An experiment with PRO

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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