thing having a trait does not necessarily allow for general attribution of that trait to all things in the same category.  My favorite example of this in cards is the designation of Salutations Exhibit cards as a 1939-1946 issue.  The truth is that some Salutations designs were issued as late as 1960.  The lazy tools at ESCO re-used the same art for a decade or more.  It depended on when the player retired.  Ted Williams, for example, retired after the 1960 season and his Salutations card (the no #9 showing version) can be found on uncut sheets of Exhibit cards with Rocky Colavito as a Tiger.  Colavito was traded from Cleveland to Detroit on April 17, 1960.  The Colavito card in the Detroit uni cannot predate the trade, so the Williams card on the same sheet was made after April 17, 1960.  The Williams card was reprinted for at least 14 years, which is why it is easy to find a high-grade example.  That does not stop sellers from offering the card as a 1939-46 card.  They, and many of the public, assume that all Salutations Williams cards were made in the 1939-46 timeframe because some Salutations Williams cards were made between 1939 and 1946.  Inductive reasoning at its worst. 

Apples and Oranges: My mother was a terrible cook.  One of her worst habits in the kitchen was assuming one ingredient was the same as another.  One summer, she invited my wife and I for dinner, where she announced that she had discovered a Thanksgiving turkey in the second freezer my parents had and had made it for dinner.  I took some meat and poured on the brown gravy, then took a big bite.  Well, mom didn’t know how to make roux so she mixed the drippings in the pan with whatever she found in the pantry that looked brown.  In this case, it was soy sauce.  Took a week for my lips to unpucker.  That’s how I feel when I hear people bitch about high prices in one selling venue versus another.  Every selling format is different.  They have different cost structures, incentives and opportunities.  A card show and eBay are different shopping experiences and you cannot expect to use one the same way as the other because the seller's finances are different for each. Putting it in a slightly different context, if you want to eat a hot dog in New York City, you can get one from a cart on the sidewalk at one price or you can go into a deli and pay significantly more. No one at the deli whines that they are paying $20 for a $4 hot dog because eating at a table in a restaurant is not the same as eating while standing in the gutter.  If your sole concern is price, the better choice is to never go to a show. Why pay parking, admission and perhaps travel costs? Just buy it all online. We go because there are other benefits to going, like the chance to look over the cards in person, immediate delivery, etc.  Apples and oranges.