Here is another article from the Philadelphia Daily News on sports card grading.
A bright side to card grading

by Ted Taylor
For the Daily News

Max Silberman, a retired Overbrook High School teacher, has been a card collector since he was a little boy - that's a lot of card sets ago. At the recent Philadelphia Baseball Card Show in Fort Washington, he amazed me by saying, "I absolutely love this card-grading craze."

And as Silberman and I spoke, near a quadrangle of PSA card graders - looking more like an H & R Block office than anything to do with the hobby - he continued:

"I love card grading because it has allowed me to pick up an awful lot of older ungraded cards at really good prices."

He nailed it. Because the investing element in the hobby believes that unless a card is professionally graded and encased in plastic it is worth substantially less than the same card sans grading, dealers stuck with lesser-condition ungraded cards often unload them at really good prices.

Over the past decade, lifelong hobbyists have watched in amazement as card grading evolved from a novelty to a way of life in the card-collecting field. There probably are a dozen professional grading companies plying their trade at the moment, and the competition is intense. At the Fort Washington show there were two of the larger grading companies, SGC (which, ironically, has the same initials as the college where the Philly show originated in 1975) and PSA, the oldest and best known.

At each installation, the sheep were lined up to plunk down their cards and their money so that someone unknown to them would be so kind as to tell them whether their card was a 7, 8, 9 or 10.

The other thing that amazes me is that now collectors are busting packs of 2001 cards and trotting off to have them professionally graded. Cards right out of the pack, which should be (better be) mint are costing collectors even more money so that they can be told the obvious by a third party. Amazing; P.T. Barnum was clearly right about suckers.

Sports Collectors Digest recently took the grading companies to task with a scathing editorial about the competition in the field and their willingness to grade questionable and unlicensed product - establishing a value, it seems, for worthless junk. One company, it seems, graded some unlicensed (previously deemed worthless) Tiger Woods cards that then sold for upwards of $3,000 on an eBay auction.

Ted Zanidakis, a longtime dealer from Brick, N.J., who was set up near one of the graders, got into a roaring battle with one of their "experts" who had no actual knowledge about a variation on a 1949 Bowman baseball card that Zanidakis wanted them to grade. It got so intense that cooler heads had to step in before it got physical.

Zanidakis, who has clearly forgotten more about sports cards than most grading experts will ever know, was still grumbling about his experience two days later.

"I feel like a dinosaur because I don't deal in graded cards," he said, "so I thought I'd get one of my '49 Bowmans graded to see what kind of price it would bring."

When the grader came up with a grade that was unsatisfactory to Zanidakis, he went bonkers.

And that's the deal, of course. People have learned that a graded card brings a better price at auction or in over-the-counter sales. Why? I'm not sure. Snob appeal, maybe? It has just evolved that way and people who never would have considered having a card graded a couple of years ago all of a sudden are advocating it. It's all about a buck.

But the flaws remain. If your card earns a 7 from one grader and you believe it is better than that, you can always go to another one and try your luck. Often you can get the grade you want if you are persistent enough.

A few years ago, I served as the moderator of a panel on card grading at the Kit Young Hawaii Trade Show. The verbal battle between a panelist in favor of grading and one opposed (Alan "Mr. Mint" Rosen) got so intense that it almost evolved into a fistfight. (Rosen has changed his mind and now appears in advertisements for one of the grading companies.)

But in the battle, Rosen made the point that he had sent several cards to be professionally graded, was dissatisfied with the results, and then re-sent them to the same grader and they came back graded higher. He argued that the grading was not objective, but more done on the whim of the graders - who in this case were a couple of guys in their 20s who had little actual card-collecting experience.

Like much of the hobby, the media has fueled the card-grading fad and people are willing to spend some heavy money to have a third party tell them that their EX-MT card is, indeed, EX-MT. The risk is that your EX-MT card comes back rated VG-EX, in which case you not only blew the price of the grading, but your card is worth a lot less money.

But there are still lots of collectors, like this columnist, who prefer their cards free of plastic cases and third-party evaluations. There also are lots of hobby dealers still selling ungraded cards in lesser condition and making money. Longtime dealers such as Mike Wheat, Kit Young, Bob Bostoff and Wayne Varner continue to offer older cards, some with slight creases or rounded corners or, maybe, where a kid in 1957 wrote the name of the player's new team on the back.

And it's true - Silberman is right - I am able to acquire my "well loved" 1940s and '50s cards for a lot less money than if I was a fanatic about it and insisted that all my vintage cards be encased in plastic and rated by some guy who wasn't even born when I wrote my first book on the hobby.