Cards still being outed on Blowout -- PSA 9 Monte Irvin in the recent ML

ullmandds · #1 09-19-2023, 01:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Snowman

I would argue that your card hasn't actually lost any value. Perhaps it has lost value in your eyes, or in the eyes of a very small minority of collectors, but the card's true value is dictated by what the market thinks it's worth, not you. And the market has clearly shrugged at the trimming and alteration scandals, as did the FBI.

If you sell this at auction to someone else and tether a disclosure to it, you may appease your moral compass, but from an economics perspective, all you've done is given someone else the opportunity for arbitrage, because it is an absolute certainty that someone (and likely the very next owner) will just resell it without disclosure. In fact, the disclosure itself nearly ensures that the next owner would be someone looking to profit from the opportunity because they would simply just outbid anyone who was afraid or put off by the disclosure. The card, and it's value, will persist unless it is destroyed. And if the card were sent to PSA, they would likely not honor their grade guarantee. They would say, "nope, looks good!" just like they always go.

At the end of the day, selling with a disclosure attached accomplishes nothing. If you truly want to do the "right thing", then you need to either destroy the card, or crack it out and send it back to PSA raw with a note attached that says, "this card was recolored" and then eat the loss. But this model is unsustainable. The vast majority of high grade vintage cards have been tampered with in some way. You'd be removing a single grain of sand from the beach.

Coming to terms with the fact that the entire high grade vintage market (and even a sizeable percentage of both the lower grade vintage and the modern market) has been f*d with is something that we either just accept or we live in denial about, or are simply ignorant of altogether. How we reach proceed with that knowledge is up to us individually. It has certainly helped to shap my purchasing decisions. I almost never buy a key vintage card graded above a 6, and I look for eye appeal. Yet I still end up with altered cards regularly. If I like the card regardless, I keep it. If I don't, I just resell it. And I don't attach my opinions to the listing. If I think it's altered, I don't care. Because if I did, I might as well give up on this hobby because the number of altered cards out there is endless. I'm not going to take a loss after loss into perpetuity to ease my conscience and effectively just give someone else free money.

I personally believe that if this card were to be resold with disclosure...it would lose significant value. And the opinion/mindset that it doesn't matter...is quite detrimental to the hobby.

To each their own, right! If I were a newbee attempting to enter this hobby...with full disclosure of all the corruption/skechiness abound...I'd pick another hobby!

Leon · #2 09-19-2023, 01:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ullmandds

I personally believe that if this card were to be resold with disclosure...it would lose significant value. And the opinion/mindset that it doesn't matter...is quite detrimental to the hobby.

To each their own, right! If I were a newbee attempting to enter this hobby...with full disclosure of all the corruption/skechiness abound...I'd pick another hobby!

Pete. I agree with what you say.
But instead of telling them to pick another hobby, I would try to steer them in a different direction.

This card is 113 yrs old. None of us will look this good at 113. Nuff Ced! (from the BST yrs ago)
.

DocScoot · #3 09-19-2023, 01:50 PM

Thankfully my budget has me hunting low grade gems, generally can't afford anything vintage above a 1-2. I do find this thread fascinating. Some of those doctoring jobs I have to admit are pretty astonishing to me, seems to me there's some real skill involved there. It's the dishonesty that's the problem here, but for a psa bump from 5 to 9 meaning a $29,950 profit, it's no surprise this is happening.

All that said, it's interesting to me that the grading companies haven't starting offering something like "restored" as a qualifier to take some of the stigma off of "altered". I can see someone not from this world looking at this process as more like art restoration which is a rather common and accepted thing for really old and valuable artwork.

Peter_Spaeth · #4 09-19-2023, 02:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DocScoot

Thankfully my budget has me hunting low grade gems, generally can't afford anything vintage above a 1-2. I do find this thread fascinating. Some of those doctoring jobs I have to admit are pretty astonishing to me, seems to me there's some real skill involved there. It's the dishonesty that's the problem here, but for a psa bump from 5 to 9 meaning a $29,950 profit, it's no surprise this is happening.

All that said, it's interesting to me that the grading companies haven't starting offering something like "restored" as a qualifier to take some of the stigma off of "altered". I can see someone not from this world looking at this process as more like art restoration which is a rather common and accepted thing for really old and valuable artwork.

It's acceptable for art because each work is unique and over time the appearance can deteriorate meaning less enjoyment for people viewing it. No such rationale for 99 percent of the garbage being done to cards which is solely for deception and profit. Please don't elevate these scum to the level of art restorers.

DocScoot · #5 09-19-2023, 02:44 PM

I agree if it's done for dishonest means it's completely unacceptable, and what I'm seeing highlighted in this thread is truly flat out fraud that should be illegal. I'm not trying to elevate fraud. But to say only unique items are acceptable for restoration seems pretty close minded. What about old cars? Or old watches? I have no problem imaging that there could be a legitimate market for restored old baseball cards, and there seems to me to be some real skill involved. The trick is the buyer has to know what they're buying. Sadly that's not what's happening in the card market.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

It's acceptable for art because each work is unique and over time the appearance can deteriorate meaning less enjoyment for people viewing it. No such rationale for 99 percent of the garbage being done to cards which is solely for deception and profit. Please don't elevate these scum to the level of art restorers.

Peter_Spaeth · #6 09-19-2023, 02:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DocScoot

I agree if it's done for dishonest means it's completely unacceptable, and what I'm seeing highlighted in this thread is truly flat out fraud that should be illegal. I'm not trying to elevate fraud. But to say only unique items are acceptable for restoration seems pretty close minded. What about old cars? Or old watches? I have no problem imaging that there could be a legitimate market for restored old baseball cards, and there seems to me to be some real skill involved. The trick is the buyer has to know what they're buying. Sadly that's not what's happening in the card market, and it seems like the grading companies are largely complicit if not mostly to blame.

Sure, if it's fully disclosed and there is a way to ensure subsequent buyers can't be deceived.

DocScoot · #7 09-19-2023, 02:55 PM

Comment removed.

ullmandds · #8 09-19-2023, 01:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Leon

Pete. I agree with what you say.
But instead of telling them to pick another hobby, I would try to steer them in a different direction.

This card is 113 yrs old. None of us will look this good at 113. Nuff Ced! (from the BST yrs ago)
.

good point, Leon...I'd steer them away from collecting high grade slabs.

Snowman · #9 09-19-2023, 03:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ullmandds

I personally believe that if this card were to be resold with disclosure...it would lose significant value. And the opinion/mindset that it doesn't matter...is quite detrimental to the hobby.

To each their own, right! If I were a newbee attempting to enter this hobby...with full disclosure of all the corruption/skechiness abound...I'd pick another hobby!

It depends on the level of granularity you're looking at though. Sure, he could disclose that it has been recolored and that PSA missed it, and that would certainly deter some bidders. But it won't deter the flippers who are there to profit from it. And whatever downward pricing effect it has on that single transaction is merely temporary. It has no staying power on the actual value of the card. And the act of disclosing for a single transaction has no effect on the market value of the cards itself. You are simply paying someone else a percentage of its value so you can sleep better at night. But if you thought about it more deeply, you'd realize that you haven't actually solved the problem. You're still just kicking the can down the road. That card WILL end up with another buyer who pays full price for it and who finds themselves in the same predicament as you. And at the end of the day all you did was put a few hundred bucks into some flipper's pocket.

You can place a value on a disclosure. Sure, no problem. Sell it without one, then sell it with one and calculate the delta. But whatever that value difference is, it would be dwarfed when compared to the value delta between what it sold for with disclosure and what it sold for after cracking it out and having it reslabbed as "Authentic Altered". If you want to actually do the "right thing", then you have to crack it out and put it in an AA slab before you sell it. And you'd better be prepared to repeat the process for the majority of the cards in your collection. Hats off to anyone who is ready for that level of commitment to the hobby and to their moral compass. Because anything shy of that is just a self imposed tax one pays to help them sleep better at night.

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