Greg Morris Overgrading
 

Bought a card advertised as NM-MT+ and SGC just gave it a 3.5

No bueno

All opinions.

What did you think of the card? Did you think it was NM-MT as well, and is that why you sent it in to SGC?

Calculated risk and it did not pan out.

Butch Turner

At least they didn't give it a 2.5!

.

Clearly you and the grader at Greg Morris must have missed a small wrinkle.

I bet Greg’s grade is closer to reality than SGCs.

That stinks, but maybe there's a gold sticker in your card's future.

let's see scans

Greg is very sensitive about his grading. Several years ago, I made a very mild
comment about one card I thought was a bit overgraded. Since then I have been banned from bidding on his site, which is a shame because I think he runs a clean operation and brings some nice raw cards to the market. I hope one day he will reinstate me.

Morris
 

How dare you question him !!

Let's hope FedEx doesn't ban you.

It happens. As posted some time ago, I had a gorgeous card that SGC weirdly graded a 4, resubmitted to PSA and it received a 9.

Then it gets personal.

Yes. And nothing but opinions. Not that it's at all rare for dealers to overgrade what they're selling anyway.

Precisely. Your opinion of your own cards is the only one that should count to you.

Indeed! Why did you need SGC's opinion? In fact why did you pay money you could have spent elsewhere for their opinion?

:confused:

Why bother to give him any further business if he's been a jerk to you? There are countless other dealers running clean operations who bring some nice raw cards to the market.

Incidentally, does Greg Morris post here? I wonder what his take here would be?

:confused:

Have you contacted Greg? Would seem an appropriate thing to do before complaining about his grading.

And/or a link to the listing

He tends to have pretty great scans on his auctions doesn't he?

"Pretty great" of course being only an opinion...

Yeah I think when you're bidding on his stuff listed as NM/MT or better, you really need to eyeball the scans carefully and come to your own conclusions. Of course even the best of photos sometimes fail to illustrate a bubble or other small surface inconsistency, so sometimes that is easier said than done.

Imagine what it was like pre-internet, hahahaha.

[QUOTE=Balticfox;2544047]Why bother to give him any further business if he's been a jerk to you? There are countless other dealers running clean operations who bring some nice raw cards to the market.

Incidentally, does Greg Morris post here? I wonder what his take here would be?

:confused:[/QU

Probably because I had some great, profitable deals with him before I was shown the door. And I wouldn't call Greg a jerk, just sensitive about his grading.

I haven’t boughten off him in a few years as I purchased a raw 1955 Topps Sandy Amoros RC advertised as ex or ex + and I picked it up for around $15. No biggie, but in hand it was clearly trimmed and bad. I mean how can you label it something like this. I guess on the same token the people he has working for him after looking at 10,000 or so cards a day or every few days are bound to let one slip or the inexperience of the worker perhaps.

Scans added

Snap it and try it again, never know.

My buddy bought this card raw at the National, graded first time, snapped it and sent it back to SGC for a second time. See next post for that result

Nice card!

:cool:

Pity it's entombed in a plastic slab though.

:(

I was going to say paper loss to the left of "LIFE," but a search shows that strip of white appears there regularly.

see here

Looks like you got a nice looking card for a nice price, why you would pay for an opinion on a $8 + tax card is beyond my scope of knowledge, except for your hope that you bought a lottery ticket, I suppose. What did the opinion cost you "all in"?

Doug "quitcherbitchin" Goodman



PS - you're big mistake was not buying the already opinioned 10 a week earlier (I can't get the link to work).

Did you see anything when you had the card in hand that would make you think SGC was right and Greg Morris was wrong?

That's a crazy nice 3.5.

Staring at the scans on the screen definitely makes this card seem like it should grade higher than 3.5.

But then again, it's always dangerous to try to grade cards based on scans on a screen, and there could always be stuff that isn't showing up in the scans.

Or maybe you just got the grader of death, and a little crack and resubmit will get you a more appropriate grade, assuming you can dodge that bullet the next time around.

Thanks for adding the pics Brian. The front looks Great the reverse has some noticeable toning. Looks like GM and SGC we’re a bit overzealous in opposite directions.
Searching eBay GM has sold a bunch of these recently including already graded PSA 7 - This day and age probably best to go after one’s already graded.

Am I the only one seeing the discoloration on the back? I think 2.5 is Harsh, but this card is visibly not "NM-MT+"

Just mentioned it in the post before yours - 5.5 would seem like a fair grade , of course TPGs being Inconsistent is an understatement

Definitely missed that, was honesty distracted by the photo! Agreed on the grade - definitely somewhere in "EX Land"

On my computer screen, it appears the back has uneven "blotches" of discoloration. It looks like dots spread out in a somewhat random pattern.

To my eye, it seems the back of that card has something known as "foxing" on it. That's a term very common to collectors of vintage comic books. Unfortunately, it's a form of mold.

If this is the case, I agree with the low "technical" grade of the card.

If I'm wrong, and the card is not speckled with spots, I apologize.

The back with some simple iPhone photo enhancements

Brilliance, exposure, brightness, contrast, etc. turned up slightly

https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...6f62470106.jpg

Come on guys, let's address the opinion elephant in the room :

That card is cheaper to buy graded than to get graded, unless you've got a registry hard-on.

Everyone collects differently man, don't yuk on his yum!

It was sent to SGC so doesn't seem to be for the registry.

I'm just saying he was hoping to buy a lottery ticket, not a card.

Nothing wrong with that, I hope he finds a $3 card that he later sells for a zillion dollars, but don't come on here to bad mouth a seller based on a single common and cheap card that he obviously thought it was a quality card himself after receiving it, or he wouldn't have sent it in for an opinion.

If he's going to call out a seller in a thread, maybe he should have titled the thread "Greg Morris & Butchie T Overgrading"

I too am bewildered.

:confused:

Not hard to believe.

Always consider the source:

Graders today have no context with which to grade fairly. For example, my client’s brother in law is a PSA grader. He is 29 years old, has worked at PSA for six years, and makes $65k per year! He is not a collector, and to him, it’s just a job! His entire experience with sports cards spans a total of just six years! LoL.

Ladies and gents; these are the backgrounds of some of the graders grading your cards!

I personally love those inexperienced graders at PSA. Maybe I am just lucky but I have had WAY more cards highly over graded than under graded by them. I highly doubt i am the only one who has got over graded cards back but people posting about that are few and far between. Way more fun to complain.:D

Luckily SGC would never employ such naïfs!

And he's probably at this point one of the better, most experienced ones. This is one of the astonishing aspects of PSA's success and market domination, that in almost every instance we have NO idea who is grading the cards or their qualifications. It doesn't even matter. All that matters is the flip.

You beat me to it... He is probably considered one of PSA's "seasoned pros".

Truth! Yet people continue sending their cards and money to PSA.

:rolleyes:

It's the same on the autograph end of things. There are now so many "authenticators" working for the companies. Insofar as vintage autographed baseball material is concerned, I can count on one hand the number of people who have TPA industry experience with whom I can have a learned conversation on the subject. I certainly don't claim to know each and every person in the industry these days, but nobody has ever approached me with "This guy really knows the material!" regarding anyone I haven't met. Never once in almost 20 years. If the field is indeed rife with experts, occasional praise such as this should be par for the course.

How often is it that the knowledge of the submitter exceeds that of the person examining an item? I'd surmise this happens far more frequently than it should.

I'd venture to say perhaps SGC (which seems to have adopted PSA grading as of late) missed more of the mark than Greg Morris did .... I'm pretty much done with even caring about grades anymore, as it is all BS nowadays

Heck yes! And just be glad you don't get to pay even more.

Shane Dale posted a 25 card test and posted the results in a YouTube vid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7YDVE30TVc

TLDW summary - GM was pretty accurate overall.

Sadly, this seems to be the case increasingly more often as of late.

That grader sounds qualified to me. If he's been looking at 1000 cards a day for 6 years, he ought to be pretty good at it by now.

Sent from my SM-S906U using Tapatalk

That's really Baaaaaaaad

A 29 year old grader making just $65K and living in a HIGH cost world is not going to buck the system; they do what they are told. But consider a 58 year old veteran like myself who has been collecting since 1976. There is no way on God’s green earth that I will sacrifice my common sense and knowledge of historical grading standards and assign a grade of 5 to what should be a Near Mint 7 card! I bet Greg Morris falls into the latter category. We know better!!!

Agreed. If some of you guys would kindly stop sending your grading submissions in to PSA, maybe we can all get our orders back in under three months. Now wouldn’t that be nice……

BTW wish I was making ONLY $65K when I was 29 years old. More like $32K if I was lucky.

SGC not much better - You've probably seen my rant (a month or so back) where I sent a dozen or so 1955s to SGC - FULLY EXPECTING ALL 5s & 6s - what came back was a crap load of 3s & 4s.

So yea - I am OUT OF THE GRADING GAME for the foreseeable future. I called SGC and was told that - "Yea we can look at them again BUT it will cost you another full Grading Fee" again.

Color me disgusted - been looking at baseball cards and graded baseball cards for nearly 50 years and it appears (to me) that the $Money Grab$ is on full display ATM.

Piggyback on what Lonnie and Greg kind of mention .
A seller sells a raw pack fresh 56 Topps That has a rough cut calling it near mint,
Buyer sends it to PSA and it gets a four, suddenly the seller is called out for over grading - it’s unfortunate most of the collecting world considers PSA the iron clad end all judge of what a grade is

Or was PSA so inaccurate as everybody on here claims and the cards were not really NM/M or better?

If you think Greg Morris' graders are very accurate and on a supposedly random lot of 25 cards, PSA was at 88% agreement with GM, that should mean they are also very accurate.

Clearly, the Miscut card was mis-graded by GM so I would say based on this small sample, PSA is very good at grading cards IF GM is also very good.

People.. you have to realize.. they list SO MANY CARDS. You can't expect them to look over a card the way PSA does. They take a quick look and give a guess of a grade. If you expect every card to come back as advertised I think you're being unreasonable, sorry. 9 times out 10 a card that presents like that will come back a way higher grade and you can't expect them to see every miniscule flaw. Overall I've been happy with my purchases from Greg Morris.

Even the most highly respected raw graders miss things occasionally. This combined with the inherent subjectivity in equating eye appeal to technical standards means that the longer you do this, the more anomalies you are apt to see pop out. Stories of cards that got a 2 getting cracked out and coming back a 7 are increasingly common.

I don’t hate graded cards, but increasingly as I get older - how the card looks to me and whether or not I’m happy with it in my PC far outweighs what a grader or anyone else might have to say about it. I would be perfectly happy most of the time buying raw from someone like Greg Morris who provides clear scans and where the reasoning behind their grade basically matches up to what you can see before you pull the trigger. Are they going to be 100% perfect 100% of the time? No, of course not. But neither is anyone else - including PSA, SGC, Beckett, and others who are supposedly "experts."


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Er....:D

It seems to me that most of the complaints in this thread are about PSA/SGC undergrading cards. My complaint is just the opposite. The grading companies don't seem to penalize for toning and thus way overgrade badly toned/tanned/browned cards.

:(

I think you are giving PSA way too much credit as to the time spent looking at each card. I doubt very seriously on 1960's commons they are looking at the card for more than 15-20 seconds. My guess is GM graders spend that much time on each card as well. Of course, on high dollar star cards both probably spend a little more time due to possible highly graded values, but for the kind of cards in this 25 lot sample, likely not much time was spent by either and for the most part they came to the same conclusions.

I'd like to meet the Grader of Death just to see just how tough he is.

I disagree. Using their published numbers of opinions sold, the opinion sellers spend no more time looking at a card than an ebay seller.

If you want to come over here, I can't introduce you... but I can show you a lot of his "work". ;)

This.

I have been told on numerous occasion that 15-20 seconds is pretty standard for common cards like these. Probably very similar to the time GM spends evaluating them.

I think it’s definitely closer to NM than a 3.5, but that’s why it’s an opinion. SGC in my belief is tighter on print flaws. I think they might have been extra anal on the inking flaw on yours as this is not a reoccurring issue and just a print flaw.

I'm just a broken down old collector trying to piece ungraded sets together. I've purchased thousands of raw cards from GM over the past 12 years. Yet even though I don't particularly care for graded cards I am competing against bidders who think a card is under graded, who are then going to send off the card to be graded. They drive the price up. I have accepted this for star cards and rookies but for a low number 1960 common? jeez.

Ok, my point is they are not a grading company, they are a seller selling thousands and thousands of cards.

When you receive a card, look it over. They have a very "no questions asked" return policy. If you go at their word and submit to a grading company without looking a card over, that's on you. And along those lines, if you look a card over and agree with their grade, submit, and are then disappointed with the grade, again, that's on you.

Good point

I agree with your point so much that I previously said pretty much the same thing :

Well stated… Same here.

NM

My experience was buying a B18 poorly imaged against black so you couldn't see the brown borders, with a See image for condition (which I also find both lazy and irritating) . It was W. Johnson so it was 150.00 to 200.00. I got it and will admit GMC is nice about returns and even pays for returns. I wrote twice saying the item had 4 tack holes and Im sure they must not have known or what have disclosed. They relisted the item without disclosing the tack holes. I wrote again still no reply but because I complained they banned me (I could care less). I reported them to ebay. This type of "we will mislead you but we take returns" is bad news and I reported them to ebay. As we all know ebay allows anything from big sellers so the report wouldn't matter. I think anyone should buy from who they like but they are a crappy seller in my opinion

I get to posts later than most . Anything with reference to grading becomes only about grading, sgc, psa, a topic that has been covered quite a bit, but I will chirp in.....Boy has grading gotten tougher. Im sure many miss the old SGC 5 T206's with rounded corners