Posted By:
Todd SchultzAl and Josh. First, altered cards are given numeric grades--the fact that this card was graded SGC 40 when it had a pencil mark and the fact that PSA uses a mark qualifier are evidence that such marks will not lead to rejection as altered (see also 1921 Herpolsheimers). To say that altered cards are per se rejected then is untrue, unless you don't consider pencil marks to be alterations. Second, and again, I am pretty sure that the mere fact of erasure is not sufficient to cause rejection, but I'd like to hear others' views on that. I know it's a slippery slope when trying to glean intent, but it generally seems silly to me to turn a pencil-marked card into an erased pencil-marked card and have it go from graded to rejected strictly on that basis. If so you are allowing one alteration but not another. If intent to deceive is the test, then I suppose all erasures should be treated as alterations and rejected. In that case, the Keefe card should not be in an SGC slab at all.
As for what SGC should know, my point was that yes, in some instances they should know what they have graded, and probably have scans, where the card reaches a particular level of value or scarcity. Saying that such data cannot be kept on all cards and that grading costs would be probitive misses the point--in this particlaur case they shoould have known, IMO.
BTW, don't they already charge you more for grading when the card values reach a certain point? What are you getting for that extra charge? I would think they are giving the card a higher level of scrutiny, as the card itsef is not intrinsically different from a common, low valued card. Why shouldn't that include a heightened examination, and why not a scan database of their own, previously graded high-value cards? If they truly could not detect the erasure here, a quick review of a scan database would have shown that they graded this exact card previously. Seems like a prudent and not overly burdensome task.