Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth
Card doctoring and enabling card doctors are hugely profitable, and it will continue unabated, at the highest and often most respected levels of the hobby. I would love to know why the FBI investigation apparently went south, can only speculate, but presumably we won't know.
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As I've stated many times, this was all very predictable from the beginning (from my point of view). I just imagined myself as a juror who knows nothing about the hobby, listening to the complaints levied against any potential defendants and falling out of my chair laughing at the behaviors that some in the hobby would like everyone, inside and outside the hobby, to be viewed as criminal. I just don't see that happening. Not now. Not ever. There is a wide spectrum of what counts as an "alteration" to begin with even among hobbyists. But as soon as we started breaking out the pitchforks for people polishing chrome cards, we lost everyone else outside the hobby (potential jurors). And all one needs to do is point to the completely laughable / remarkably inconsistent list of dos and don'ts that are/aren't allowed by PSA and it's game over from a jury's viewpoint (e.g., it's OK to soak a card to remove it from a scrapbook and to get glue off the back of it, but it's not OK to store a card in a screwdown. Or, it's ok to soak a card to remove it from a scrapbook, but if a stain goes away during the process, well, that's just not OK).
I get that some of my assertions above can be viewed as a red herring, when the primary complaint is trimming cards, but it all falls along a spectrum, with trimming at or near the far end of it (rebuilt corners and recoloring are there as well). It is not illegal to alter a baseball card whether we like it or not. I just don't think a jury is going to care even about a trimmed card or a recolored card. It is not a crime to recolor a card. Countless collectors have taken a black Sharpie to their 71 Topps collection and later resold those cards. Nobody is going to put those people behind bars. And some number of people have trimmed cards down to the correct size because they were too tall to fit in their one-touch holders. Are we going to lock them up as well? There are good reasons that these behaviors are not criminal.
Then, there's Pandora's Box. I maintain that still to this day, even the majority of us that are tuned in to the trimming scandal lack an accurate understanding of just how massive this problem truly is. In the early years of PSA, I honestly believe that the bulk of their business came from a mob of trimmers. I also think they knew it, but just didn't care about it. As long as the cards "looked good" and were "close enough" in size, they were fine with taking their money. It was a hush-hush arrangement. If you look at high-end vintage cards closely, paying attention to certs and grades, you will see this was irrefutably true. Every auction I look through, I find countless clearly trimmed cards. And those are just the ones that are easily identifiable. The majority of trimmed cards cannot be detected. Not by you. Not by me. Not by any TPG. It just is what it is. And if we want to hold PSA's feet to the fire (or PWCC's, or Probstein's, or eBay's, or any other AH) by holding them responsible for every trimmed card in a slab that ever passed through their hands, and decertifying cards, then we will destroy this entire hobby. Because the entire hobby has been built upon that foundation whether we like it or not. Marshall Fogel's entire collection would be worth pennies on the dollar, the Wagner 8 would suddenly be affordable, PSA would be out of business, and we wouldn't have any auction houses left to sell our cards through. And there'd be no one left to sell them to anyhow.
To everyone outside of this hobby, we are just a bunch of old men yelling at clouds.