Pre-War Cards

A reportedly once-creased T206 card with lack of damage is among the alterations being found

The trimming scandal continues over on the Blowout forum with more cards being found on a daily basis. As I wrote recently, the alterations being found included all sorts of card doctoring. And a relatively unknown type of alterations are now a focal point.

A T206 card featuring Ray Demmitt was recently outed on the forum. Allegedly, the card was bought as a PSA 3, altered, and then received a grade of a PSA 4. The card appears to show a crease either removed or, at best, hidden, in addition to some other minor alterations.

Now, if this was a common card, that sort of work might seem silly to undertake. After all, you’d be talking about a card that was worth about $40 and making it worth about $50 and making it worth, say, $75. The amount of work to do to clean it up and then resubmit to a grader wouldn’t really be worth it.

This card, however, is not a common. It is Demmitt’s rare St. Louis version and the values are exponentially more. As I’ve written here, you can make a solid case that it should be valued closer to the Sherry Magie error card, which is one of the Big Four in the set. The card was allegedly bought as a PSA 3 for $2,480 and then resold as a PSA 4 for $4,727.

Yeah, that’ll make the grade bump a little more worth your while.

Now, the idea of removing wrinkles and even creases isn’t a new one. But it is one that many collectors would be surprised to hear of. This type of damage can indeed sometimes be removed by experienced card doctors.

That type of alteration can have side effects, so to speak. Cards that have had creasing removed can see those wrinkles or creases come back over time. However, as a temporary fix, some card doctors can mask or even somewhat fix those.

The trimming was one thing. Collectors, for example, have often pointed out that cards simply need to be measured to determine if they are of the appropriate size. That may work on more modern cards where printing and cutting methods have improved to make them more consistent. But early issues, such as T206 cards, can fluctuate in size and still be perfectly untrimmed specimens. To stay on track, though, the removal of wrinkles and creases is not something that can be seen with a simple measurement. This is stuff that’s really going beyond that.

Again, this stuff is not new to the hobby. But the story here is the discovery of these types of cards with more unique alterations that are getting past graders. The graders are the ones many collectors rely upon and with so many alterations going undetected, this is proving to be a very big problem.

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