Quote:
Originally Posted by steve B
That's exactly the point. A card prone to some small defect won't grade 9 or 10.
And with the production process there are at least two places where a card can get slightly messed up for all or most of the run.
It's not just sheet position, it's how the card is positioned on the sheet, or on the camera ready art. Topps wouldn't notice a small difference in spacing between cards, like if it was half a mm off to one side or another. But once cut, that small difference will make centering less than perfect on every example of that card unless it's miscut just right.
The cutting and packing processes have a lot of their own hazards. Henderson can be on top of a cello, and there's one spot it can get tweaked just enough to put it out of being a 10.
I'm not seeing any real benefit to PSA to control grades. And even with some benefit, like more being sent in, there are still a lot of reason to think they don't do that.
Like... every grader would have to know not to grade certain cards higher than an 8 or 9. If that was really the case..
The graders who can't spot alterations would have to have a list of don't grade high cards memorized -Not likely.
In close to 30 years, none of those graders, even disgruntled fired ones have ever said anything, not even by accident. Nobody has that level of silence anymore. Not without serious legal backup or the threat of violence. And even then... People talk.
Conspiracy theories are fun, but most are about as legit as bat boy hanging out on the UFO with Elvis.
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I feel like you might be under-appreciating PSA's interest in keeping low population counts in popular cards. And also over-appreciating what is necessary to keep those pops low. It's not something extremely nefarious they need to put in place. Just have management tell graders to scrutinize big vintage cards because 10s should be very rare, and/or require them to get approval by senior graders/managers before handing out 10s to major cards. I'm sure some type of oversight like that exists.