Slabs would be more attractive to me if

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Posted By: Al C.risafulli

I'm not sure that these suggestions make much practical business sense, and I'm not sure that if they were implemented, they'd win over the anti-grading crowd anyway.

David's right. People spend enough time debating the differences between a 2 and a 3. Can you imagine the nightmares over arguing the merits of a 67 vs. a 65?

There are always going to be people who choose not to embrace the concept of grading. That's fine; I understand many of the sentiments. But the fact remains that grading services have encapsulated millions of cards, and will continue to grow. They've got to be doing SOMETHING right.

Gil, what you're asking in your first post IS too much to ask. Even if a grading company went through the enormous amounts of R&D money that would be required to retool all their molds and use a plastic that would make their slabs A) impervious to UV light, B) impervious to acidic air pollutants, C) watertight, D) immune to changes in outside atmospheric conditions, and E) impossible to be cracked out, can you imagine the liability issues? Let's say SGC made such a thing, and you put your T206 Wagner in it, and then put it in a display case on your front lawn. What happens it the card fades a little? Or if, for a goof, you toss it in the ocean, only to find that it wasn't properly sealed due to human error, and now your Wagner is ruined?

I can't even imagine what it would take to find out whether your slab is impervious to acidic air pollutants. To me, it sounds like you'd have to find out the chemical composition of the air in all different parts of the country and all different altitudes. Then you'd have to actually MAKE some slabs, and slab every type of baseball card there is, using every type of ink and every type of paper. Then you'd have to come up with some way to do accelerated life testing using all the paper/ink combos and all the chemical/altitude combos, and artificially age the slabs - how long? 100 years? 200?

Plus, I could just hear the comments. "These people expect me to pay $275 to have my 1960 Don Mossi card protected from the sunlight? I've got ALL my Don Mossi cards in a shoebox in my basement! What do I care from sun?! Plus, when they're in those space-age, alloy tombs, you can't smell them!"

These companies are CARD GRADING COMPANIES, not defense contractors. Their job is to make an assessment of authenticity and condition, and then encapsulate the card in such a way that it is reasonably well-protected from tampering. They do that nicely. Sure, they make mistakes sometimes, but so do I.

-Al