VERY VERY disgusted with PSA--you won't believe it!!

[Al C.risafulli]

Barry, I wasn't referring to you in the last sentence in my post.

I probably have the most ridiculous example of crack-and-resubmit that there is in the hobby. And yes, we've all heard the stories. That's the problem - we don't hear about the 200-card submission where everything was pretty much right on the nose, we hear about the one card that seemed overgraded.

To me, if you tell me that you have a '38 Goudey Jimmy Foxx in SGC 84, I have a pretty good idea of what you have. I still want to see at least a scan of the card before I buy it, but I can be reasonably sure that it's not going to have any back damage or bad corners. That's what I'm looking for - a THIRD PARTY assessment of the card. I don't want YOU to tell me you've got a near mint '38 Foxx; I want someone else - someone who reviews cards all day long - to say it.

My first job was in customer service. I took complaints all day. After working at that company for a year, I really thought it must be the worst company on earth, because everyone complained, all day. It took someone else to explain to me that the company was fine, we had millions of customers, and a tiny fraction complained - but I never took calls from people who were just calling to compliment the service. That wasn't my job.

These boards are similar. Nobody posts scans and says "Hey, I just submitted this card for grading and it's properly graded." All you see is the card with the bad label, the one that's overgraded, the person complaining that they didn't agree with the grading company. It's easy to start to feel like they never get anything right. It's easy to forget that there are literally millions of cards out there in PSA and SGC holders where the card is graded to their published standards.

-Al