Which planet do they mean?

[slidekellyslide]

Heh. "other industry leaders"....that should include Mark Rucker who probably knows more about 19th century baseball photographs than anyone. He owns Transcendental Graphics...IOW he owns one of these images. In the future Goodwin should check with Mark before making a claim like that.

[Peter_Spaeth]

http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=82042

[barrysloate]

Dan- I'm pretty sure Mark doesn't own the cabinet. He keeps images of everything he can find, as that is his business. But he sold off most of his original material a long time ago.

Isn't there an image of this in that mid-1980's National Pastime? I can check mine shortly and see.

NO, it's not in the NP.

[oldjudge]

A few points:

1-To say any photographic image is unique is ridiculous. It may be very rare, but you can never say with certainty that there is no other one out there. Is this image rare--yes.

2-The cabinet that is shown above is not the same as Goodwin's cabinet, which is an identified Sweeny cabinet. Same image--different cabinet.

3-Is the buyer unhappy with the purchase--No, I bought it and am extremely pleased to have gotten it.

[barrysloate]

Jay- do you see those people sitting above the grandstand? Are those luxury boxes?

[oldjudge]

That's Steinbrenner's great grandfather's box

[barrysloate]

Ah yes...Ebenezer Steinbrenner!

[bmarlowe1]

So, I think Jay is saying that when Goodwin calls it an "unprecedented cardboard memento" - they are right because the other known "momento" is not a Sweeney.

I'll defer to Jay's considerable expertise in that area, but it seems that mention of the non-Sweeny "momento" in the description would have been more - I don't know - transparent. Even if the final price was acceptable, this may have affected the bidding.

[oldjudge]

Mark--I agree with what you are saying about the write-up. This is not a problem with only Goodwin however; the hype is pervasive in almost every catalog. I'm simply saying that I just ignore the hype and look at the item. Could it have affected the bidding, maybe, but probably not much if at all.

The practice that annoys me the most is, when examining the rarity of vintage cards, auction houses quote how many have been graded by SGC and PSA. This is truely meaningless. Most of the great Old Judge collections, as an example, have very few of their cards graded. Being the highest graded Old Judge is being the big fish in a very small pond. The result that I thought was really crazy in the Goodwin auction last night was the N172 Galvin PSA5 going for $9,400. That is not a particularily scarce card and, even though not graded, there are certainly better copies out there.

While I'm at it, another practice that gets to me is lot descriptions that seem to be judged on how many flowery phrases can be jammed in to each paragraph. A one sentence example from the upcoming Legendary Auction's description of the restore-reversed Wagner is shown below (not trying to pick on Legendary--I could have found examples in virtually any current catalog):

"A conservator’s earnest attempt to bring back the card’s signs of aging resulted in the sight one sees, today, when viewing it. "

[barrysloate]

Jay- if I graded that sentence with my English teacher's cap on, I would request a rewrite. For some reason they feel convoluted sentences enhance a piece's importance.