Posted By:
Rick McQuillanI don't mind a whole lot if someone overgrades by a grade or a half grade, but with Fritsch a G means that you will get at least half of the card and VG means that the card has only been through the washing machine once.
I would love to order from their "One of a kind" vintage section, but I don't want to go through the hassle of receiving supposedly VG cards that are torn, chewed, beat up or marked,and then returning them.
The other problem with several of the older "catalog" companies is that they don't have scans of their cards on their website. I know that it is a lot of work to scan cards, but I am not going to look through their catalog, call or email the company to request scans of cards, and then wait a day or a week for the scans. Maybe the reason that scans aren't provided is that the sellers know that the cards are overgraded, and they hope that people won't go through the hassle of returning overgraded cards.
There are several companies who seem to have good customer service, decent prices, and accurate grading standards, such as Mike Wheat, California Sports Cards, Gar Miller, and Frank Ward, although I would like to see more scans on the lower end vintage cards from some of these companies.
As far as the Fritsch reprints, I have many friends who love collecting the reprint sets. At one time I was collecting Green Bay Packers and Milwaukee Braves cards. I had over 6500 different Packers cards, and I bought some of the reprint sets to add to the my collection. Fritsch is regularly buying large ads in the hobby magazines and most of the ad content offers reprint sets, so my guess is that the reprints are selling well or Fritsch wouldn't keep spending the money on the ads.
Rick