What I Don't Understand about Baseball Card Economics

[glchen]

Originally Posted by barrysloate

Hi Gary,
So here is something that still troubles me. If the hobby has reached the point where the slightly altered cards are almost impossible to distinguish from the unaltered ones, then what use does the hobby have for third party graders? We pay them a lot of money to make determinations that many of us don't feel qualified to make ourselves. But it appears that as graders and authenticators they are no more skilled than we are.

So it's starting to look like (and truth be told it's been going on for a long time), all of these machinations are reduced down to one thing: getting the number we want on the slab. The whole hobby is really about that number.

Sorry folks, but it's a sad state of affairs. And I don't like it one bit.

Barry, I think there are a couple of categories of collectors here. First is the type that is on this board (and similar ones like blowout) who try to understand as much as possible about cards, including grading, alterations, shilling, etc. These folks can usually do a better job authenticating and grading cards than the TPG's can. Then there are the folks who just like to collect/invest in cards, and don't care about the other stuff. They know TPG's make mistakes, but don't care because they trust they can still do a better job than they can. For example, I'm not much of a handyman. If something breaks, I look on yelp for a service person with good reviews, and hire that person to fix that thing the broke. I could do the research myself on how to fix that thing, and learn how to fix it, so that I can save money and do it myself in the future. I'm just not interested in that stuff, and don't trust that I can fix it better than someone who does it for a living.


For people in the latter camp, I think that TPG's are still useful and better than them. And the other part of TPG's is the safety factor. Some people may not care about the grade actually, but just want the card holdered because it's less prone to being damaged that way. Or if they left the cards to a loved one in their will, that person will know those cards are worth something rather than 80s junk. So although I completely agree when the cards are really valuable, it's buyer beware for what's on the flip, I think that there are other things useful for TPGs rather than to just filtering out these frauds which are getting harder and harder to do.

[barrysloate]

I've said this before and will repeat: I have no problem with a company that examines cards for alterations, and then assigns them an unbiased grade. The problem is the ones we have must do a much, much better job than they are now. They have to figure out a better way to catch these cards being submitted by card doctors. If not, then I have no faith in the product. End of story.