SGC card returned as likely trimmed. Help me understand.

[robw1959]

Originally Posted by jchcollins

To make sense of some of these seemingly silly and arbitrary decisions that professional graders make, you have to understand the history of grading and how it evolved within the hobby. The standards that a PSA or SGC generally use today are a carefully constructed and heavily modified heirloom of the way things were done originally in the 1970's and even earlier, with some totally new and random things added in that somehow survived the cut. The original MO for graders like PSA was to "set standards" and therefore prevent opinion swings between dealers and hobbyists, and to cut out a lot of alteration that was rampant in the hobby at the time. 30 years on, well yeah - they didn't really accomplish those goals - but they started very profitable businesses - so of course they ran with it.

For starters in this case, the difference between "Authentic" and "1-Poor" is heavily influenced by the card hobby notion (unlike in some other expensive hobbies) that alteration is always to deceive, and therefore is BAD, and so most altered cards - including some which look stunning - are automatically WORSE than cards with "honest" wear. This is how a card that has been trimmed a sixteenth of an inch and is otherwise minty in appearance gets a PSA AA, and the same card which is barely recognizable and may have indeed been run over by a truck might be in a PSA 1 - Poor slab. If a card is not necessarily altered, but just missing so much that it's generally considered to be worse than poor - then it will sometimes be slabbed as Authentic without the Altered.

Your Clemente IMO was a case of the grader having a bad day, or perhaps it was just one of their new graders (they have a lot right now...) that honestly doesn't know better or wasn't trained properly. I think that card should have been slabbed "Authentic"; as they have slabbed worse examples of cards missing pieces that way before. True "trimming" is generally done with the intent to be subtle and to deceive - if it was not some kid back in 1959 or whenever who did some obvious trimming, but with the intent of making the card fit into something smaller like a picture frame, or maybe even later with plastic pages designed for smaller cards. Your card is not "trimmed" per se, but missing a chunk.

At the end of the day, remember that yes - grading is subjective due to the necessity of tying a technical standard (generally definable) back to eye appeal of the card (something that will always be in the eye of the beholder). Grading companies count on this discrepancy, and it's one of their best kept secrets to keep cards flowing in, not to mention the large number of collectors who pop their cards in frustration and resubmit them, hoping to get a higher number on a piece of paper sealed up in a piece of plastic. Convincing collectors that they are experts who apply standards evenly (they aren't, and they don't...) is the great marketing genius of TPG's.

If you think your card is bad, look at the "half a T206 Wagner" graded early in the game as "Genuine" by PSA which has been making headlines recently for heading to the auction block. There are no true standards really at any given moment. It's just whatever the graders feel like doing when they first look at your card.

It looks like the "half a Wagner" card you're referring to is actually the second card ever graded by PSA. So they gave the first one, a trimmed T206 Wagner, an 8 and the second one a "Genuine," which would translate as "Authentic" in today's grading. Two over-graded cards is not an inspiring start for PSA. Admittedly, they hadn't figured a lot of things out at that point.
https://www.sportscollectorsdaily.co...06-wagner-psa/