An experiment with PRO

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Posted By: bruce moreland

http://www.brucemo.com/cards/articles/pro/

bruce

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Posted By: hankron

very interesting

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Posted By: jay behrens

boy, if anyone ahd any doubts....

Jay

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Posted By: warshawlaw

You've gotta publish the results in VCBC. I love the trimmed basketball card.

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Posted By: Jaime Leiderman

Good Job!!

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Posted By: T206Monsta

Why did I know the results before I scrolled down to them... HHHMMMMMMMMMM?

Great Job putting that together. I believe every bit of it!

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Posted By: Dan Mathewson

For a little less than a c-note, you've done an incredible job of exposing a serious matter within our market.

I hope the big publishers (VCBC, etc.) pick up on this and expose it even further.

HNY!

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Posted By: Julie Vognar

...

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Posted By: leon

Just wanted to chime in.....great job !!!!!

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Posted By: hankron

Random number generator between 9 and 10

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Posted By: Julie Vognar

...

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Posted By: T206Monsta

I can understand the dislike for PSA but I think the relative number of cards graded is a factor. I would guess just from volume on "the bay" and in the various periodicals that PSA is the industry leader in market share for grading. Therefore, they would have the most mistakes as they have a greater chance of making mistakes. SGC is great but I'm sure we can find msitakes of theirs.

Now PRO, that company is batting 1000% in the inability department. It doesn't matter what they touch, they screw it up.

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Posted By: MW

T206monsta --

The type of "errors" that PSA frequently makes while encapsulating vintage baseball cards are not those that can be classified as normal typographical or clerical mistakes; they are not mathematically related to the quantity of cards graded. Instead, they generally showcase an astonishing lack of knowledge and expertise as E-cards, T-cards and various N-series issues are commonly mislabeled and misgraded.

Furthermore, the encapsulation of so-called "mint" condition 19th and early 20th century cards is extremely troublesome and clearly defies most known standards of normal, grade-adjusted distribution. The bottom line is that I don't trust vintage PSA 8s and PSA 9s and I don't think many on this chatboard do either.

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Posted By: david

i would agree. the fact that they graded an old judge with the add clearly trimmed from the bottom graded psa 8 and mislabled is a joke. psa time and again continues to demonstrate their complete lack of knowledge regarding vintage cards

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Posted By: T206Monsta

...but if you have one company that does 10 times the volume, your going to have a greater case for inconsistency and differentiation in ability regardles of T, N, or E cards because more people are involved that have differing skills. If you started your own business, you might think you do a great job until every one is on to your great job and you have to start hiring people that aren't as good as you and then you have breakdown. You can't discount volume, It directly affects quality. I can't imagine SGC does 1/6 the volume that PSA does in any year but some specialty areas probably do vary. I don't see many 2002 Topps SGC graded cards.

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Posted By: MW

edited\

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Posted By: bruce moreland

Thanks for the nice comments about my article.

When Dr. Koos was selling either the PRO Jackson or the Mantle, at one point he switched tack and announced that PRO was fine, and defied anyone to show differently.

I thought that was a very interesting challenge, and that's one reason I did this.

If someone tries to say that since grading is necessarily subjective, that all grading companies are the same, please feel free to send them the URL to my article.

bruce

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Posted By: Dan Mathewson

...he was very Pro-PRO, as he was trying to unload his PRO Mantle for over $20K (which, later, I think he siad he did, but who really knows for sure)...

Are there any prospects, yet, who appear intereted in picking up your experiment for publication?

-dan

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Posted By: John

I’m going go out on limb here. First I like to say to Bruce thank you for vindicating why I don’t support card-grading companies. I would also like to point out that of the few dozen 19th and 20th century cards I have bought graded there really seems to be no standard with any of them (PSA/SGC). Some companies are worse than others I think you have proven that like a glove that wont fit (sorry OJ). Here are some issues I have please tell me if any one feels the same or am I alone. First outrageous prices I have no problem with paying top dollar for a really top grade card, but I don’t want to be stupid. For instance during the Harris collection auction I bid on several cards Waddell throwing was one I went to $5,000 a decent amount I thought. The card went for around $9500.00. Ok so I was out bid, someone wanted it more than me that’s the hobby right. Then why less than a year latter does the same card go in Mastro’s auction for $5576.00? I’m I to believe this guy took a bath of around $4,000.00, if so not a very sound purchase. Harris’s green Cobb also took a small hit of around $18,000.Chalk it up to the economy what ever it seems silly to me. Second problem why is it that I have PSA 4’s that look better than 6’ and 5’s? Also why is it when I send a card in personally it may comeback with a qualifier (Trim/OC)? However if I send that same card thru a large dealer who does a lot of business with that grading company it comes back in a holder unqualified and sometimes with a higher grade. Third one of my best friends works in the standards business, his company is in charge of grading all lumber in the US and Canada. His company is a non-profit company. When I asked him why non-profit he said to be an impartial grading or quality control company it is standard business ethics. You cant be influenced by outside sources, such as money, gifts etc. Now I raise the question isn’t a PSA or SGC somewhat influenced by the large amounts of money that some of the larger sports card dealers send them over the average Joe collector? And if so does that affect their grading services? After all they in a sense set the rough market price. I heard a story recently of dealer who sent in 4 cards three 1933 Ruth cards that he said were 1’s at best and his NM Cracker Jack Johnson. When they returned two Ruth’s were PSA 1’s and one Ruth was PSA 2, too his surprise his Johnson was also a PSA 2. He called and complained right away knowing one of the owners. The owner’s remarks were “send it back someone obviously didn’t know what they were doing.” So he did the card came back a PSA 7. These things I have heard and experienced make me confused about the stability of the vintage card market and where the hobby is going. I think all of us can grade our own cards, most of us have for years. It has apparently and always will be a subjective matter. Now I agree with the possibility of fakes for large investment cards some sort of authentication service is needed. With that being said. PSA/SGC and others even though their company profiles are of the mind set to set in stone a consistency never before had in this hobby, it doesn’t seem to be working in my opinion.

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Posted By: runscott

This is the kind of experiment I really like, and you did it to perfection. The grades didn't surprise me, but the fact that they put two identical Jeter cards in two different sized holders raised my eyebrows.

This needed to be done a long time ago - thanks.

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Posted By: bruce moreland

Nobody has asked me if they can publish it, which is fine. I wrote the stuff with a web page in mind, but it could be re-worked as an article, I suppose.

bruce

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Posted By: bruce moreland

Man, the pop-unders are getting crazy here.

One thing that PSA seems to do very well is find wrinkles. If you see a really super looking PSA-4 or PSA-5, look for a wrinkle on the front or back.

They don't always find them, but I think that they are as good as anyone at finding them. The '57 Topps card I sent to PRO had been a PSA-5, with a wrinkle on the back. The wrinkle is ridiculously light, and it's close to a corner. I don't think a 7 should have a wrinkle on the back, although I have seen PSA-7's with worse wrinkles, but I think that this shouldn't have dropped it down to PSA-5. I think that PSA-6 was a better grade for this card.

I don't understand the PSA-2 that came back a 7 the second time.

I would have liked to have had a card with a heavier wrinkle to send to PRO, but I didn't have one.

bruce

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Posted By: bruce moreland

I sent in two Jeters.

Both started out life (from my point of view) as PSA-8's. Both were sent in to Beckett, and one came back BGS-8, while the other came back BGS-7.5 or 7.0.

The lower graded one was sent back to PSA, and PSA said that it was trimmed. I sent it to them twice, and they said the same thing twice.

The one they said was trimmed is exactly the size it is supposed to be, if these SP's are standard modern card size.

The other one is pretty evidently over-sized.

So the reason that they came back in two different sized holders is that the good one is too big. It would not fit in a standard holder, so they put it in a soft sleeve and stuck it in a Bowman holder. This is the right thing to do.

Which is actually a very interesting thing about PRO. I cannot fault them for anything except the most important stuff, which is of course grading and authentication (and perhaps buy-back, since they apparently have none). They have the details down very well. The slabs are good, they are hard to open, and their service is good. They beat their return deadline, they didn't gouge me on shipping, they didn't wreck anything, and they packed the stuff well.

I think that both the Jeters are okay, or at least they are close enough to okay that I wouldn't fault PRO for slabbing them.

The only real problem is the grades the cards got. PRO figured out which was the better of the two and gave it a higher grade -- they gave the one that had been a BGS-8.0 a PRO-9.5, and the one that had been a BGS-7.X came back a PRO-9.0

You can take issue when them coming back a grade and a half higher than BGS graded them, but all PRO has to do is say, fine, we use a different scale. It's hard to fault them in an objective sense for grading these cards that high, since these would probably both be called mint by most of the card shops in the country, at least those that bother to assign grades.

The real problem is that a lot of inexperienced people insist upon taking all grading companies at par. Sometimes people see my professional grading web page after they've bought a PRO card, and they email me to ask if they got hosed. I go look at their eBay bidding history and it's obvious that they got enthusiastic and bid on a bunch of graded stuff as if all of the grading companies are the same. I did this when I started (I didn't do too bad because I bought SGC and CSA), and I bet a lot of people do this, and I bet that PRO and the people who use PRO both know full well that this is their niche market -- people who are new to the hobby and think that all of the professional grading companies are neutral, rather than being agents of the seller, which is what PRO in effect seems to be.

That is the real problem with PRO. The third-party grading idea is that the seller pays for grading, but both the buyer and the seller are supposed to benefit. PRO seems to have the seller's interests in mind first.

Buyer should understand this.

bruce