Moving On Indeed
 

..To bring us back to Pre-War Baseball Cards , I respectfully suggest we change to
: " SHOW US YOUR FATS FOTHERGILL CARDS ! "

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Many might hate on this but chew on this thought....all these guys that do this crap and drove up the prices....and I'm lumping in the investors who don't care what a card looks like as long as it's in a 9 holder have made all your vg ex and crappier cards go up in value as well. So can we quit the bitching to this extreme level. It's not as extreme as your all making it seem, the sky is NOT falling. This post will be all forgotten by the time the next major auction comes out regardless of what BOA claims maybe altered. The big money investors don't care. Raulis your collection is beautiful and your Willie Mays 9's will always have value. You could sell these cards today with full disclosure and and you would still get a record price for your high grade PSA 9 willie mays cards.

For me that is really the only sad part about the whole thing. Known altered cards selling for the price of the very rare unaltered versions.

Cards have been altered for profit since the beginning of collecting. It also doesn't matter if you collect high end or complete beaters they have ALL been altered by people taking advantage of the easily taken advantage of card buyers.

Besides collecting what I collect my favorite part of the hobby is watching the scammers. Forums are amazingly hilarious for this. We have more than one card doctor on here. When they get exposed if it is someone nobody likes they get attacked and sometimes kicked off. Other times the card doctor is a hobby icon and the guy that bought the altered card gets attacked for calling out the card doctor. Now that is always funny reading.:D

Appreciate your kind words, Johnny.

Had a rough night last night - didn't sleep much. The whole situation is just rather aggravating. A couple of days ago, this was one of the crown jewels in my collection. Today, I don't even want to look at it.

I realize that some think that it's still worth every penny that it was before, but I'm not so sure. I certainly wouldn't want to buy it knowing it had been altered, and I suspect that the only people who would want it are those who don't notice the disclosure, and buy it thinking that it's legit. Or they buy it hoping to hoodwink a future buyer by not disclosing it, which would not be cool.

While I might personally sell it with a disclosure, at some point a future seller is likely to drop the disclosure, and some poor new owner would get blindsided like I just was. And I don't want to inflict that on anyone else.

Going back to your point about value, while I hope I don't lose my shirt, my whole motive in collecting is because my collection brings me a little more happiness into my life, not because they're worth a small fortune. But now that one of my pieces has been identified as modified, it makes me wonder how many others are similarly situated. Kind of makes me sick just thinking about some worthless card doctor doing his thing to my stuff. So at the moment, the whole endeavor is definitely a lot less fun.

And it also makes me a whole lot more gunshy about going out and buying additional high grade pieces. I spent $6.5k on this one, which is a lot of bread. Up until yesterday it was probably worth low 5 figures. Probably a lot less today. But I've had some $100k pieces in my sights, and now I'm not so sure that makes any sense if I'm taking a gamble on whether they might be worthless doctor jobs.

It's one thing to read about cards that have been outed and understand that it's a theoretical possibility and someone else's problem. It's a whole different ballgame when one of your pieces is on the list.

Starting to come around to Peter's way of thinking...

Wait a minute. Perhaps the grading skeptics are right. Perhaps I’ve been wrong to blindly follow the traditions and superstitions of PSA registry geeks. Maybe we collectors should test these card grades analytically, through observation and developing our own expertise, a “scientific method”. Maybe this scientific method could be replace reliance on others whose skills and motives might not align with ours. Perhaps I could lead the way to a new age, an age of rebirth, a Renaissance of the Hobby!

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Nicolo -- i am saying this candidly and not to upset you, but if you have been buying this type of high grade material from the same and similar auction houses, or from anyone really because cards get moved along, the odds are pretty good that this is not your only altered card. Altered high grade cards are prevalent in the hobby, some of the superstar doctors have been at this for decades. Blowout is great but as someone mentioned they probably have outed a very tiny fraction of the altered cards out there.
The philosophical question for you is, can you live with what you don't know, or is that likelihood enough to ruin things for you even if nobody has specifically outed the card. As I've said it's a question of tolerance and only you can make that judgment.

That sucks and I would probably feel the same way.

One solution, don't buy high grade vintage cards. Sure, lower grade one's get hacked too, but human nature (greed), means the more money the more likely of fraud, imo.

The card below isn't trimmed and I sleep well at night.

Ditto

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I fixed your post :)

Totally understand.

And the answer to your question about tolerance is: I don't know. It still stings, and not just a little. I'd prefer not to experience death by a thousand cuts as each card in my collection is outed over the next 10 years, which would be extreme, but not an impossibility.

Obviously just knowing that I have one bad apple casts doubt about everything else I have in my collection. At the same time, I'm so far in that it's tough to imagine just bailing and getting out. But maybe I'll have to think about some middle ground. Just not sure what that looks like other than I'm probably going to be really gun shy about buying high grade stuff going forward.

I don't know how important the registry thing is to you. If the cards mean more than the registry to you as a collector, If it were me, based on what I did years ago when I got spooked, I might think about moving some of the more expensive pieces and going instead for a nice midgrade that you've vetted thoroughly. I would add that if your main concern is the cards losing value, as opposed to just hating the idea of having an altered card, I don't think you need to worry. Enough people don't care that it won't affect resale value.

You might consider selling your high grade cards and moving into lower grade, but great looking, cards? For me, it's fun to find really nice looking lower grade gems.
Collecting can still be fun but you need to decide what's best for you. One suggestion, take your time and sleep on it for a while (weeks or a few months). Many times the answer becomes clear after mulling it over for a while.

Thanks for the advice, thoughts, and ideas. I appreciate your willingness to engage, even if it's tempting to laugh at my pain, because I had it coming for being a gullible rube.

And I'm definitely not going to move quickly. No sense in making a big decision based on one terrible event.

I think many of us have been there, and no it's not funny.

Most of us have felt that pain before. Like when I gave the NYPL my Peck and Snyder......it made me sick over the whole issue. And some members (at the time LOL) thought I did something nefarious (which I didn't). Hang in there, you'll figure it out.
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Nicolo, good luck on your journey. Ultimately, it is your decision to make.

While I haven't had any of my collection outed, I am worried about it happening someday. I will continue to make the best decision I can on future card purchases.

That an action is done is not evidence that action is necessary. Though I am happy to learn PSA is now using a post it note system to explain why cards got certain grades. I didn’t know that. Explaining why they do what they do is good.

We’ve gone from “misinformation” to “a different explanation”. Looking at the slabs, and of numerous other 50’s Topps cards, print variants from which sheet slot the card was in do not seem to disqualify high grades. This seems the more reasonable evidence for me to use, the evidence of what PSA has actually done, rather than to assume that any action done is a necessary action done and skipping the other work performed by Moser’s *finger and moisture*. Misinformation is factually false and inaccurate information usually with intent to deceive, not an opinion from the physical evidence that one just disagrees with or does not like.

I will certainly admit that Moser has infinitely more experience submitting to PSA. As a collector of cardboard instead of a criminal fraudster, I don’t have as much need for their services ;)

I would argue that your card hasn't actually lost any value. Perhaps it has lost value in your eyes, or in the eyes of a very small minority of collectors, but the card's true value is dictated by what the market thinks it's worth, not you. And the market has clearly shrugged at the trimming and alteration scandals, as did the FBI.

If you sell this at auction to someone else and tether a disclosure to it, you may appease your moral compass, but from an economics perspective, all you've done is given someone else the opportunity for arbitrage, because it is an absolute certainty that someone (and likely the very next owner) will just resell it without disclosure. In fact, the disclosure itself nearly ensures that the next owner would be someone looking to profit from the opportunity because they would simply just outbid anyone who was afraid or put off by the disclosure. The card, and it's value, will persist unless it is destroyed. And if the card were sent to PSA, they would likely not honor their grade guarantee. They would say, "nope, looks good!" just like they always go.

At the end of the day, selling with a disclosure attached accomplishes nothing. If you truly want to do the "right thing", then you need to either destroy the card, or crack it out and send it back to PSA raw with a note attached that says, "this card was recolored" and then eat the loss. But this model is unsustainable. The vast majority of high grade vintage cards have been tampered with in some way. You'd be removing a single grain of sand from the beach.

Coming to terms with the fact that the entire high grade vintage market (and even a sizeable percentage of both the lower grade vintage and the modern market) has been f*d with is something that we either just accept or we live in denial about, or are simply ignorant of altogether. How we reach proceed with that knowledge is up to us individually. It has certainly helped to shap my purchasing decisions. I almost never buy a key vintage card graded above a 6, and I look for eye appeal. Yet I still end up with altered cards regularly. If I like the card regardless, I keep it. If I don't, I just resell it. And I don't attach my opinions to the listing. If I think it's altered, I don't care. Because if I did, I might as well give up on this hobby because the number of altered cards out there is endless. I'm not going to take a loss after loss into perpetuity to ease my conscience and effectively just give someone else free money.

To quote the song from the Mikado, "Here's a pretty state of things, a pretty state of things." Man, how did we get to this point? I wonder if David Hall knew from day one his company would result in more doctoring, not less.

I dislike this attitude more than any other.

Just because a bunch of other people are clueless or corrupt does not make it ok.

Frankly, it's also a huge temptation that I manage to avoid.

agreed!

Bingo snow it has not lost any value and please do not lose any sleep Raulis.

If it makes anybody feel better I am the moron of the year ,
Thinking .. “ hooray “ card with a rough cut got a nice grade 🙄

I personally believe that if this card were to be resold with disclosure...it would lose significant value. And the opinion/mindset that it doesn't matter...is quite detrimental to the hobby.

To each their own, right! If I were a newbee attempting to enter this hobby...with full disclosure of all the corruption/skechiness abound...I'd pick another hobby!

Pete. I agree with what you say.
But instead of telling them to pick another hobby, I would try to steer them in a different direction.

This card is 113 yrs old. None of us will look this good at 113. Nuff Ced! (from the BST yrs ago)
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Thankfully my budget has me hunting low grade gems, generally can't afford anything vintage above a 1-2. I do find this thread fascinating. Some of those doctoring jobs I have to admit are pretty astonishing to me, seems to me there's some real skill involved there. It's the dishonesty that's the problem here, but for a psa bump from 5 to 9 meaning a $29,950 profit, it's no surprise this is happening.

All that said, it's interesting to me that the grading companies haven't starting offering something like "restored" as a qualifier to take some of the stigma off of "altered". I can see someone not from this world looking at this process as more like art restoration which is a rather common and accepted thing for really old and valuable artwork.

good point, Leon...I'd steer them away from collecting high grade slabs.

It's acceptable for art because each work is unique and over time the appearance can deteriorate meaning less enjoyment for people viewing it. No such rationale for 99 percent of the garbage being done to cards which is solely for deception and profit. Please don't elevate these scum to the level of art restorers.

Make no mistake I am not complimenting PSA. I had to pay for the review. Now they just take your money and no post it note.

If you reread my post it said I had not ever seen a Mays higher than a 7 with the print flaw. Had I looked, as you did, I would have found them.

In that same post I was replying to both what you wrote as well as what snowman had written and this thread had misinformation. I never said that either of you had an intent to deceive. YIKES. Bit of a stretch there. Not everything should be this combative. Relax.

Got it. So a card graded "A" is the same value as a PSA 8.5

And what was the point of third party grading again? :confused:

I agree if it's done for dishonest means it's completely unacceptable, and what I'm seeing highlighted in this thread is truly flat out fraud that should be illegal. I'm not trying to elevate fraud. But to say only unique items are acceptable for restoration seems pretty close minded. What about old cars? Or old watches? I have no problem imaging that there could be a legitimate market for restored old baseball cards, and there seems to me to be some real skill involved. The trick is the buyer has to know what they're buying. Sadly that's not what's happening in the card market.

Sure, if it's fully disclosed and there is a way to ensure subsequent buyers can't be deceived.

Comment removed.

I don't see this as a subjective take or as an opinion with which we can agree or disagree on. I am merely pointing out the objective reality that surrounds us. It is true that this card maintains its value on the marketplace regardless of whether we want it to or not. The only opinion that matters is the one on the slab. That is true for altered cards as well as for unaltered cards that get erroneously rejected. You can't sell that 33 Goudey Gehrig AA for the price of a PSA 6 even if PSA got it wrong.

It depends on the level of granularity you're looking at though. Sure, he could disclose that it has been recolored and that PSA missed it, and that would certainly deter some bidders. But it won't deter the flippers who are there to profit from it. And whatever downward pricing effect it has on that single transaction is merely temporary. It has no staying power on the actual value of the card. And the act of disclosing for a single transaction has no effect on the market value of the cards itself. You are simply paying someone else a percentage of its value so you can sleep better at night. But if you thought about it more deeply, you'd realize that you haven't actually solved the problem. You're still just kicking the can down the road. That card WILL end up with another buyer who pays full price for it and who finds themselves in the same predicament as you. And at the end of the day all you did was put a few hundred bucks into some flipper's pocket.

You can place a value on a disclosure. Sure, no problem. Sell it without one, then sell it with one and calculate the delta. But whatever that value difference is, it would be dwarfed when compared to the value delta between what it sold for with disclosure and what it sold for after cracking it out and having it reslabbed as "Authentic Altered". If you want to actually do the "right thing", then you have to crack it out and put it in an AA slab before you sell it. And you'd better be prepared to repeat the process for the majority of the cards in your collection. Hats off to anyone who is ready for that level of commitment to the hobby and to their moral compass. Because anything shy of that is just a self imposed tax one pays to help them sleep better at night.

I honestly have no idea, but if raulus were to reach out to PSA with the before & after scans would he be laughed out of the building? Would there be any response from PSA? Seems to me that having the #2 PSA Willie Mays master set would at least warrant a response from someone.

Yes, they would respond. And there's a chance he might get reimbursed. But they often deny these sorts of claims.

They might bump it to a 9.

That might be the best solution. Raulus is made whole & the card is??? I wouldn't want it destroyed, but what is the solution to stop it from being graded by PSA a year from now?

I didn't think of that possibility.

They have a webpage that discusses their guarantee, and identifies how to contact them:

https://www.psacard.com/about/financialguarantee

I've sent them an email as they requested, to get the process started. We'll see how it goes. I'm not holding my breath. They have an autoresponse to identify that they work to respond to emails within 3 days.

I'm certainly more than happy to take the current market value for it, and hopefully they use it as a teaching moment for their graders. But both would seem like rather unreasonably high hopes.

Please let us know how that works out for you. I'm rooting for you.

If PSA actually pays you, then we are here

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I would agree for the average collector. Raulus is not your average collector.

Good luck and keep us posted. Did you mention you are a member of net54? That might have raised the level of importance for PSA

HA.

No disrespect to this august body, but I'm not convinced they will be effectively swayed by my participation in this forum.

I haven't really considered how I'm going to approach it once they get back to me. If they are dismissive, then I'll probably have to find ways to push a little harder. And I suppose a little online pressure can sometimes be used to help a company do the right thing.

But we'll see how it goes, and I'll be happy to share the outcome when it unfolds.

My guess is they'll look at the data, suggest that they are two different cards, and thank me for my time. Or some variation on that theme.

I think the likelihood of being reimbursed for a recolored card is higher than for a trimmed card.

That would probably assure they blow him off. Like Nat cares about Net 54. I think having such a high ranked Mays player set might lend some credence though.

They're not going to care about a before scan of the card in question. All they can do, and I would argue all that they should be expected to do, is evaluate the card itself again, in hand. You can point them to the alteration, but if it is not detectable in hand, under a loupe, then it's not detectable. This is why so many trimmed cards get the thumbs up from them after being sent in for review. If it measures correctly and the edges look right, there's really nothing they can do. However, in this case, it should be detectable.

This is dangerous they could also lower the grade back down to a 7 and your Royally F&Cked…will only get compensated the difference.

Raulis just sit back take 72 hours and think this over sir. Again your collection is beautiful and you should be proud.