PSA Response from President Steve Sloan

[benjulmag]

Originally Posted by Mark17

To me, the proverbial elephant in the room is this: Exactly (and I mean, EXACTLY) what is illegal? I am not saying that deception is not happening in these well documented cases, and I am not in any way defending deceptive practices, but from a legal perspective, what can and what cannot a person do to a card before re-selling it?

Obviously, turning a Magee into a Magie is fraud. But consider:

1. If I find an all original 1966 Ford Mustang in Aunt Nellie's barn, and then clean the pigeon poop off the hood, vacuum and use stain remover on the flooring, put air in the tires, can't I still sell it as 100% original? Note that I did not replace the tires, hoses, belts, gaskets, which would have made it no longer "all original." All I did was clean off dirt. So, what's different between that and cleaning dirt of an otherwise original card?

2. If I buff out a scratch on that old Mustang, how is that different than spooning out a wrinkle?

3. What is the legal rule, exactly, on cutting (or trimming) cards? If I have a 1962 Post Cereal card that was hand cut to begin with, and has wide borders, can I trim it down to the correct card size, giving it razor sharp edges and corners? If not, why?

4. Suppose I find an uncut panel of Post cards, or Bazooka, or 1975 Hostess. Can I get them laser-cut into 10s? They were meant to be cut by the collector in the first place.

5. In the Junk Wax era, when many people like me were buying Topps vending cases by the hundreds and getting them sorted down, a guy named Rick Starks came up with a brilliant idea. Doing business as Steven Juskywicz (something like that,) he bought tons of uncut sheets directly from Topps and had them laser cut himself. I mean, pallets upon pallets of sheets. What was brilliant about it is that he'd have a bunch of the same sheets on the cutting machine at the same time, so when they were cut, stacks of the same card could be lifted off the cutter and set into 800-count boxes.

In other words, no sorting necessary. I finally got smart and purchased my 1990 Topps inventory from him. I bought 800 complete sets and what I received were 792 800-count boxes, each box contained 800 of the same card. It only took me a few hours to sort them into teams (for the teams I could sell) and separate the keepers from the commons.

When you'd open one of those boxes and look at the edges, they were smooth as glass. Perfectly cut. Plus, the centering was way better than the cards Topps was cutting. I will bet6 that a large percentage of graded Topps cards from that era, especially 9s and 10s, were cards cut not by Topps, but by Steven Juskywicz, Inc.

So, if someone found a vintage sheet of cards today, could they get it professionally cut to produce some beautiful individual cards? If not, how would that be different from the above example. For that matter, what would the difference be between cutting a sheet of cards, and buying a vintage sheet of stamps and breaking up the sheet to sell the stamps individually?

Before people start jumping all over me, please understand, I am NOT defending or advocating deception. My point is: What, exactly and precisely, is illegal, and what is not?

We can't simply say that certain people and companies are "Guilty" without defining exactly what they are guilty of. What does the law say about doing stuff to your baseball cards?

Probably easiest to respond to your points in your order. In doing so, I am not representing that I am stating the hobby's view (to the extent one can ascertain what that is) as opposed to only my view.

1. I do not think there is anything wrong with removing a foreign substance from a card provided in so doing you are returning the card to its same original physical state. If, say, to remove a glue stain a minute layer of the original card is removed with the glue, then that removal will have morphed into an alteration.

2. Two reasons: First, the crease can return, and for that reason the removal needs to be disclosed. Second, we are not selling old cars. We are selling cards that are represented to be unaltered by recognized grading standards. Should the day ever come that used cars before being sold need to be evaluated by national TPGs who specialize in car grading and the car grading standards mandate that scratch removal be disclosed, then at that point not disclosing it would be violative of that evaluation process.

3. No reason you cannot provided you disclose what you did. Again, we come down to the recognized grading standards. FWIW, I am a collector of final production-run uncut sheets that contain the vintage card(s)/set I want to own because I believe pristine cards/sets in such sheets are more valuable than the factory-cut versions. But then again I make that statement as a collector who collects for his subjective pleasure only. If I should one day decide to cut the sheets and then submit the cards for grading, I would need to disclose what I did. In another thread I made the observation that in my ideal world all the flip would reveal is whether the card is genuine and what has been done to it. There would be no numerical grades. So for a card cut from a sheet (or recut if cut improperly the first time), a person who couldn't care less provided the card is real and of proper size would presumably value it along the lines you are suggesting.

4. It depends on how such cards are graded. Not being a collector of them, I do not know if any such card can ever receive a numerical grade. Provided they can, then once again the key point here is disclosure.

5. This one is bit trickier as one could argue the dealer who cut them did so at the behest of Topps and that Topps for some of the sheets subcontracted them out to be cut. From that perspective, one could reasonably opine that the cards, provided they were cut substantially at time of issue, be treated as cut by an authorized agent of the manufacturer and therefore be deemed to have been cut by Topps. Question - when the dealer cut them, did the borders exhibit the same physical characteristics as when Topps cut them? Assuming they did then to me there is nothing wrong with what was done. That is my view though. Others might feel disclosure is still mandated.

Conclusion: If there is one "elephant in the room" that emerges from this discussion it is the absurdity of taking the subjective grading standards TPG companies employ and treating them with the same reverence as if they were an 11th commandment God gave Moses. BUT, because the hobby does IMO when submitting a card for grading one has a duty to disclose work done which if not picked up by the TPG would result in the card receiving a grade inconsistent with these standards.