Posted By:
Al Crisafulli"At first, Grading of BB cards was reluctantly received
by many, young and old."
Of COURSE it was. Suddenly, a lot of people's Near Mint cards were now EX cards. That made people's collections less valuable than they thought, and it made selling prices lower than dealers would have liked. It didn't take long, however, for many people to see the benefits that grading offered.
Virtually any new industry is reluctantly accepted. Grading, in my opinion, has brought people into the hobby. It has established standards for judging a card's condition. And in a lot of cases, it has helped inject a lot of cash into the hobby. And I agree - it made it a lot easier to buy cards on Ebay.
Before Ebay, it might take the average collector a lifetime to complete a 1933 Goudey set. Now, with enough cash, you could probably do it in a few weeks (except the Lajoie). The downside of this is that you're taking a risk that cards are not accurately described. By buying the cards in a slab, you minimize that risk.
I can understand a person choosing not to have graded cards in their collection - even buying slabbed cards for their personal collections and cracking them out. But I cannot understand, after the industry is firmly established and has been that way for five to ten years, rejecting the concept outright and implying that it's bad for the hobby. Sentiments like that fly in the face of everything we see, every single day, as people buy, sell, and build their collections.
-Al