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Posted By: Tom Lawrie

Bruce,

Great effort! I have been collecting for about 27 years (I'm 35 now) and I have always bitched about the grading of dealers and grading companies. I like SGC except for the low knock-off for centering; otherwise, their conservative grading is better than the others.

Your approach obviously tries to resolve a lot of the conflicting issues, but I wanted to make some minor comments and then go into some major philosophical problems. First, I disagree about writing - I think that any writing on a card downgrades to VG at best. It gets too subjective if an Old Judge with a pencil mark is a 5 but a 57 baseball checklist with a mark on back is a 3. Where do you draw the line? I personally think that anything more than minor pencil, esp. significant pen, warrants a Good, Fair, or Poor grade. Shouldn't matter whether there is a blank back or not, especially since different issues may have blank backs on some cards but not on others (e.g. Kalamazoo bats).

I think your pictures are overgraded. For example, the VG-EX card looks VG to me, esp. with the layering on the top left corner. Have you seen Alan Hagers book on baseball cards? (Hager's Comprehensive Guide to Rare Baseball cards, or something like that.) The guy has a poor reputation, and his book has many glaring mistakes and self-serving prices. That said, he provides a lot of nice pictures (though not always accurately labeled), and included are a number of pictures distinguishing between different card grades, both for older cards and for newer material. I may not agree with his grading, but he does a good job of explaining his grading hierarchy. You may want to take a look at his presentation of corners, etc. as you refine your standards.

Another problem is how much do you take off for multiple problems, and how do you weight it? Is a 70/30 centered card with one corner ding better than a 50/50 with 3 dings and a print line, and are either better than a pristine card that is miscut? What works for one person may not for another.

I agree completely that there should be some hobby standards, but the problem is that no one can agree on the weighting of different defects. For me, just as with the Supreme Court and pornography, "I know it when I see it." A card must be absolutely perfect to be Mint. 50/50 centering front and back, perfect printing, registration, cut, wear, no toning, etc. Gem Mint and Pristine are just gimmicks. A card is either absolutely perfect (Mint) or it's not. And I've never seen a perfect vintage card in all of my years of collecting. So if it's almost perfect, then it's near mint. To me, that is anything that looks perfect on first glance, but then a slight problem is noticed on close scrutiny. (e.g. 60/40 centering on front or true 70/30 on back, light print mark, slight ding on one corner, etc.) If there are very minor problems immediately obvious, probably EX-MT, and if there are very obvious minor problems, then EX. Any crease, regardless of how small, downgrades to VG-EX at best (even on back surface wrinkles), whereas as a real crease is VG at best and possibly Good if really detracts from picture or is very long or heavy. Multiple creases are Good at best and probably Fair, whereas Poor to me is anything where parts of the card are mutilated or missing (the old card on the spokes analogy). Any signficant layering on cards, such as that on your VG-EX picture, to me can be no better than VG; combined with a crease or writing can only be Good.

I think the 10 point scale, or even SGC's 100 scale, has multiple defects. [I warn you in advance that the next section is pretty dense, but substantive.]

THE PROBLEMS IN DETAIL:

In any type of academic science, for a measure or scale to really mean anything, it must be both valid (syn. with accurate) and reliable (syn. with repeatable and reproducible). Additionally, if we hope to quantify the various components of our measurement on a numerical scale, the increments have to mean something. So here are why the scales currently in use have fundamental problems in every area:

1. None of the grading systems have been validated to ensure what they call a Near Mint card or an Excellent card or whatever is actually what they say it is. Maybe another way to look at this is to say that each individual defect can me measured to some extent (e.g. the crease is 3 cm, the centering is 58-42, the ketchup stain is 5.8 cm in diameter) but there is no current way to accurately say that a paper loss of 3 mm or less in the corner in either direction would make this card EX-MT rather than NM. Plus, the tools to determine centering, etc. are probably inaccurate. My 60-40 might be a grading company's 55-45 on one day, and the company's 65-35 on another. Plus, while they might measure the length of a crease, their tools currently do not accurately relay all of the necessary information about the crease (depth, location, detraction from the image, effect on fibers, straight or zigzag, how obvious, etc.) Thus inaccuracies abound in the grading process, from the smallest of measures, to the subjective summation of defects, to the relay of the information to customers.

2. But an even bigger problem is that the grading scales are not reliable: they are not consistently reproducible from one individual to another in a single grading company, and they are not consistently repeatable by the same individual at different times. I won't dwell on this, as we have all heard stories about grades changing from submission to submission.

3. Somehow, with the numeric grades companies give the illusion that they have quantified a card's condition (or quantified the defects), while in reality that is not the case. The difference between a 6 and a 7 is not the same as the difference between a 7 and an 8. A one point (or in SGC's case 10, 6 or 4 point) difference doesn't mean anything on the scale. It is a big mystery (to everyone) how they go from a 1-inch crease, a print mark, and a corner ding to a VG numeric grade of 3 or 40. There is no way that they have quantified these defects, as the numbers on the scales themselves are meaningless. In other words, subtracting 10 points for a small corner crease from an SGC 88 card is not the same as subtracting 10 points from an EX 60 card; 10 points on one part of the scale is not the same on another part. All of the companies have this identical problem. I think that SGC acknowledges this to some extent as a small deduction makes a large change in high grades, and less so in middle and lower grades. Even so, all of these companies fail to ensure that a quantifiable deduction for a particular defect actually means something on their scale, assuming that they even attempt to quantify the defects.

SUMMARY OF PROBLEMS: The grading companies use inaccurate measures in producting an inaccurate picture. Their results are not reliable. And there is no accurate quantification given to individual defects that would allow them to quantify the grade to distinguish one card from another.

CAN THESE ISSUES BE RESOLVED: No. There is no way that the severity of a crease can accurately measured at present (or likely in the future), or that the severity of corner layering can be quantified. Without accurate measures, the rest of the hocus pocus is worthless. But even if sophisticated devices could be designed, there would be significant variability among different individuals and companies (assuming that measures could be repeated by the same person at different times) that would likely never be resolved. If these other problems were resolved (won't ever happen), it is remotely possible that the quantification issues could be resolved with a complex formula taking a number of different factors into account. But given the insurmountable problems of accuracy and reliability, there is no point in designing such a complex formula.

SOLUTION: Two potential solutions come to mind.

1. Grading companies could take a minimalist approach and only indicate whether a card is Authentic and Unaltered, Authentic but Altered (with notation for trimming, bleaching, restored, etc.), or Counterfeit, and only slab the first two. (The could also briefly describe the defects that they noticed, such as one crease, multiple creases, stain on front, print mark on back, centered to right, miscut, etc., but let individual viewers give weight or value to the defects on their own)

2. Companies go to a much broader, non-numeric grading scale that is valid and reliable. In other words, the scale allows the graders to be accurate as they only need to identify major problems rather than trying to quantify and weight multiple variables (a task that is impossible at present), and the scale is reliable, with the same individual able to come up with the same grade on different occasions, and different individuals also able to consistently arrive at the same grade. Something like this:

Category A: Mint (perfect card, impossible with vintage issues, unlikely but possible with modern cards; perfect 50/50 centering front and back, perfect registry, no printing flaws regardless of size, etc. I defy someone to show me a perfectly mint vintage card; they don't exist, even if right out of the pack)

Cat. B: Near-Mint to Mint (that is, from a current 7-9 on PSA's scale, not the grade 8 NM-MT; this is card with minor defects that are not noticeable on first glance; everything is nice but not absolutely perfect in every way; this card is almost perfect - nearly mint -but not quite)

Cat. C: EX to EX-MT (with well-defined criteria separating EX-MT from NM; cards with minor defects on first glance)

Cat. D: VG to VG-EX (presentable cards with one or two major defects on first glance, or many minor defects; any card with a writing or crease, regardless of how small, at best can end up here, and may move down even further)

Cat. E: Fair-Good (multiple major defects, but still somewhat presentable on some days)

Cat. F: Poor (mutilated, never presentable, filler only)

Cat. G: Altered with notation as to all alterations

I think that these broad categories are the best that we can achieve for the forseeable future. Any further stratification is disingenuous on the part of the grading companies. (These suggestions sound a lot like the grading scales that appeared in early hobby references in the 1970s. Maybe I liked their broad, initial approach and found that everything appearing since seems to be subject to endless debate.)

Just my opinion.

Tom