Retouching the Mona Lisa is called restoration, but a Mickey Mantle?
A scandal in the world of baseball card collecting threatens to undermine the value of a long-established card grading system, has put into question the legitimacy of a prominent marketplace and has raised concerns that some collectors overpaid for expensive cards.
Millions of dollars’ worth of cards are at stake as collectors question purchases and wonder whom they can trust.
The controversy centers on the authenticity of sports cards. To verify their condition, cards are sent to a grading company, which scores them on a scale of 1 to 10. Grading sets the value of the cards and is considered a prerequisite for selling them on an auction platform like eBay.
Cards in pristine condition are highly valued by collectors and can fetch thousands of dollars more than similar cards with scuffs or worn edges. Sellers can improve the appearance of a card by trimming its edges or
removing residue, but collectors believe any alterations make a card less authentic, and cards that are known to have been doctored are often worth considerably less.
And card alteration can lead to federal fraud charges, which happened in 2013 when a seller admitted to trimming a Honus Wagner card, one of the most valuable baseball cards in the world.
“Originality is the bedrock of the hobby, and it all flows from there,” said Peter Spaeth, a lawyer in Boston who is an avid collector of cards. “Most people place a premium on originality and don’t want altered cards.”
Spaeth and other collectors are claiming that altered cards are on the rise in the marketplace, and they have accused one auction service of supporting fraudulent sellers.
Beyond accusations that cards are being touched up, complaints are surfacing that prices have surged because of market manipulation, said Darius Houseal, who works in finance in New York and spends six figures annually on collecting cards. He blamed “shill bidding” for creating volatility in a marketplace that had been stable for decades.
Allegations of fraud in baseball cards or any collectible markets are not rare. Unlike the fine art market, where one-of-a-kind works come with a record of their provenance, the collectibles market relies on the veracity of sellers, who have expertise but also benefit directly from the sale.
Jonathan Steinsapir, a partner at the law firm Kinsella Weitzman, pointed to scandals that involved the sale of wine that belonged to Thomas Jefferson and the first comic book to feature Superman. In both examples, the products were fakes.
The seller in each case had more information than the buyer, Steinsapir said. “There are incidences of fraud in fine art, but you can find several experts in every city,” he said. “Where there is less experience, less knowledge, the incidence of fraud is going to go up.”
The baseball card scandal started with some internet sleuthing. Collectors believed that a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card had been altered and wanted it removed from sale. The seller, PWCC, a service run by Brent Huigens, said the card had gone through a conservation process, which he said was different from an alteration.
Purists were outraged, and a group of tech-savvy collectors searched for other times when cards were manipulated. They began to suspect that PWCC was allowing corrupt sellers on its platform.
For these collectors, originality matters. Baseball cards, comic books, coins, stamps, even bottles of wine are initially produced in large numbers, so their condition is going to vary over the years. Originality is more significant in collectibles than in fine art, where a restoration of a work is understood.
Yet most of these disputes were confined to message boards, which are not often populated by the richest collectors. Huigens, who positioned himself as an honest broker, has cultivated a following beyond hobbyists. Last Friday, he convened a private meeting of collectors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to discuss the museum’s collection of baseball cards. He was joined by Allison Rudnick, the museum’s assistant curator in the department of drawings and prints.
Rudnick said in an interview afterward that the conversation was focused on the Met’s collection, and she commended Huigens for his “deep knowledge of baseball card collecting.”
Other collectors offered Huigens their support.
Ken Kendrick, an owner of the Arizona Diamondbacks, who has a collection that includes the 25 rarest baseball cards in the best condition, said he knew Huigens and had recently introduced him to officials at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, which has a display of baseball cards.
“I’m just disappointed to learn that he’s been involved with things that have been alleged to be improper,” Kendrick said. “In my experience, I’ve found him to be a bright, capable guy, particularly compared to some of his peers in the baseball card world.”
Huigens declined repeated requests for comment. His public relations representative said the company was involved in an investigation, but declined to provide details or the name of Huigens’ lawyer.
PWCC said in a statement posted online that it was working to identify all cards that had been altered. It also barred a longtime baseball card dealer, Gary Moser, 55, who had been accused of trimming the rough edges on cards, removing stains and altering colors, all to attain slightly higher grades and garner considerably more money.
Moser, who lives in Long Island, N.Y., said he had nothing to hide. In an interview, he denied that he had trimmed or altered cards.
He said he had always tried to buy cards for less than they were worth and sell them for a higher price. He added that he looked for mistakes in the grading process. If a card had what he believed was a low grade, he would ask for a re-evaluation, which often produced a higher grade.
“It’s all what the public believes,” he said.
He faulted grading companies like Professional Sports Authenticator, which is part of Collectors Universe, a publicly traded company in Santa Ana, California, that offers authentication services for sports memorabilia and trading cards.
PSA charges up to $5,000 to grade a card. Moser said that its graders were not as knowledgeable as they purported to be and that they were overwhelmed by the volume of submissions and rushed the process. The grade you get, he said, depends as much on the grader as on the card.
Fraud in collectibles markets is rife but difficult to prove, said Carter Reich, a lawyer who specializes in art fraud cases. He, too, blamed grading companies for not following a universal standard.
“It’s their own standard,” he said, “and some other grading company has a different one.”
But that does not mean the company always gets it right. The first card that PSA ever graded was a 1909 T206 Honus Wagner. It awarded a near-perfect grade of 8 in 1991.
Kendrick paid $2.8 million for the card in a private sale in 2007. Despite being the first and highest graded Wagner card, it was dogged by suspicion that its edges had been trimmed.
In 2013, Bill Mastro, who in the 1980s was the king of card sales, admitted to trimming the corners of the card, pleaded guilty to fraud charges and was sentenced to federal prison.
“It was upsetting,” Kendrick said of learning that the card had been altered.
But the controversy only increased the value of the card. Shortly after the news broke, Kendrick said, he received an offer to buy it for four times what he had paid.