Here's the reply I received from Ebay:
Dear Alan,
Thanks for taking the time to write to us.
We are aware of an issue with being unable to narrow down the search
results within Baseball Cards. This is not a permanent change and we
are working to resolve it as quickly as possible.
There are many changes in progress as part of the announced final seller
release of the year.
(
http://www2.ebay.com/aw/core/200907270812462.html). These changes will
be rolling out during this week and are not yet complete.
As part of this release, the categories within Sports Trading Cards are
changing to the simplified set of sports that you see here:
http://sports-cards.shop.ebay.com/Ca...i.html?_npmv=3
Previously, there was a duplication between the categories (eg
Baseball-MLB > Singles (Pre-1930) > Graded etc) and the Item Specifics
(Sport, Year, Graded, etc), which made it confusing on which to use to
narrow down the search results. Once you browsed to the Singles
(Pre-1930) category, you were still presented with the Year Item
Specifics. We are removing this duplication in favor of the more
versatile Item Specifics.
Prior announcements about these changes can be found at the following
links.
http://pages.ebay.com/sell/July2009U...ies/index.html
http://pages.ebay.com/sell/itemspecs.html
http://pages.ebay.com/categorychanges/sportscards.html
When categories are changed, there is a reindexing of the items that
must occur, and this can take up to several days to complete. Once
complete, your items should be showing in the category:
Sports Mem, Card & Fan Shop > Cards > Baseball (category 213). Until
then, your items should still be found in all relevant title searches.
In addition to the previously available search refinements of Product,
Sport, Year, Card Manufacturer, Card Attributes and Grading information,
we will be adding the ability to refine search results by both Team and
Player where applicable.
Once again our apologies for this issue and we ask for your patience as
we work to resolve it.
Sincerely,
Mahina
eBay Classification Team