Recent Vintage Submission POP - A kick in the b@ll5!
PatriotTrading
Posts: 301 ✭✭✭
Just went terrible. 110 card order. Majority were 1975 Topps/OPC or Mini baseball. A few 72 FB were thrown in the order. Some were shocking. Some were understandable. Some I clearly missed.
PSA 9= 2
PSA 8.5 = 1
PSA 8 = 63
PSA 7.5 = 2
PSA 7 = 24
PSA 6 = 11
PSA 5 = 5
PSA 4 = 2
Got an 8 OC qualifier on a Nolan Ryan which was cool to see. A few 6's were understandable due to centering. Ultimately I'm going to look over the 7's or less to see if its centering or surface. With the 4's I clearly whiffed on a crease somewhere. They are all being shipped to me shortly.
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I had similar returns recently and I will NEVER send more than the absolute minimum in orders ever again. There’s just too much variation in grading going on. No consistency from order to order.
1975 minis are super tough to attain in high grade but command a significant premium for its devoted fans. If you have any PSA 8s or 9s with red/yellow combo and plan to sell, please let me know!
You may not be pleased with the grades overall, but 66 out of 110 in PSA 8 or higher grade for those issues certainly isn't bad at all.
Collecting 1970s Topps baseball wax, rack and cello packs, as well as PCGS graded Half Cents, Large Cents, Two Cent pieces and Three Cent Silver pieces.
Afternoon,
How quickly our standards have been lowered! 3 years ago this would have been met with midnight marches, pitchforks and torches!
YeeHaw!
Neil
I disagree, at least in this particular case. As someone who has submitted hundreds of 75 minis over the years (and a fair number of 75 OPC cards, too), I can state with certainty that 9s and 10s weren't easy to attain back then, either, even with pack pulled cards. Have you seen some of the 75 minis pulled from past group breaks?? Getting 7s (or 9 OC) was a feat, LOL.
Collecting 1970s Topps baseball wax, rack and cello packs, as well as PCGS graded Half Cents, Large Cents, Two Cent pieces and Three Cent Silver pieces.
This is an example, the Yount I expected a low grade. The LeFlore, no idea, the back is clean too. Maybe something on the surface in the sky?
This one they got right, I just missed the wax/gum staining. The Nolan/Carlton, I'm guessing its the centering though a 6 would've been nice. The last card, looks like something on his leg that I missed. So PSA nailed it on many of the lower grade ones.
Pretty lame they didn't use the proper size holder for the minis, so that the rails securely surround the card.
Totally agree. And they sent me the huge holders for two 1982 police mattingly's that I have in the regular holders for about 10 others.
Scratch marks maybe. The Ryan/carlton appears to have something by ryan's face. Leflore there looks like somthing to the left in the stands beside near his head.
But these are just guesses.
Here are the grading changes I have come across
all refractors and tiffany's are 8's unless worse
Small scratches, from 7's to 5's
cardboard issues (small) - 8's to 6's.
Centering doesn't seem to get the 1/2 grade it was intended to get originally.
Thus 5 years ago when corners were the most important, the surface has now over taken the corners.
ALso keep in mind that, reviews, bring in mo money mo money. And this is the business.
The registration on the LeFlore is what killed it. Three different shades of purple in the borders. Similarly, the brown borders on the Yount have specks of fading throughout. PSA is gonna destroy any 75s that don't present consistently around the photo.
I'm your inner child. Get in. Listen, what you really need in life is some frikkin torque.
Those 5's look like 10s
What percentage were you expecting for PSA 8's and 9's? Not what you were hoping for but what you thought you would receive.
Or worse, sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't, making the 1/2 grade meaningless.
Putting the Yount side by side with the LeFlore, the Yount is a weak 5 and the LeFlore is a strong 5.
The LeFlore could probably be a 5.5, but at that point, who cares.
They appear to be saving the 1/2 grades more for higher grades.
As you know OPC card stock can be a little "wavy," but unlike the rough-cut, this inherent feature gets downgraded.
A card with fish eyes staring you in the face, can get a high grade, yet a card that you have to tilt, under the right light conditions, with a 30x loupe to see, can get hammered.
I think it's the weak back printing. The colors are washed out, especially on the lower half and the dark green areas are "snowy." I saw some others he had that graded higher, but they were commons. The Ryan likely gets more scrutiny.
There is nothing wrong that I can see with color or registration on the Leflore that would knock it down to a 5. Its a beautiful card (as are the others). Possible surface wrinkle on the front of the cards would knock the grades down to a 5 (old PSA grading standards admittedly). So look very carefully. If you don't see it , I would crack and send to SGC. Nothing to loose IMO. It woud be great if you could show before and after scans.
this^
https://www.ebay.com/itm/1975-Topps-Mini-628-Ron-LeFlore-Detroit-Tigers-PSA-9-MINT/387238403710?nordt=true&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc&_trksid=p2349526.m43663.l10137
MINT 9 LeFlore mini sold a month ago. Draw your own conclusions.
I'm your inner child. Get in. Listen, what you really need in life is some frikkin torque.
Dang, didn't know it was worth that much.
Yeah, I'll take a closer look. Someone mentiond what looks like a hair on the surface in the stands. It would be strange if it was stuck to the surface. I also see something across his pants, maybe a bit of wax of something. Hopefully I can wipe it off.
Patriot, that stinks about your grades! The new standards are ruining the hobby for me!
If those LeFlore and Yount cards are PSA 5's I just don't understand.
Successful card BST transactions with cbcnow, brogurt, gstarling, Bravesfan 007, and rajah 424.
The Yount I understand with the snow on the bottom within the brown borders and how badly OC it is top to bottom. But a 6 would've been nice. I missed my delivery today but I'll update the thread with what I can find out.
Great question, I think its the amount that missed a 9 more than anything. I'll take a look again when my order comes in to see where I missed. It very well could be many of these were tilted or just straight OC being mainly from the same break.
My buddy recently submitted 22 1975 Topps commons that he pulled from a wax box. He went over them many times with a Loupe and only submitted the cards with razor corners, no print defects and good/great centering. He received one PSA 9 and 17 PSA 8's. He also received two PSA 7's and two PSA 5's. Years ago with cards from the same wax box he hit 12 PSA 9's and 8 PSA 8's out of a 20 card submission. That's a huge difference from cards that were all pulled form the same wax box.
It makes it more difficult when you can’t really know from the cert # when the card was graded. Before someone dismisses that be aware that PSA has started reusing cert #s from earlier sequences. They’ve also started requiring dual grading of PSA slabs to be submitted under review now. So you end up with a card that’s newly graded in the original cert.
Anyways, for better or worse, it certainly seems that vintage and modern are being held to the same strict standard. The problem here is that you really shouldn’t ever have had two standards. And all of SGC, Beckett, and PSA are to blame. Whether SGC and Beckett were slower to adopt reason, they were all, at one time or another, considering vintage vs modern with different standards. Then they realized that … oops. Everything modern is a PSA 10 if we use the current evaluation standards. Then they made their next mistake in not providing a clear explanation and they did nothing to differentiate.
They have not reused any cert numbers. The higher number ones you saw previously beginning with 81XXX were assigned to 4SC at one point in time (some certs with 90XXX were previously used for other submitters also) but they are pretty close to exhausting the cert run now up to 999XXX at which point they will need to add an additional digit.
Collecting 1970s Topps baseball wax, rack and cello packs, as well as PCGS graded Half Cents, Large Cents, Two Cent pieces and Three Cent Silver pieces.
They picked the wrong standard - everything ultramodern is an 8-10 with the majority being 10s. The old vintage standard (which approximated the written standard) makes way more sense.
Wish they would have the courage to rewrite and publish the new standard. It’s their company, they set the standard, but it’s obnoxious to change the grading standard and not communicate those changes to paying customers.
Let me say, I share your frustration on these vintage grades from PSA. When I see cards like the Ryan leaders and the LeFlore cards get PSA 5- The card has a wrinkle somewhere!! If PSA is giving this card a PSA 5 without a wrinkle, then we are all being deceived/tricked/screwed by them. I have sent in around 2000 cards this year to PSA and my perception is that there are very experienced graders and then there are graders that don't know what they are looking at. When I send in 100 cards straight from vending that has 60/40 centering, with no edge wear, no surface issues and corners that are perfect. Honestly, I expect a PSA 9 or 10. The occasional PSA 8 or PSA 7 due to a print defect in the background is understandable.
I would say an invoice of 60% PSA 8's actually might sound like a win to most people here, but seeing the quality of the cards you are sending in, I would be upset as well. Has PSA abandoned the whole idea of giving out a PSA 10? PatriotTrading probably spent $1870 in grading for this invoice. If the invoice was full of commons to work on his set- he lost his shirt. PSA needs to charge $9 a card so customers can work on these types of sets. It would sure be easier to stomach these crappy grades.
I've sent in a ton this year too and my experience has been mixed and that's me being very nice. If you're sending vintage then you need to expect most of the cards to come back in the 5-7 range with several 8s and maybe a 9 here or there. Do NOT expect to ever get a 10 these days because those things are so rare. I will no longer send any order with more than the absolute minimum requirement. The inconsistency is too expensive on the grading and value ends.
I get the argument that all cards should be graded at the same standard, but there's nothing similar about cards made before the 90s and those made now. Cardboard isn't the same, printing isn't the same, etc...
Now that SGC is the same I wonder what company is going to start getting the business for vintage.
I can provide some more examples later. There are some pretty large gaps in each series in the PSA database.
This card received its first ever card grade last month.
Some of you need to wake up and stop sugar coating the grading standard shift! Over the last 2 or 3 years many of you have been conditioned to accept the new grading standards because you just keep getting poorer and poorer submission results. I see it all the time in the guess the grade threads, most of you have become almost as strict as PSA, nick picking every little detail. It's ruining the vintage hobby for me, I am 90% modern now. If Uffdah hadn't magically hit a gorgeous run of 62 baseball I don't think I would have ever witnessed a freshly graded , vintage PSA 10 under the current standards.
If you cracked 20, vintage, high grade PSA 8's or 9's graded before 2017 and sent them in you would be devasted with the results. Bottom line is they moved the goal posts/changed their grading standards.
Successful card BST transactions with cbcnow, brogurt, gstarling, Bravesfan 007, and rajah 424.
Autos with PSA/DNA attribution are different...I'm referring strictly to graded cards.
Collecting 1970s Topps baseball wax, rack and cello packs, as well as PCGS graded Half Cents, Large Cents, Two Cent pieces and Three Cent Silver pieces.
They got this one right. I missed a surface issue, what looks like a worm underneath the printed image. It's that dark spot in the sky just behind his shoulder.
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They got the Nolan Ryan right, it has a strange edge that looks to have to do with the cut, on the right side. The paper is effected ever so slightly. I'm sending this one in anyway but they got this one right too.
The nice part is the Hisle. Its just a big wax stain on the front that I imissed,. Terrible on my part. It'll be easy to wipe off. Crack and resub for sure on this one and also a PSA 4 of another
.
This is the PSA 4 where I missed the giant wax stain. They may have been cards to fill the order and I simply didn't screen them properly. On second thought, not sure if I'll resub this though with it likely only getting a 6-7 max.
Yes, wax stains are an easy fix with dryer sheet or woman's nylon stocking. These issues don't clearly show up on the screen and are the reasons why it's tough to correctly grade a card via scans. Good luck!
Collecting 1970s Topps baseball wax, rack and cello packs, as well as PCGS graded Half Cents, Large Cents, Two Cent pieces and Three Cent Silver pieces.
This card was in the PSA database….
These two Topps issues were tough to see only 8's on. Can someone chime in about the brown border on the Yeager. Are there supposed to be sploches wiithin the border or a solid color? With the Frank White, there seems to be the slightest surface bubble on the top of the light pole. Its actually really hard to make out.
There's info here within the forums about the differences. You won't ever find two single graded cards (not PSA/DNA attributed cards) with the same cert or a non PSA/DNA graded card with a previously used cert run.
Collecting 1970s Topps baseball wax, rack and cello packs, as well as PCGS graded Half Cents, Large Cents, Two Cent pieces and Three Cent Silver pieces.
The card I showed you was graded 8 years ago and received the cert #19990858. It was submitted for PSA grading (not PSA/DNA as I am not referring to PSA/DNA here) but not for dual grading. The autograph was graded, but the card was not graded. I submitted this card under review service for dual grading. 3 months ago, I would have submitted this card, as I always do, under value dual-grade. I didn't do that because recently PSA pinged me on an order where I did that and said that from now on they have to be submitted under review dual-grade. So this card was never considered, and now that it has been, under a decidedly different grading standard from 8 years past. You wouldn't have any idea when it was graded from the cert #. I have hundreds of examples of my own cards.
I'm not saying PSA is reusing numbers, but you really don't have an idea based on the number when it was graded because there are big holes everywhere in the database... sections they just skipped in the 0xxxxxxx, 1xxxxxxx, 2xxxxxxx, 3xxxxxxx before they arrived at a better process. I am aware of the 8xxxxxxx and 9xxxxxxx which were used early on as well. I agree with you that there are not two PSA cards with the same cert# (ignoring fakes) and that there are not two PSA/DNA cards with the same cert# (again, ignoring fakes), and I am not cross-mingling PSA and PSA/DNA number spaces. I doubt anything sees a cert with 19990858 and thinks... yeah that card was graded in 2024.
That is a special scenario and outside the norm due to the circumstances you detailed and the fact that the card was reholdered after you got the card newly graded in addition to the PSA/DNA auth attained years ago). Yes, there are some gaps in the cert runs as PSA jumped around a bit years ago (I have cards with 3, 4, 5, 8 and 9 graded many years ago) before they started moving forward in cert number succession from around the late 1s a number of years ago. That said, those who have been submitting for many years can typically identify which certs are actually "new" vs which that aren't based on the cert number. In your original post to which I responded you stated "It makes it more difficult when you can’t really know from the cert # when the card was graded. Before someone dismisses that be aware that PSA has started reusing cert #s from earlier sequences," which wasn't entirely clear and which I interpreted as you saying that PSA is reusing cert numbers when that is not the case. I agree that some people may be under the impression that a card was recently graded if it's holdered (or reholdered) with the lighthouse flip but the cert number is still a very telling indicator of whether that is actually the case or not if you bear in mind the aforementioned cert run exceptions and remember when PSA began utilizing the lighthouse flips (around the 4s or so).
Collecting 1970s Topps baseball wax, rack and cello packs, as well as PCGS graded Half Cents, Large Cents, Two Cent pieces and Three Cent Silver pieces.
What I noted over my years of collecting HOF/stars in very high end condition (2002-2012ish time frame), was that low number certs that started with 30...40...50...80...90... were reserved for high end mint/ PSA 9 graded exemplars. As I recall these certs were not dispensed in numerical order during that time.
They weren't but it didn't have anything to do with Mint 9 grades.
Collecting 1970s Topps baseball wax, rack and cello packs, as well as PCGS graded Half Cents, Large Cents, Two Cent pieces and Three Cent Silver pieces.
There are approximately 4 hundred million certs below 99999999 that are unused with the largest available space in the 0xxxxxxx - 3xxxxxxx number series. Certs that were never used.
I meant what I said about PSA reusing certs from the past for this case but I also fully expect that they will “fill in the gaps” with new certifications before they flip to the billions. Which I think would be stupid in the same way I think what they’re doing on review certs now. Toyota came up with the production coding scheme everyone sane is using today in the 1970s which uses date coded serial numbers.
Anyways. All I was saying is. Here is an example of a problem that’s going to most likely get bigger before it’s solved properly. There are certs with old numbers that were first ever card graded in 2024. I’m not speaking to anything else.
The Yeager likely got an 8 (and not a 9) due to the touch to the lower left corner (on the front). Note the white on the tip.
The White likely received an 8 max due to the faint black splotch/tiny spots to the left of the S in Royals. If there is surface bubble above the pole (I can't see it), you were lucky they missed it. That would have meant a 5 or 6 max. If it's a small paper/pulp chip under the surface, then traditional, I've received 7 or 8's on those.
I graded 75 mini's during the early 2010's. These two likely would have received the same grades then, as now, in my view. No change here.
I’ve been following this thread but until now have held off from responding because it would totally be the “old man shakes fist at cloud” meme. But here goes.
In the early 2000s, I built both a 72T baseball set and a 75T baseball set. Both fully graded. Both all PSA8 or better. In both cases, 30-35% were from my own submissions. I sold those sets off in 2004ish. And pretty much exited to hobby until this summer when my wife told me I needed a hobby.
Holy rip-van-winkle Batman!!! It’s like I woke up in crazytown with regard to grading standards. Neither SGC nor PSA care 2 shits about grading vintage according to published standards.
PSA Standards for an 8 - “ Centering must be approximately 65/35 to 70/30 or better on the front and 90/10 or better on the reverse.” REALLY?!?? Because that is so detached from the reality of what’s coming out it makes me cry. Now. . .if you want an 8 it has to be all but pristine. Screw 70/30. . .it it’s not 60/40 or better don’t even think about an 8. A 9 and it’s not 55/45? Fuggedaboutit.
When I was submitting cards, of course there were overgraded cards. But the grades generally aligned pretty closely to published standards for grade. Now. . .it’s like they’re grading vintage according to the standards of modern laser-cut cards and totally not understanding pre-1980 the technology, tools, and techniques for producing cards was vastly different. There’s no sense of nuance in the grading room whatsoever.
When I sent submissions, I was probably 75-80% accurate when the grades popped. But there’s no way I could submit cards today. Because published standards for each grade are meaningless - and as a result, everything is a crapshoot. And in that context, I’m content keeping most everything raw and evaluating cards based roughly on the standards that have been published for years - not on the standards reflected on the slabs.
-shakes fist at cloud-
Yeager. . .I think you mean lower-right. But when I was building a graded 75 set way back, I saw cards like that get 9s all the time - because back then graders understood a corner like that was consistent with the cut of the bottom of the card and was (likely) merely a chip and not actual corner softness. But impossible to tell without the card in hand.
White. . .when I was submitting 75s that was a 9 all day long. Nobody dinged for microscopic dots like that. Everything in that card is totally consistent with the issue/set.
-drops $0.02-
Or Census Median Enforcement + see my sig
It's the singer not the song - Peter Townshend (1972)
Yes, I meant lower right. thanks