What's the deal with paper cut-outs for sale?

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Posted By: Gary B.

In searching for pre-war cards on ebay, I come across a lot of paper cut-outs from Spalding, Reach, Whitman, etc. with off-center text on the back that are graded and sell for what to me seems like outrageous amounts of money? What's the deal with these? It seems many grading companies (psa at least) won't touch these. What's the appeal of these? They're not even cards. Do people really want magazine or newspaper cut-outs of old baseball players for $50 or $100 or more? As far as I'm concerned, they're just more items I have to sort through (including the annoying reprints) to look for the good stuff. I don't get it...

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Posted By: bcornell

Gary-

"Cut-outs" are a minor plague in the graded card categories. There have been a lot of threads on the forum about this - the best simple explanation is Scott Forrest's here. Searching on "Roy Huff" or "AAA" will yield a bunch of others.

Bill

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Posted By: Aaron M.

This is one of the various scams on E-Bay. A novice (or just plain dumb) collector sees these and thinks that they are cards, exhibits, premiums, whatever, but not a piece of paper cut out of the magazine. The dealer (I think it's just one guy operating out of Hawaii with three different user names) even created his own "grading service" to help fool the novice (he basically just puts the cut-outs in a plastic card case you can buy at your local card store for an hour and then smacks a sticker on it--he even assigns it a "card number" which is really just the page number it was cut out from).

These are, of course, worthless.

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Posted By: runscott

Aaron's correct - most of the "high feedback" sellers of this stuff ARE Roy Hoff operating under several i.d.'s (including "Vintagesportspro"), in an attempt to give the items legitimacy. He sells the less desirable cut out pages, in their entirety, as "PSA10GEMCARDS".