How does PSA decide what cards to grade?

[Rich Klein]

Originally Posted by glchen

As others have said, if the card is listed in a standard baseball card reference book, that is usually good enough for PSA to grade it. However, there are some exceptions such as (1) too many reprints exist where PSA can't tell if a card is authentic or not, e.g., 1932 Fro Joy Babe Ruth, (2) card is too big for any holder and (3) odd shaped or too fragile cards/pennants/pins are hit and miss. If the item is cut down from a poster, game, notepad, PSA also will usually not grade it. Or cut down from a card with multiple players (e.g., 4-1 Exhibits with only one player like Ruth). Finally, I haven't seen PSA grade Real Photo postcards.

Also Star Basketball is a problematic group of sets for PSA to grade

And sometimes there are just unknown cards. A friend of mine sent me on LinkedIn a scan of an item I had never seen before. It's an early 1970's Johnny Bench produced for a personal appearance. Cards like that rarely made the catalogs and thus are not known to any of grading companies.

Take if from me as a cataloguer, if the grading companies don't know about a card -- it's hard for them to do the work sometimes.

That's why I was glad to see amongst the PSA posting of positions available was for researcher (or a few) to help with issues such as that.