Posted By:
Charlie BarokasJay,
Nice dodge. Unlike you I will not dodge your question. Once again you are trying to lump "cleaning" in to all forms therein. My opinion, is the same as many others on the topic and unlike you I will not put words in anybody's mouth. But, I think it is not unethical to clean my car before I sell it without disclosing the cleaing. I also don't it is required to disclose that a piece of dirt was removed from a baseball card.
Having said that, there are many ways to clean and alter a baseball card that I do think are unethical. Kevin Saucier has done a good job explaining those. In my opinion, soaking a card in a chemical is unacceptable and unethical.
Soaking a card out of an album with distilled water was being done well before any of us were born. Which I believe is not unethcial. That is the main reason many of these cards are around in such high-grade.
Once again, it is a case by case basis. The case you cited regarding removing dirt with water is not unethical and unacceptable, in my opinion. I have spoken with many people in the hobby regarding this and I think there is a viable consensus to support it.
Lastly, to complete not dodging you as you did me, I would not disclose removing dirt with water, if I was selling a card, car, rug, pair of old underwear etc etc
Dan,
Fair point. However, I think it is naive to think that baseball cards survived this long without being cleaned, perserved etc at some point. I think a reasonable person would assume a 100 year card that looks like it came out of the pack yesterday, might have some sort of restoration done to it.
CB