It is quite easy to voice your dissatisfaction with current grading standards,

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Posted By: Frank Wakefield

Well for starters, to say that everything is "mint" until it reaches the public or the consumer is something with which I cannot agree. A card can leave the printing process with a ding or a scrape.

I really hate the slabs. I've come around to somewhat being glad that slabbed stuff is out there for sale, because it gives the slab-heads something to buy so they stay away from the unslabbed stuff. That keeps slab-heads from driving up the price of raw cards. I will conceed that a good aspect of buying a slabbed card is that one has a higher expectation of the card being genuine. I've bought a few slabbed cards, and I've broken out almost every one of them. Those little guys commited no crime, they don't deserve a prison. I like to be able to hold the rascals. And those holders are WAY TOO big for storage.

I'd like to get the formula for KL93, I think that was the "stronger than steel" plastic that the Army used to encase Gort in The Day The Earth Stood Still. Make some BIG slabs. That would protect those cards.

Warshawlaw has it about right. Read his comments again, so it will sink in. Sometimes (there, I've qualified it to lessen the offensiveness) wannabe collectors take comfort in buying slabbed cards when they lack the knowledge and skill to ascertain the authenticity of a card themselves. It is like they collect the slabs, not the cards. And it seems that these "collectors" know virtually nothing about the history of the game.

To me, the little pieces of cardboard represent little pieces of history. And having one is a way to hold history. Some of my favorite cards aren't the ones with the best resale potential. I like the cards for who the players were, not for dollars in a price guide or quantities in a population report.

Baseball is not a game. Baseball is not even a season. It is a continuum. It passes along through the generations. In the 60s I listened to baseball games on the radio because my Dad did. He took me to some ball games. He played ball with me and my little brother in the back yard. Dad had listened to ball games via radio with his father in the late 30s and 40s. He'd gone to some nearby minor league games. And I don't know how my grandfather got interested, but I have to figure some adult relative took him to a game at the turn of the century. After attending a couple of hundred ML games and half a dozen WS games, I finally saw a no hit game in Arizona, Jose Jimenez beat Randy Johnson, 1-0, June 25, 1999. The Cards barely got a run off of Johnson in the top of the 9th, I believe on a broken bat single. Johnson struck out 14. My twin daughters were with me, seeing their second game ever. And the significance of a no-hitter is still lost on them. A couple of years later I handed the ticket stub to Jose before a game in St. Louis, he was in a Rockies uniform then. Several players were signing, I focused on him and walked along the left field line with him, he noticed, maybe because I had a sign for him. When it was my turn to hand him an item, I held out a ticket stub from his no-hitter, he looked at it, smiled, and then took a program from a kid. We talked for 5 minutes, him holding the stub, and signing other stuff. At first I thought he might not sign it. But then I realized that he was reliving the moment, and all around us were hearing about his no-hitter. It was the last thing he signed that day, and he returned it to me with a huge, grateful smile. Baseball transcends the generations. The little pieces of cardboard can be passed along, with memories and recollections. Or they can be antiseptically slabbed and viewed as a commodity.