So the other day I was doing a search on eBay and came across a poorly titled auction — my specialty — for a rookie-year Ichiro card that I had never seen: Mariners Keebler.  As it so happened, the card was actually graded Gem Mint by BGS, which made it even more attractive to me.  The final price was a steal in my opinion; less than what it cost to actually get the card graded.

Before the card even arrived, I debated whether or not to crack the case and re-submit the card to BGS.  It was clear from the blurry picture that the card was graded some time ago, when BGS was using its old-style labels.  And when the card arrived Thursday, I was stunned to see that two of the sub grades were 10s, and the others were 9.5s.  This was perhaps one of the finest Gem Mint cards I’d ever seen.  And then I took a closer look.

The card’s lowest grade is on the corners, which I find perplexing because this particular make doesn’t really have corners.  There is no sharpness on which to judge these areas because the corners are round!

Now before you jump down my throat about the ethics of cracking slabs and re-submitting, know this: The slab that was sent to be looks like it has been to hell and back.  So even if it was a “borderline” Gem Mint, I’d be sending this thing in for a new piece of plastic.  But now that I see how close it is to Pristine, it just justifies my decision to send it in any way.  Let’s just hope that I can receive that rare grade bump from merely Gem Mint to Pristine.

This entry was posted on December 31, 2010 at 12:31 am and is filed under Newspaperman with tags baseball cards, BGS, Ichiro. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.