About a month ago I sent a batch of cards to Beckett Grading for slabbing purposes.  Say what you want about grading, but I still rather enjoy having some of my cards encased in thick plastic and assigned a grade. Keyword: Some.

First off, let me say that I was disappointed that Beckett did not grade three of my cards — 1948 Bowman Bob Feller rookie, 1948 Bowman Yogi Berra rookie and my 1938 Goudey Heads Up Joe DiMaggio XRC.

The Feller and Berra have writing on the front, not unlike my 1939 PlayBall Ted Williams that Beckett Grading slabbed earlier this summer.  I placed a note on each card asking that the card itself be graded and that I knew the “signatures” on the front were not real.  This was a reasonable request based on my return on the Ted Williams rookie.  Both cards were returned just as I submitted them with a note stating that “Service Unavailable.”

Head scratcher for sure.

And the DiMaggio? Check it out:

Doh!  Really?  We’re going to flag this one for restoration?  If you look at the card in hand, you can see someone traced DiMaggio’s head with a dried-out pen.  The markings make the card look worse than before.  Couldn’t we just slab this one a “1” and call it a day?  That’s all I want. The card is clearly authentic.

Now that the bad news is out of the way, let’s have a look at the en-tombed items.

Yes, this card graded a 1, but if you’ve ever held this card in hand, you’d enjoy it’s true beauty.  Aside from the obvious paper loss, this is a beautiful example of Phil Rizzuto’s 1948 Bowman Rookie Card.  Love that I can now display it in my graded card case.

You might think that 6.5 grade is ugly … not I.  Do you know what I paid for this card? Yeah.  The key here is that this 1985 Nike Michael Jordan “rookie” is authentic.  The only real flaw are the corners, which show some white.  This is a nice win for my collection.

This is a straight cross over from a PSA slab.  I prefer BGS slabs.  I have said this many times.  I got this 2008 Bowman Chrome Draft Buster Posey on CheckOutMyCards.com.  Probably  a bit pricey, but it was a must-own for my collection. Proud to have it in a BGS case. Straight 9’s, homey.

Speaking of COMC, here is a duo of 2002 Upper Deck Premire XRCs that I snagged off the site in raw condition.  How excited do you think I was when I saw that the Prince Fielder and Zack Greinke graded Gem Mint.  Not a rare grade for these cards, but clearly they display well.

And finally …

These are solid copies of some of 1994’s rarest error cards.  These are 1994 Upper Deck Collector’s Choice Silver Signature “White Letter Variation” cards of Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter, the two best in the set.  As I’ve documented here before, these cards are much rarer than the basic silver signature cards that were offered one per pack.

I picked up both of these at a local shop and they were priced as basic Silver Signature cards.  The Rodriguez was about $15, and the Jeter was $6.

This entry was posted on October 10, 2011 at 7:06 am and is filed under Newspaperman with tags baseball cards, Beckett, Beckett Grading, Joe DiMaggio, rookie cards. 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.