Anyone who wonders what Evan Mathis is up to...

[Snowman]

Originally Posted by Exhibitman

It was (is?) possible to get a ten out of the pack or set. I’ve had several of them over the years. Much as I dislike grading I can’t be so cynical as to say that every ten is doctored, at least not in the post 1980 arena.

It used to be possible. I would argue that it no longer is (or that it's nearly impossible rather, and that any 10 you might be lucky enough to get would almost certainly not regrade as a 10 again if cracked and resubmitted). Surely, there's a turning point where card manufacturing eventually rose to a level where they were capable of producing gem mint cards, and if you get some nice pack-fresh cards from those years, you can still get gem mint grades (as you said, post 1980ish - with a few exceptions like the Rickey Henderson RC). But for pre-war and the early Topps stuff, pretty much everything from the 50s and 60s, they just didn't make truly gem mint cards. You'd have to grade those on a curve to give them a 10. PSA used to do this. They used to give 9s and 10s to really nice-looking cards with flaws in the early days, but they no longer do. Every card has edge defects and corners that aren't perfectly sharp. Nowadays, the only way to get a "perfect" card is to "improve" one. PSA sees so many trimmed cards that they now think those are legit pack-pulled cards. And they've become the new standard by which all other cards are now measured against.

PSA has simply moved the goalposts too far from where they used to be. They had moved it by about a full grade prior to the pandemic when compared to the early days, and have moved it another full grade since then (give or take). If you haven't been submitting vintage cards for grading in the past year or two, then you may not have recognized it. But cards that used to be graded as 6s and even 7s are currently being put into 4 and 5 holders with extreme regularity. You can occasionally still get a fair grader, but on average, it's really gotten bad there. The correlation between grade distributions for each card and what year they were submitted is extremely high.

I've graded thousands of vintage cards over the past few years, and I keep meticulous records. Grading today is just a vastly different landscape than it used to be.