Koufax?

[RichardSimon]

Originally Posted by travrosty

Adam, regarding your question why some sellers offer no returns on ebay.


there are two types of sellers who sell with a no return policy.

one is scammers and people selling forgeries who don't want to have to return the item for obvious reasons.

the other type of sellers are honorable sellers who don't want to play the game of dueling authenticators and have to return a real autograph just because a service like psa or jsa rejects the item.

If i sell an item and offer a return policy, some buyers will buy the real autograph from me, take it to a sportscard show and submit it to psa or jsa, and they deem it fake when its not. Then the buyer comes back to me and returns it under the return policy. I now have to refund the guys money and list it again, and maybe run the risk of it getting pulled off of ebay for no reason. So instead of going through all of this nonsense, I offer a no return policy officially on ebay, but i offer a return policy personally because of course I would accept a return and refund a buyers money if the item is fake.

All a seller like me would ask if that it be shown specifically why an autograph is fake, which is something psa and jsa do not do in their vague letters of rejection. There are so many instances of psa and jsa getting it wrong, that we simply don't trust them to do a thorough and complete job of authenticating an autograph, so we do not want them dictating our return policy, which is fair enough. We have about 9 trillion embarrassing examples of psa and jsa's "work".

it is not to say we will not accept a return for a bad autograph, we will and do if one is presented to us with convincing evidence.

how do you know which type of seller is selling the item? The best thing is to get opinions on items before you bid from people you trust. look into a sellers background and history as best you can.

Time for this story.
Many years ago I ran into a man in my hallway who lived in my apartment bldg. I was carrying the BB Encyclopedia and he made a comment about it, we started to talk baseball, I mentioned autographs and he told me he still had his childhood collection.
He asked if I wanted to buy his collection.
He and I became close friends after we finished our dealings and went to dinner , Knicks games and the theater together. He had some notoriety in this world and his name was Gil Jonas. It was an honor to be called his friend. Look him up on Amazon or Wikipedia. Sadly he passed away in 2006 and I lost a good friend.
Eventually I bought a large part of his collection and it included 12, yes 12, Babe Ruth autographs, all gotten in person on different things. He actually had become a gofer on the Babe Ruth radio show. Before that he would hang out at the Ansonia Hotel, where the Babe had a room for various purposes .
I sold the autographs to various people.
Years later he sold me the last few that he had.
Two of those Ruth autographs were rejected by PSA. One of them was from a customer of mine who had upgraded his Ruth and wanted to sell the one I sold to him. He sent it to an auction house that used PSA and they rejected it, telling him that PSA said it was not good. I told him to send it to Lelands , that they would know it was good. He did send it to them and they happily sold it for him. I would take the opinions of Mike Hefner and Josh Evans over PSA any day of the week. As to the other one that was rejected by PSA , the buyer told me he knew it was good but did want a PSA cert. to make it easier to sell. He kept it and did sell it.
Of course I can tell so many more stories but I figure that is enough for now.