The Superiority of SGC
 

I just got notified by PWCC that one of my cards purchased from a PWCC auction last November, a 1948 Leaf Joe Dimaggio, was indeed an altered card, and that they wanted to issue me a refund so that they could take it out of circulation by turning it over to law enforcement. It was originally a PSA 3 (PQ), but just looked too sharp for the assigned grade, so I cracked it out and sent it to SGC. Unfortunately, it came back from SGC as an unholdered card that was deemed to have been trimmed. The card is now in the mail to PWCC so I can be refunded once they have verified that this was the card in question.

My point is this: With PSA's reputation as the most conservative grading company out there, I'm pretty sure that a sizable portion of those altered cards have gone this same route and have eventually ended up in the hands of SGC at some point, yet SGC has yet to be implicated in the slabgate scandal. While I'm sure they have allowed some conserved cards to pass through their process and receive a numerical grade, so far, it doesn't look like the trimmed or recolored cards are getting through like they have passed through those card sieves known as PSA and Beckett. The only conclusion that I can draw is that SGC has superior graders.

I don't think they are perfect but they are WAY better than the other 2 on cards.

Please update when/if PWCC(Pre War Card Conservators) actually refund your purchase price.

Too early to tell; SGC has a broken cert number checker which makes it difficult to recreate submissions from their website. Plus, they're likely the 2nd or 3rd choice for Moser to submit vintage cards, with #1 and #2 being PSA.

I'm surprised that PWCC is going to take your card back since you cracked it out of the PSA holder on your own.

I don't necessarily disagree with your conclusion, but a single example is not exactly a robust body of evidence.

Fear will make people do the damnedest things.

He doesn't say he told PWCC it was removed from the holder.

Some high ticket SGC is starting to show up on BO, by the way. E.g.
https://www.blowoutforums.com/showpo...postcount=2827

Posting cross-reference on SGC's superiority.

http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=270451

I agree with others, I would like to know if PWCC provides a refund since you cracked the card out of the PSA holder. I would not think they could turn over to law enforcement.


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Well, I did let them know about that. It will probably just take longer for me to get that refund since they will likely have to send it to PSA to ascertain that this is the one that was altered. The trimming is pretty hard to spot, for sure.

My only point is that I can't be the only one who has cracked an "undergraded" card out of a PSA holder and sent it to SGC for a second opinion. And there is a strong likelihood that quite a few of the altered PSA cards have already been sent to SGC by others as well, but we don't see scads of their cards showing up in the scandal.

Usually people send the card to the other grading company in the slab in order to get a second opinion. Usually people who want to make more money on their card crack it out and send it to the other grading company raw. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the PWCC refund on this one.

I think the OP was looking for a bump. Or he is misstating his reasoning for taking the card out of the PSA holder If someone thinks a card looks too sharp for the assigned grade, that sounds like he thinks that it's undergraded and has nothing to do with a concern whether it's altered or not. Unless there's some practice of undergrading altered cards that I am unaware of.

Peter, I never said that I thought the card was altered, and still can't tell even now, looking at the blown-up scans. If it has been trimmed, it's a pretty good job, I think. My sole reason for taking the card out of the holder was to get a better grade from SGC without causing them to be biased in any way due to the PSA grade. I still don't know how this could have been deemed a "3" by them. I fully expected at least a 5 or 6 from SGC.

OK I misread your post then, my mistake, and sorry about that.

For what it's worth, PSA graded it and SGC caught the trim.

It may not be worth much given the CJ Jackson and the Leaf Jackie and others that are coming out of the woodwork. At the end of the day, I don't think anyone is going to look great among the TPGs.

None of Moser's cards got by GAI.

You aren’t looking at his ‘55 Bowman’s

I believe he actually came on here to post after those were mentioned 10 plus years ago.

I don't believe either of those were trimmed. I think it's a lot tougher for a grader to spot cards which were cleaned than cards which were hacked to pieces, like all the cards that got past PSA and Beckett.

Perhaps so as a general matter, and maybe the scans/pics weren't true reflections of the cards, but the color on the Jackson looked quite off and the Jackie was too white, even without the before photos. The Jackson also had a crease taken out, or are we now excusing failure to catch those too?

We're not excusing anything. You claimed that SGC was as bad as PSA based on the Leaf Robinson and the CJ Jackson which both got by SGC. Ask any grader and they'll tell you that a card that is bleached is much tougher to spot than a card that is missing a border. Neither of the Robinson or Jackson were trimmed, just cleaned. Much harder to spot.

I used those as examples of what I thought was likely to be the conclusion at the end of the day when as many bad cards as can be identified from before and afters are on the table. But to your point, aren't we trusting and paying these TPGs to spot the difficult to find alterations as well as the easy ones?

Of course. But I think considering the circumstances we should make the best of an imperfect situation. And there really is no test which can discern whether a card is cleaned or not usually. Not surprisingly, therefore, most collectors aren't as offended by a cleaning as they are by a trim job. That PSA routinely can't spot the most obvious trimming and SGC seems to do much better in this area should be appreciated.

If toxic chemicals were used I'm not so sure about that. And again, a crease was also removed. But to find common ground here it's astounding that some of these trim jobs are getting past PSA, just tonight another series of mini Leafs have been identified.

From what I've been told the chemicals used to clean a card (peroxide, etc.) don't leave a smell.

And yeah, the trimming is insane that they aren't spotting. All those times when you look at a Heritage auction and see high graded cards that you think have funny borders? They're ALL trimmed. Not some -- all.

I started to wonder about high grade T206s back with the first sale of the Harris Collection. I haven't seen much since then that instilled a lot of confidence.

Plus any smell that is left after the cleaning is very easy to get rid of.

I was looking at 51 mantles today and it seemed the higher the grade and the more centered the more extra room there was in the holder. Weirdly the beaters filled the whole area in the slab way more often.

That recently uncovered bleached Ruth SGC graded is a beauty.

For a while, I felt since it was in a holder, it was good. The amount t of high grade cards that look trimmed always bothered me. I'm a small fish though, no body missing my revenue

As long as you leave it in the slab it is good.;)

If it bothers you please send it to me for safe keeping.:)

Ya...last night i scrutinized my 51 mantle...its graded 4...it measured but who knows??

Since per SgC I can get the grading fee refunded by sending them the flip, I'm going to crack them out. Brb

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What has worked best for me is one of those little 60-100X top lighted microscopes. Even in a slab trimmed cards stick out like a sore thumb with that much magnification.

If at home another trick I use is scan(1200dpi) the card front and back. Then put the scan on the big a$$ TVs we all seem to have. When the card is two and a half feet by 4 foot it is pretty easy to see most alterations.

Yep, either of those will show lots of interesting things.

I agree with Jeff 100%!
Cleaning, in general, is an accepted practice with most collectors so if one can't discern what products (no smell) were used to clean a card then how can a TPG not accept the card as real and give it a number grade?

Imo, comparing this to a trimmed card is not an apple to apple comparison. I believe most would accept a card that has been soaked but fully reject a card that has been trimmed and/or recolored.
Having before and after photos when purchasing is not an option for most collectors so even if a card looks a little faded or doesn't present the best, most collectors would just assume time and the sun got to it over the years.

Personally, and although they are not perfect, my grader of choice if and when the time comes will be SGC, which I have stated many times here.

Actually he was a huge submitter to gai. I suggest you research 1955 Bowman’s GAi and moser for one example. Oh I see Anthony beat me to it. Lol.

Dale, maybe you're confusing a soak in distilled water with a chemical bath with a bleaching agent. One is reasonably well accepted, the other is not. Moser is doing the latter, along with a whole host of other alterations.
As to whether the TPGs should catch them, they all claim to be able to, and that's why they charge up to $5,000 per card to authenticate, detect alterations, and grade cards. The fact that they're either not using the proper techniques to detect alterations or they're unable to detect them at all, they promise that they can.
They should either do their jobs properly or stop lying to their customers.

I agree, John, but like I wrote above, if there is no discernible way to detect if it was bleach, peroxide or water, how does a TPG not grade those cards?

I am unsure if the technology exists or not but if the TPG's don't have the technololgy that can detect bleach or peroxide, and the smell test doesn't work, then how can they not grade those cards? :confused:

I have never sent a card in for grading nor have I ever soaked a card but I couldn't imagine having my cards sent back as ungradable because someone guessed that I had soaked them in bleach or peroxide.

Edit: Just read Peter's thread here on the SGC Joe Jackson card. Do detectable means exist for detecting bleach or peroxide and if so, is it safe to say they weren't utilized when this card was graded? https://www.blowoutforums.com/showpo...postcount=3297

That gets to be a complex subject. Most light colored cardstock that's wood based was bleached when it was made.
None of the traditional methods to detect bleach that I've heard of would be acceptable.
It *may* be possible to check with a spectrograph, but I haven't read of anyone doing it.

Bleaching is done sometimes in some actual conservation.
https://www.conservation-wiki.com/wiki/Bleaching_(PCC)
See the section on appropriateness, and section 2.6 on testing.

Note, none of that applies to some guy with a tray full of stuff from the grocery store....

SGC needs to fix their cert lookup. Most of what I have bought from PWCC are in SGC holders. Since I am indifferent between SGA and PSA I tend to get outbid on most of the PSA cards I try for. Without the cert lookup the super smart people putting together Moser submissions cannot uncover additional SGC cards that are likely suspect.

SGC certs have been random for at least a year anyhow, so even if they had a cert lookup there would be no way to recreate subs made since then.

Thanks Peter - was not aware of that. Still might uncover some older ones if they fixed it. Some of the submission runs published for PSA go back to 2017. However, would not help as much as I would have thought.

Of course it would help, as well as consignment houses like Greg Morris and painthistorian and others who have sold raw cards to Whitman111 over the years to upload those scans to a file sharing service for the blowout guys to have more photos for comparisons to identify even more tainted cards.

I just got an email from Betsy Huigens stating that they now have the card in-house, and that my refund would be issued in my PayPal account on Monday.

Congrats on that!

I completely agree with the original statement about SGC being head and shoulders above. Last year, I bought a very nice 51 Bowman Football Norm Van Brocklin, PSA 5 on ebay. However, I wanted the holder to be uniform with my other SGC cards and sent it to SGC. Wasn't even looking for a bump. SGC sent it back with the Scarlett letter "A." I measured it and, you guessed it, came up just an eyelash short..trimmed. SGC caught it, PSA did not. Period.

They're amazing! : sample size 1
They can't tell autographs signed two years on T206s from ones signed when players were actually alive: sample size 12
They can't tell if $10k+ cards have been chemically bleached: sample size 3 and counting