Global Authentics Timeline

[collectbaseball]

I'm generally more confident buying things without certification than ones that comes with GAI.

[drc]

I believe GAI was started in the very early 2000s, when the head of grading for PSA left and started his own card grading company. It was primarily a trading card grader, but soon added autograph and game used units.

The company has indeed taken a serpentine route since then, with authenticators and units coming and going, its reputation going downhill. The original authenticators long gone. The original pack grader had to quit when his house burned down. There have even been multiple companies holding the same acronym.

[shelly]

That was Steve Rocchi. I dont ever remember Mike being part of them. I could be wrong because he has been with so many company's

[RichardSimon]

I don't remember Mike as part of Global either.

[drc]

Well, he was. I used to bid in his auctions, followed the companies he worked for and have had GAI LOA's with his endorsement. He was even with MastroNet (as they were called at one time) with Steve Grad before he was with GAI. The full 8x11 GAI LOAs from when Gutierrez was there will have his name on it and are from circa 2001-2005 (I don't have exact years on the tip of my brain), so you can identify a GAI autograph from when he was there.

As I said, early on GAI had some big name people (Bushing & Knoll were the top game used experts at the time, Mark Murphy was the top unopened pack expert), and was considered a very resectable company. It's in recent years that they had their all their issues. Bushing & Knoll left after a couple of years early on too.

GAI was big news and closely followed by baseball card collectors when it started (including on Net54 and the PSA board), as it was started by ex PSA guys and was supposed to be the new competition with SGC and PSA. The card grading started out okay-- was respectably respectable the first couple of years --, but fizzled out in price and perceived quality and had its issues over the years too. Baseball card graders will also sometimes comment that cards graded by GAI early on (with a different style and color label) were different/better than in recent years. I don't believe card graders take any recently graded 'GAI' or 'Global' graded cards with any seriousness. As I mentioned earlier, in recent years GAI appeared to be have sold parts of the company, at least its name and/or acronym and/or variations on its name, to different entities and it all became a bit of an alphabet soup mess at some point and most baseball card collectors lost interest in even trying to figure it out.

[travrosty]

MG was with global for awhile, maybe the only guy to be part of all 3. global, psa, jsa.

[VintageGamerN00b]

This is all great info. It seems like it's impossible to date or trust any GAI stickers because they're so easily removed from the pieces anyways, but it's certainly an interesting display of how nebulous some of these companies' histories are.