The Grading Pyramid

Grading is a pyramid. At the top, you have the 10s. 10 means perfection and thus all 10s will be identical. As you go down the pyramid, grades are set for a variety of reasons -- 9s almost all look the same, but 3s, 2s and 1s have a huge number of potential flaws, including paper loss on reverse, creasing, corner wear, etc. What makes a card an SGC 30 could be a variety of factors that tell you nothing about the eye appeal of the card without looking at it.

Professional grading is not designed to reflect eye appeal. It is designed to point out flaws, often hard to see or hidden, in a piece of card board. When you see a clean-looking SGC 30, you actually know there are a lot of hard to see flaws. When you see a badgered up SGC 30, what you see is what you get. But not all SGC 30s will look alike -- in fact, at that level of the "pyramid" you will have a lot of different looking cards.

This becomes problematic when sellers try to sell a PSA 2 for what a previous PSA 2 sold for. Without comparing both cards, going by the number alone gets you nowhere because what you don't know about the previous card is whether the damage was similar or whether the eye-appeal was comparable. Sometimes you can get a pretty good deal on a nice looking 2 when a seller is willing to use a previous ugly 2 as a comparable. This is why they say, "Buy the card, not the holder."

Picked up another Marquard a coupla weeks ago. Here's my current collection of signed T206 Marquards. Sometimes people will ask me how rare these really are, and I say, "Well, if I've got 8 of them, how rare can they really be? How many more must be out there?" Heck, I've owned maybe a half dozen other signed T206 Marquards that aren't even among this 8!

Anyway, here they are....

Share Your Collection!!

If you're going to keep special cards under lock and key for a generation, you owe it to the collecting public to at least let them breathe online. Collectors of pre-war cards are only holding our cards in a sort of collective public trust. Sharing cards not only increases personal enjoyment, but it inspires collections. People complain that kids today don't collect baseball cards. Today's collectors share responsibility for passing on the enjoyment to the next generation. Not only does this make sense economically when you go to sell, but it makes at least me feel better when I realize I can't take these with me. Moreover, sharing cards on my website has brought so many collectors to my attention, including like-minded folk with similar collecting interestes.

In short, share your images!

"The Unauthenticatables"

My endless pursuit of autographed T206 cards often forces me to buy cards that have not been authenticated. Frequently, a signature is convincing, even though I am unable to find any examples of the signature against which to compare it. And the seller isn't making forgeries, he's just selling a card that has definitely been signed by someone -- perhaps even the player himself. The problem is, not only can't I find an exemplar -- neither can PSA/DNA or JSA. In fact, the sad truth is, some signatures are so obscure that even if they were genuine, the experts can't confirm it or deny it. They can only tell you the factors that suggest it could be real, and the reasons they think it might be fake.

The three examples below fall into this category. I absolutely love the Frank Smith, which has been artfully signed in white by someone with a smooth hand. James Spence took a picture for his files, but had nothing against which to compare it. Maybe one day, an identifying exemplar of Smith's will turn up and uncover whether this is the genuine article or not.

The McElveen is an ugly card with an interesting signature. It doesn't have the traditional hallmarks of a fake, as it is small and unassuming. However, given that McElveen died in 1951, this gave McElveen precious few years to sign T206 cards in ballpoint - as this one was - since ballpoint pens only came into vogue shortly after World War II. PSA/DNA found the signature to have questionable authenticity, and JSA couldn't authenticate it either. The reason? Again, nothing against which to compare it.

Finally, good old Gus Dorner. This one is pretty clearly just an identifying mark of a collector, who wanted for some reason to put the player's full name on the back of his card in pencil. However, if it were real, we wouldn't be able to authenticate it -- this is a Minor League card of a player who played sporadically in the Majors only through 1909. Again, no exemplars available.

So what do you do when you come across signed cards that can't be authenticated by anyone? If a player signed few autographs during his lifetime, that makes them rare -- and valuable, but only if the signature can be confirmed as real. Ironically, the rarer the signature, the less valuable it can become. If there's only one -- and there were no witnesses -- then how do you know it is real at all?

The Ultimate Signed Pre-War Card

For the past decade or so, my mother always gets me the Cooperstown Calendar (among other things) as a Christmas present. Imagine my shock and awe when I looked at March and saw an autographed 1933 Goudey Lajoie in the display. This has got to be the ultimate autographed pre-war auto -- beatable only by a signed T206 Wagner or T206 Plank. Obviously, it is hidden away from all collectors -- totally unobtainable -- and I would bet there is not another. How many collections are incomplete without this one? Autographed pre-war card collections? Signed HOF card collections? Lajoie collections? Simply an amazing card.