[vintagebaseballcardguy]

Originally Posted by jchcollins

I do mostly postwar and am not able to spend anything approaching a lot even there, but the scandal has made me look back fondly at childhood days when collecting old cards was not only about evaluating minuscule differences between slabs and numbers on flips. Back then, say if there was a Willie Mays card from the 1950's in a shop - it was simply cool that it was an old card. Condition issues were a given; for my own collection I tried to avoid cards with major creases, but that was about it. Dinged corners and off-centered cards didn't make much difference.

Since then and the advent of professional grading, I have seen grading and condition as kind of a "sub-hobby" of mine - because it was something that I had been interested in even as a teenager before the PSA days - how do you really "accurately" grade a card even within certain tolerances - the fact that EX cards should not have creases, NM should be centered better than xx/xx, those kinds of things. So now what I feel like is that this scandal has cast even more confusion and doubt over the accepted grades because of what the doctors have done. There is discussion about trashing the 1-10 system in it's entirety and just going back to some version of Authentic only, or "Authentic - Nice Card" without so much detail and minutiae put into the system of half-points. How do folks feel about this? On the surface this would seem a hard system to buck quickly - just looking at how crazy detailed things got over in the coin hobby and their slabbing - which of course led to it starting here in ours.

Bottom line I will continue to find grading interesting - and I enjoy educating new collectors here and there on forums like this and maybe more so on social media as to the nuances of condition. It does feel like the PWCC mess has cast quite a shadow over even the legit practice of card grading - as it evolved in the hobby from the 1970's on to today.

Well said, John.

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