Old Judge

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Posted By: scott

I recently came across an eBay auction for a n172 Old Judge card--it was slabbed by SGC with an AUT (authentic) designation but description said SGC would not grade card. What does the above mean as far as why SGC would not grade card--trimming? or something else? Do Old Judge collectors frequently submit cards for authentication even if they know card won't get grade. Thanks in advance for clearing this up.

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Posted By: Judge Dred (Fred)

Scott,

Are you referring to the Ryan N172 that is being sold on ebay? If so, the seller indicated that it wouldn't be given a grade due to the size of the card. The seller is very trustworthy. I believe what he said because I purchased a card from him and the Ryan card probably came from the same batch. The card I purchased is absolutely beautiful. It has nice sides and corners. The card was clean with the exception of the evidence of album removal on the back. I looked closely at it and there didn't appear to be any evidence of trimming on the card. OJs came in different sizes and styles. I would guess that the same style cards seemed to be close in size but not exactly the same.

In this case you buy the card and not the holder and keep in mind who's selling it. If I were to buy this card it it would be because I like it and I trust the seller.

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Posted By: scott

I'm still a little confused. SGC says it's authentic but will not grade. If it's a size issue, then does SGC only grade OJ's that meet certain size parameters--even though there are legitimate OJ cards which fall outside of those parameters??

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Posted By: Judge Dred (Fred)

I believe that SGC, PSA and GAI have a difficult time assigning grades to cards that may not meet certain size criteria. Although the card may not have the appearance of being trimmed they will decline to grade the card because they are unsure of issue and just don't want anyone coming back at them later stating that they think it was trimmed. There is another thread called "Why can't an altered card be graded" that discusses the AUTHENTIC assignments to encapsulated cards.

Something else to consider is that you might submit a card several different times for grading and you could come up with several different grades or even have the card come back as altered.

Maybe it would be fun to do this. Send in a card 4 different times to SGC, PSA and GAI and see how many different evaluations you get for the same card.

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Posted By: David Seaborn

Hi guys,

I'm the seller of that N172 Ryan card. I think to ease confusion, I'll cancel and re-list with a better description for full accuracy. I still don't fully understand SGC's policy. I've checked and they can, in fact, encapsulate trimmed cards. I got this card graded at the Ft. Washington show and their head grader spoke to me about it. He said it was not trimmed but it did not fall within their "minimum size requirements". Looks like the same thing happened tp the T206 Cobb (red) in lot #32 for Lew Lipset.
This is a little confusing for me too. If a card is not trimmed, to me it should be assigned a grade.

In the end, for this card I guess it doesn't matter too much since they've been killing me on the grades because of back damage (I'm fairly certainly if it did grade, they would only give this a 1 as they did with several oters). It sure does leave me scratching my head though. Thanks for the heads up.

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Posted By: Scott

David/Fred: Many thanks to both of you--another example of why this board is a great communication/information tool for vintage collectors. Cheers

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Posted By: leon

I too have a card that is due back to me on Tuesday, from SGC, that they didn't holder because of size requirements. It is a Fatima T222 Chance, that I recently won off of ebay, and the person said it was their grandfathers when he collected ( Don't know when ). I told the seller about the situation, gave a few options, and am going to return it for a refund. If this card "was" trimmed it was long ago. I knew right when I got it that it was short and compared it to another and indeed was correct in my assumption. I see SGC's point somewhat. I think this card might have been subject to "old collector mentality" collecting and trimmed to fit in a binder or something. I don't think it means SGC doesn't know enough about a series, most of the times. Back to the Oldl Judge in question. How many folks on the board think they have handled more Old Judges than the top 2 graders at SGC? A few but not too many. So I don't think the "they might not know enough about the series" question is true, especially in this case. They won't grade a card, no matter what series, that they aren't comfortable being able to tell what went on with it, or whether something went on with it. I applaud them for that. regards

ps...Hal has a Delehanty OJ in an SGC 84 holder, I sold him, that PSA wouldn't grade as they didn't know enough about the series and thought it was too small.....

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Posted By: davidcycleback

Whether it's James Spence or the top expert at SGC or PSA, any authenticator will tell that there is a percentage of items where they can't make a final opinion. One person who worked with Mike Gutierrez said what most impressed him most was that if Gutierrez didn't know he would say he didn't know.

The collector should worry more about the grader that encapsulates and labels 100 percent of the items they receive, rather than the ones that don't.

Also, collectors and dealers will and have sued grading companies if the label on the holder is incorrect. Considering it's often the submitters who insist on financial rembursment, sometimes in the thousands of dollars, they should be the first to figure out that a grader is going to set paramaters what what will be graded and returns unlabelled items they have questions about.

If a customer said he'd sue me for $5,000 if my LOA turned out to wrong, I wouldn't write the LOA even if I knew it would be accurate.