Best Place for Modern PSA 10s?
 

Whats the best place to find modern PSA 10 baseball cards?? Im talking very obscure players from the late 80s to the mid 10s - players who mostly only played a few years tops (sometimes only 1 year or less). There are a handful of players Im searching for that have not turned up on eBay over the course of several years (graded 10, mind you). COMC skews heavily towards ungraded cards.

Where do you go to find graded cards for modern players that make you wonder who the heck submitted these cards in the first place?

Most big volume sellers like COMC, Four Sharp Corners, Dean's, Burbank, etc. have all their inventory on ebay I believe, so there's probably no off the beaten track places to go. Four Sharp is the most likely to have this sort of thing, IMO.

That's heavy risk submitting cards worth $0.25 and having to pay $15 (SGC) or $25 (PSA). No wonder they never show up on ebay.

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Yes, if you want them, you'll likely have to submit them yourself. We're no longer in the $6 grading specials for commons like 5 years ago. And we're miles away from the bulk grading that 4SC used to get where they could send a monster box of cards to PSA and get charged $2 to evaluate each card and only have to pay $5 or so for the ones that were determined to be PSA 10s for slabbing.
Now you have to look for suckers or cards graded decades ago. COMC is still your best bet for those things, because 10,000 individual sellers use COMC as a consignment service.

This 70% or more of what I submit, sports and nonsports.

The thing that nobody is mentioning is that cards from the 80s and 90s are being graded with extreme prejudice at PSA. They hired a ton of new graders after the covid boom and they seem to all have been trained on chrome/prizm/ultra modern standards. It is a situation thats been discussed frequently on blowout and other forums.

Aside from the high costs, as already mentioned, it just isn't worth submitting a common card that would've been a 10 in 2019 or earlier and getting a 7 or 8. If the standards had remained reliable, the cost would be an acceptable issue for me.

EBay "saved search" and waiting has worked for me, but not much the past few years...

Like someone else pointed out...since we've moved past the $6/$8 graded specials era, a lot have been snapped up. I know the ones I have are in a strongly held collection and will not make it back to market any time soon. This has everything to do with it's a card a want and nothing to do with what price I could get for it.

I have many saved searches from mid-1980s through the 2000s that are still unfulfilled because they rarely/never come up for auction or current sellers are pricing them through the roof.

Some cards don't have graded examples, or only 1 or 2 out in the wild. It helps to search the PSA/SGC registry to see if one has even been graded.

This is god’s honest truth.

It has become near impossible to find common 10s and more impossible to submit one. As a Lance Parrish collector I can only wait for set breaks to get an addition or upgrade and he is a semi star to many. Getting a super common is a needle in a haystack.

This is why these cards in 10 are often ridiculously priced and even auctioned they go for a ton. A 1982 Topps Parrish sold for 545 in auction format the other day (glad I have mine). A 1979 Parrish can’t be touched under 2k. The prices for these cards because of grading costs has blown up.

This is correct. I am not a registry person - but this issue makes it difficult to collect certain sets that are driven by the registry. This includes a number of sets from the 1990's - 2000. One example is the 1991 Topps Desert Shield set. I don't think there will be any more PSA 10's given.

Thanks - lots of good comments.

I think it's pretty clear that the days of super low grading fees are gone (thats not all bad, IMO). Some of these cards never really made sense to grade, but people certainly did, and I thank them.

Its just a little bit of a bummer when the market makes huge changes that arent always easy to foresee. But I guess if you spend enough time in the hobby, that happens a lot.