Fritsch Cards, i guess they are in the RePrint Bus

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Posted By: rand

i had an experience with Fritsch cards about a year ago. after i recieved my order i quickly realized they like to Overgrade their material, so i sent it all back. then as i was perusing their catalogue i noticed alot of Reprint sets. i was wondering why such an established dealer was selling this stuff. then on ebay i noticed alot of reprint sets for sale, of course, they are mostly Fritsch Cards. then i checked the feedback, and of course most of their sales are Reprint sets. seems to me, they are more interested in selling worthless stuff then actually focusing on real cards.

whats my point here? i guess i just dont understand how these older dealers can still grade their cards from 1980's standards, yet have full knowledge of graded material standards in todays world. oh, and by the way, they have owned this material for decades and want todays prices with yesterdays conditions.

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Posted By: Dan Bretta

I still get their catalogs...I haven't received one of their vintage catalogs for a long time now though. They must have a dedicated customer base willing to pay far over ebay prices. The price they ask for complete current sets is well above what you can walk in to a Walmart and pay for the set...and that's their pre-release sales prices. As far as reprints sets go they've been selling those forever.

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Posted By: rand

i dont understand their focus. Yes, make money, thats the bottom line, BUT if you love what you do then making money is just part of the equation,not the main motivation. try to ask them for a scan of a regular card. i would think a dealer who has a million cards in inventory would want to actually sell them, not photocopy them and nickle and dime their way through ebay. i dont know, how many customers do you think they have lost due to ebay, as well as Kit Young and others that overgrade and overprice their long owned inventory.

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Posted By: jdrum

I don't think that they have printed a vintage catalog since #81 several years ago (2005). I have bought cards from them for years. You generally know what to expect, liberal grading and high prices but they usually have what you are looking for. I generally find that I have to return something from each order because of the grading. But where else can you find those tough in-between grades like NRMT with crease or EXMT with punch hole. Usually all significant problems are disclosed in the catalog descriptions. They also charge a "convenience fee" of 5% for phoned or faxed orders. Very, very good people to deal with!

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Posted By: William Cohon

A few years ago, I put the 1934-6 Diamond Stars set together. Mostly VG, nothing graded, and no high numbers. But I have all the pictures, and I derive pleasure from the beautiful artwork. In 1937, Diamond Stars was prepared to release a new bunch of cards. Times were tough, and for one reason or another the cards were deep-sixed.



Well, it turns out that Fritsch offers them. I know they weren't printed in 1937, and yet they offer a contemporaneous view of major league ball in the thirties. The cards are a portal to the sensibility of an earlier era, and they're cheap.



Having said that, I wouldn't buy vintage stuff from the Fritsch catalogue, either.

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Posted By: leon

First of all RIP Larry Fritsch.....

Not for any particular reason but I haven't ordered from them since Larry passed away. I guess I haven't seen another of their vintage, 1 of a kind, catalogs since then, though there might have been some. The approximately 10 times I ordered from them I almost always returned something for being grossly overgraded. That being said they were always friendly and did the returns with no fuss at all....and always a "thank you" for my business. The cards I did keep always made the hassle worth it. They were always very friendly too. As mentioned above they have been selling reprints for a long long time....That doesn't bother me except it does make for a lot of unscrupulous transactions down the road, when others get hoodwinked in future dealings of them because of misrepresentation. Just one person's dealings..

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Posted By: Richard Cline - RC

I haven't bought a lot of stuff from them but they have always been quick with a reply to any question I might have. As far as the reprints are concerned, some collectors will never be financially able to put together these sets and truly enjoy the reprints. For myself, it is the only way I will ever have the '33 Goudey Lajoie. Unfortunately, as Leon stated, some of the shadier "dealers" will undoubtedly put some of these on the market as genuine. That is where this site comes in handy for some of the expertise on vintage cards.

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Posted By: Michael Steele

First of all, I agree with leon, RIP Larry Fritsch.

Only purchased once from them over the years when I first really got into collecting around 78 or 79 as a teen and was able to purchase the 1st and 4th series run of 1967 Topps. Of course back then the cost was cheap but the cards were untouched/beautiful and still remain in my set save for a few centering upgrades.

So my memory is good one but have not purchased since because they always seemed a little high in price.

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Posted By: Frank Wakefield

Mr. Fritsch was a good fellow. He'd take time to chat on the phone. I enjoyed it. The true hobby misses him.


They had high prices on old stuff. And it was overgraded. After buying from them a couple of times I got to where I just expected that going in. Why did I continue to buy from them?? Because some of the stuff they had you just couldn't find anywhere else. It was either hope you found it somewhere else one day, or buy from them. Exchanges were always easy, much easier than expected. Nice folks to deal with. Who of us has not overpaid for a card we really wanted?? This was a great place to do just that, because they had so many old cards.


I bought Cracker Jack reprints and T205 reprints from him because I wanted to be able to read the backs of all of those cards. There are lots of folks out there who love the game, the history of the game, and like looking at reprints of old cards. They think we're nuts for having a bunch of cash tied up in old cardboard... they're not totally wrong about that. So that's why the reprints.

As for why they've shifted from as much vintage business to more new reprint stuff... I'd think a combination of the growth of eBay and the passing of Mr. Fritsch.

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Posted By: davidcycleback

As a kid, I bought a Frisch Play Ball reprint set. I couldn't afford the real set mowing the lawn. I liked them and was well aware they were reprints.

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Posted By: rand

would anybody agree that old time dealers are out of touch with todays buyers? seems to me, todays collectors are tired of the overgraded overpriced material. who has the time to order cards without scans and then have to send them back. professional grading has been around long enough and all these dealers have had plenty of plastic through their hands to get a grasp that a card cannot be NrMt (except for the pen writing all over the back)

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Posted By: Rick McQuillan

I 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

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Posted By: Jeremy

A couple of points re/ why folks buy reprints...(To each his own) To piggy-back on Frank's comments, I purchased several reprint sets from LFC b/c of affordability and a inexpensive collecting mission. I wanted to put together a HOF Player collection and I wound up doing it for cards from 1870-1949 in Reprint format, then focused on the real thing from 1950-2008. Had a ball putting this HOF player collection together, did it for under $1,000 and put each one in a 9 pocket (old style...) page 3 Ring notebook, and I love getting this 3 Ring Folder out to show my boys... We pull the cards out, look at the backs, and this does include stuff like a Mayo, OJ, T's, Reprints, etc... Then I let them touch and smell the Vg-Ex 64 Mantle, the ex-mt 67 Aaron, and the vg 53 Hal Newhouser... (You get the point)-- My true collecting focus is pre-war and is minor league-southern league material, so I put more than my fair share of green backs into this arena, but I smile every time I get that $1,000 HOF collection notebook out to flip the pages and look at the 270ish Player/Mgr Type cards from the 1800's to current. I have all the important type cards and my favorite particular card of each HOF player and accomplished it in little time with no money.

Also, someone mentioned finding some of those cards that are hard to find... I accomplished this with LFC over the holidays. Picked up a T207 Hub Perdue for $70 and a T213-2 Bridwell-Nashville card for $41 as well as some 50's PC's of Southern league players. I have been after these 2 cards for some time and while the Perdue seems difficult to locate, the Bridwell-Nashville Variation is virtually impossible. (I have been after it for 5 years) Just looked through his online vintage catlog, plucked out what I wanted and noticed a few others had beaten me to the punch in the last several months for a few dozen Type 1 Coupon cards, some hard to find Colgan Chips, etc....

While I don't want to sound like a LFC commercial, I have only done business with him maybe 3 or 4 times, but have been very pleased at his range of Vintage raw material and of course the reprint stuff happen to fit part of my collecting strategy...

Best,


~ Jeremy ~

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Posted By: Steve F

It's nice that these are being used positively by some collectors. But we've all seen the costly scams that some of these fakes help perpetuate on the naive collectors.

If I need a rare copy, I'll print one off the net and glue it to a scrap from my Cap'n Crunch box. Steve F

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Posted By: Bob

At one time an awful lot of Fritch's cards were waaaay overpriced but as time went on and collector passion for some sets fired up, those prices suddenly seemed very reasonable and desirable. Case in point the 1911 and 1912 Zeenuts he had. They sat and collected dust on their shelves for several years and boom! Collectors went nuts and they had to call a selling freeze to up the prices even more and still they sold out.
Larry's caramel cards in general were always overpriced and way overgraded but he did have cards no one else had. Sometimes you just bit the bullet and bought them.
As far as grading went, if a card said "EX" you usually got a really nice card. VGEX was a 50/50 proposition but VG and below was always scary.