Episode 108 Got PreGrading FAQs

Welcome back to Sports Cards and a Cup of Joe. This is your host, Joe Davis. And it is great to be back with you again this week. And today I'm welcoming Taylor Pruitt, our director of consignments, to be here with me. Thank you for coming in, Taylor. I know you're very busy, but we had a number of questions, comments and suggestions. Things from our last video, last show where we talked about GotPregrade.com the new service we are offering here from the team at Got Baseball Cards. And so Taylor, I tasked you with find out what all those questions are. Let's put them all together. So this is basically a GOT Pre grade follow up discussion where I can answer questions and, and get all that out there. And so I figure if one person asks the question, 100 others might want the same answer. So I'm just going to let Taylor fire away with those questions and I'm going to answer everything to the best of my ability to bring complete clarity to anyone who's got questions about this great new service we're offering. All right, sounds good, Joe. Yeah. You have a lot of YouTube comments out there. So I've gone through all of them, I've seen all of your comments and there's lots of questions, clarifying questions. So a common question is, so what exactly is GOT Pre grade and why have you decided that this is the time to announce it. So Got Pre Grade is a service. It's really an extension of services we've offered for years. For years we've offered pass fail prescreening on cards to help clients determine whether we think a card should be submitted to an actual grading company or not. And we've offered that service for many years. And what we call the detailed pre screening is where we will take a card, examine it for the condition issues, we will identify those issues, we will assign a pre grade estimate and give that back to the client. Then they can pick and choose do they want to send it on for grading or not. And so what we're doing now is many times the clients have said, well, I wish what you gave back to me is a way was given back to me in a way that was labeled, identified with the issues, a way I could tell others instead of just saying, hey, the guys that got baseball cards said this is going to maybe be an eight. You know, so we wanted it cleaner, crisper, nicer, easier system for everyone to understand. So now we're doing the exact same work, but we're actually taking all those condition notes, we're assigning them to the card, putting them in the database and that they can pull up on gotpregrade.com and they will see what the issues with the card is, they will see why we assigned it a pre grade estimate. And then anyone they want to sell that card to, if they want to advertise it on ebay, they want to take it to a show. Any potential buyer can look up the serial number and know what the condition issues are that we have identified. And as to the timing, we honestly were not planning to roll this out until later in the summer. But right now there's such a need in the industry to be able to get good, solid evaluations of card condition in a timely manner. Because the timely manner is the challenge right now in the industry. Since PSA is the leading grading company, they've shut down lower level services and the other three leading companies, in my opinion of cgc, SGC and BGS are all taking months to get cards back at those entry level grading points. So we, we introduced a service which we believe will be timely and we want to be transparent and we want it affordable to be able to assist collectors with this service right now at this time. And to your point, I remember there's been some collectors who have taken our pre screening detailed notes before and tried to sell them like that so you could show people this is where the problem is really hard. So this is even more of that, but legitimate. How have you seen the response been from friends, collectors here at the store? How's it been overall? It's been very positive overall. I mean, I had a number of calls the next morning after the show came out and some of those who haven't been positive, I think it's more because they didn't really understand yet what it was all about. They're like, well, why do I want to pay for that and pay to get it graded? And the point I wanted to make to them is like a lot of the cards that we're going to pre grade for clients, they're not going to end up grading. That's the point. We literally had someone call yesterday, they said, hey, I've used your prescreening service for a long time. Can I prescreen and then pick and choose which ones go to pre grade? Like absolutely, because here's a scenario and I'm sure many others will take advantage of this here. He wanted us to prescreen modern cards and he said, hey, if you think it's got a shot at a 9 or a 10, then I want to send it on to he actually wants us to hold them and send a PSA in six months or whenever that is. And he said, but everything else, I want to know what's wrong with it. I want to know the condition issues. And he said, so anything that you think is an 8 or lower, I want to pay for the $15 service. So with him, and he's literally turning in cards, paying $6 for detailed screening. And some are going to pass. Assume some will pass. I haven't seen the cards, but I'm saying assuming some of them pass, those will go onto PSA later and then the rest he can get back in hand inside of two weeks with grade estimates, pre grade estimates, and condition notes about the cards. So again, this is an extension of something we've already done for ages. And I've been pleased with most of the response has been really good. And part of this whole video, part of this discussion today is to help bring clarity to those who don't really understand what the purpose. Why are we doing it? Whatever. Right, yeah. Which maybe gets into the next question. Who in your mind, when you're thinking about the service, does it benefit the most? Well, you know, I'm old school and I know a lot of those who listen to the podcast or join us here on the Got Baseball Cards channel. I know we have a lot of vintage collectors. I think it works great for vintage, that's one thing. And the reason is there's such a wide. I know our vintage inventory, it ranges from ones to eights. And if it's eights and higher, that's probably already been sent off. But my point is we have hundreds and hundreds of Kofax Banks, Willie Mays, you name it, K Line, Killer Brew, vintage stars. But they're not necessarily near mint mint cards. So they might be a four or a five or a six or whatever. And so for dealers who have a lot of that inventory and they have a tough time moving that inventory, this could be useful to them. We do the work, we do the pre grading, we provide all the condition notes and they can go sell that card and us as a third party, in a sense, we've provided our opinion on that card. They go to resell it to someone. That buyer is not having to take that seller's word for what he says, oh, it's near mint. Yeah, sure it is. They can look it up, they can go to the website, add a show, they can see what the condition notes are and they can understand and have more peace of mind about what they're buying. Maybe the card's only a three, but they'll know why it's a three. They'll know it's got a surface crease, they'll know it's off center, whatever. And so that's one thing I think for vintage dealers mid grade, again, if you're listening and you've got a Mantle rookie and you know it's real, don't waste your time sending it to us, send it into the grading company. You know, there are certain things that don't make sense, but there's a lot of stuff it makes sense for. And it might be vintage, it might be a new release. You know, I was talking to someone yesterday and he said, you know, this could be really helpful for those who rip new products because you can't send the cards in to PSA affordably right now for under $80. And if you want to send it to any of the other leading companies, you're going to be waiting 4, 5, 6 months likely to get it back at those entry levels. So this is a way to get a pre grade evaluation. You can get it in a, in our sleeve and you know, I'm not going to sit and go, oh, us putting a 9 or a 10 on it's going to make you get more money. That's for the market to decide. That's not the point of the service. The point is to help collectors, as we say, to know what they've got. And so hopefully it can help some people with new releases where they're like, hey, I love this Jackson Dart rookie I just pulled out of signature football or, or this Cooper flag out of an upcoming Tops product because all those 25, 26 basketball products haven't even come out yet and they're like, you know, I'd love to know if this has a shot at a 10 down the road and we'll give our evaluation. Hopefully for that submitter it does. And they can know now. Maybe they say, well, hey, I've got a better shot at selling this now because I've had a good independent evaluation of it. Or they may just say, hey, I'm just going to hang on to it. I feel good about this card, I feel confident in hanging onto it and I'm going to grade it down the road when I can do it more affordably. So there's a lot of, you know, I mean, you name it. I mean the price point I think matters a lot because you know, again, like a Mantle rookie, it doesn't have to be a Mantle rookie. If you pull a card, it's nice and clean. Maybe you just send it through our pre screen service at $6 and we say, yeah, this is really sharp. And it's a 500 or it's $1,000 card. Go ahead and send it off to PSA or send it to BGS Express or whoever you choose to. But for those lower price points right now, if you want to get something back in hand, then you can't do it for months. And so I think there's a sweet spot where this service where, where the price point of the service and the turnaround for the service makes a lot of sense for certain values of cards. Yeah. And you can maybe speak to this too, but with big shows coming up, if you only have three weeks until a show, but you have all these ungraded cards to know what you've got to say. Our slogans, maybe that's helpful too, if you don't have a long time until your next big show to have something win your hand. Exactly. Okay, so common question. Are you saying that you're now a grading company like PSA or Beckett? Absolutely not. And I made that clear in the previous episode. We are not launching a grading company. We have great relationships with the four leading companies that we work with. Psa, cgc, BGS and sgc. We've worked with all of them for years. We want to work with them for decades more. And we are not trying to be a grading compet. We're trying to create an add on service that helps clients who love knowing the condition of their cards. We will have some people probably use this service who don't grade. They just want something affordable. They want to. Maybe they've got a small set. Maybe they're a. Let's say they're a player collector. They love old Ernie Banks cards, but they don't want to spend 30 bucks to grade them with PSA or whatever company. And they're like, hey, I'd love to at least know your evaluation of each card in my collection. And then they want us to sleeve every card, put our label on it, put it in our database, and then their buddy comes over and he can say, hey, look at my Ernie Banks collection. You can even look up every card online and see what the issues are. And here's my 40 Ernie Banks cards or whatever. So there's a lot of different uses for it and I just want it to be a blessing and a help to people who want to take advantage of it. It doesn't work for everybody. Just like an actual grading company. Certain ones work for Some people, some work for others, but in no way, shape or form are we a grading company. We're giving pre grade evaluations of our opinion and our opinions only. So if you respect our opinions for being in the hobby forever, it feels like for 35 years and having a phenomenal team that has worked with grad companies for decades, then take advantage of it. But no, we are not a grading company. We will never be a grading company. This is not going to turn into got grading. That is not going to happen. We are a pre grade service to help collectors and we have no desire to get into that arena. No, not at all. We love working with the companies we work with and we will continue to do that. Which is why you can easily cut a card out of it and wear sleeves and stick it into a real grading card. Exactly. This is not a slab. This is a, you know, Beckett raw card review was introduced years and years ago and Beckett would use this service, would use their raw card review service at shows when they didn't bring slabbing equipment. But it was a way or they wanted to offer two options, slabbing and the raw card review. And that's the first time I saw it. And there are other services out there just like this Dallas Card show review. They have this service and we wanted to. So it's not, this is not earth shattering O no one's ever heard of this service. It exists in the industry. It's just that we trust our team at what we do. And $15 for anything in this industry to get it back in two weeks. It's pretty cheap. But again, one of the big confusion points is we've been asked about the differences. Like you can still send us stuff for Pass fail at $4, you can still send us stuff for detailed screening at $6. This is a independent standalone service, but it's not replacing those services that we've had for years to help collectors. Yeah. Which is the next question. Is this going to replace pre screening? No, not at all. You can go on gotpregreat.com submit specifically for this service or you can go on gotbaseballcards.com and then you can say, hey, I'm sending stuff in that I possibly want sent to a grading company eventually, but I initially just want screening and then got pre grade might work for some of those cards, but it is not replacing the cheaper options. It is just a much more specialized service in the sense that you actually get the serial number, you actually get it in the database, you actually get all the condition notes saved permanently on the website. And then you can more easily transact with those cards rather than a card where there's just handwritten notes attached to it. Right, right. Okay, we got a few more here. You've mentioned it a little bit. So what exactly you're saying our holder is not a hard card. It's not a slab. It's not a slab. So what is ours? It's literally, if you've ever submitted cards to an actual grading company, they like you to send cards in in a oversized semi rigid, which is exactly what this is. It's an oversized semi rigid with the tamper evident seal. You cannot peel it off without voiding the label. You can't tear off any part of it without voiding the label. And then it's sealed again so that even the semi rigid stays clean and unscratched. Yep. Cool. That clears up some questions for some people, I'm sure one guy said. So are you guys, you guys are giving us notes in addition to the pre grade number, is that right? Yes. So that will be able to, they'll be able to pull that up. They'll type in the serial number on gotpregrade.com and that will pull up any notes if there are condition issues with the card. And some example of those notes. Another guy asked would be, it could be off center, it could be soft corners, it could be chipped edges, it could be print lines front or back. It could be a crease, it could be, you know, staining, it could be print marks. There's so many different things that could be detailed there. And so what we do is, you know, there's not three paragraphs for every card. Basically, as I had this discussion with Doug, our head of pre grading, you know, when he looks at something, if he says, okay, this is a four, he's going to list the primary issues as to why it would get that four. Now the card could be off center also, but if it's got a surface crease, that's why it got the 4, not because it was 65, 35 centering. And so the primary condition issues are what are going to be identified as to why the card got assigned that pre grade. Estimate. Yeah. Okay. When can people start sending them in? Right away. We actually got our first shipment today already. We have several more on the way and we've already seen individuals taking advantage of the two day service. We had one submitter already sent 66 cards on the two day service that are on the way to us. Supposed to arrive probably Friday. And so look forward to seeing Those. And so, yeah, send them in. And again, we're promising, I've committed to honor this pricing at least through the end of June. And then we're going to evaluate. We'll see what kind of volume we get, what we can handle. And so I encourage you, send them in sooner rather than later, because one thing I've seen in this industry is everyone seems to be falling behind. And so we don't want to have to hey, and then June, say thanks for the submissions. We'll be back in a few months. We don't want to do that. We want to be able to balance what we can handle in a timely manner. So we want to be very transparent about, you know, what that timeframe is gonna be like. Yeah. And to the point about the. The guy who's sending in 66 cards at two day, he should have those back by what's today, a Wednesday, by the Nashville show next weekend if he's going to that. Like, there are a lot of perks to having the service available for cheap. Yeah. All right. How does somebody verify a card that somebody's selling them? How do they verify the cert? You can just go on, got pre grade dot com, type in the serial number on the card under cert verification, and that will pull up the information on the card, like what the card is, what the card number is, who's on the card, what set it's from, and the condition notes in the grade and the pre grade estimate. I should say. Yep. Okay. And there's a question here, which is, you've already kind of hit it, but why should I spend $15 on a pre grade when there are grading companies that offer similar pricing for slabbed grading? That's a great question. And I literally answered one person that way. Yeah. He was asking about sgc and I was saying, hey, there are them, sgc, cgc, bg, and all these other companies we represent, they have affordable pricing options available. The biggest thing right now is the turnaround time. And so back in the day, I mean, I started with PSA in 1998. I could literally call up and I talked to the president's administrative assistant. Her name was Mary. And I would say, hey, Mary, how you doing today? Can I get my grades on my new invoice? Oh, yeah, sure thing. Those aren't those days anymore. And, you know, you could send them in and a couple weeks later you have your cards back. And that's not the case anymore. And so everything is slower because all the volumes are up at every leading grading company. And so, you know, if PSA and CGC and SGC were turning cards around in two weeks, there wouldn't be any point in the service right now. I mean, you could just, you could just grade affordably, get them back quickly and move on. But there's a void in this hobby right now. There's a need for this type of service, at least I believe for some percentage of collectors who want to use it. We're trying to meet that need. And as I've told other, like, if you don't want to take advantage of it, that's fine. You know, it doesn't hurt our feelings. We're trying to roll a service out to help those who want to take advantage of it and those who don't. It's okay. You know, we do 100 other things here in the business. I remember I bought a Michael Harris card at a show like a year ago and the guy said, this is perfect condition, it's a good card. I looked at it back in front, saw no issues, got it back and gave it to Doug. Huge lines down the back that I never saw. Came back at 6 or 7 at PSA. So I'm just imagining being at a show and having at least somebody's looked at it and it's sealed by somebody who knows what they're talking about. Because you can be at certain shows now, the lighting at the Nashville is usually pretty good, but I remember back in the day when I was, you know, as a teenager at an Atlanta show and there was one corner of the room at this normal, you know, bi monthly Atlanta show and like the lights were basically out in the corner of the room. And the running joke was there was this vintage dealer there and everybody would say, you know why he sets up in the corner? Because people can't see the condition issues on his cards. And so that's true at a lot of shows. You can literally, you have to be careful. Like thankfully there are card shows in every kind of building in the country now, but that doesn't mean they're all well lit and you have to be careful. And so, yeah, at least this evaluation will hopefully protect that. Makes me feel good. There will come a time when some of our pre graded holders are at shows across the country and by them being done, it'll help protect some buyers. All right, three more questions. Will PSA grade the card straight from our holder or should I remove it before submitting to psa? If you've used our pre grade service, you should remove it from the holder because PSA Wants cards sent in in semi rigids with nothing. And they don't even like the pull tabs. They want you to send them in. And so, yeah, you should. So if you take advantage of this now, and I'm sure we're going to have some do this, they'll use pre grade. Got pre grade right now. They'll get the cards done. And maybe they use those cards as they are at shows all summer long and then when PSA reopens, hopefully in the fall, but, you know, hopefully whenever that is, I'm sure there'll be plenty of them, depending on what the monetary value of that card is at that time. They'll be cutting them out, sending them in. We understand that's true with any other review service for raw cards. It happens. And you don't want to send them in that holder. I mean, we've received Beckett raw card review things in the mail from submitters. We're like, we can't send them in this because. And let me clear this up, some submitters will think, oh, well, if I got a nine from you, then I'm sure PSA will give it a nine. There's no guarantees of that. It's no different than, I mean, I've cracked out tons of BGS 95s from submitters who wanted us to then send them onto psa. There's no guarantee that PSA was going to give those a gym grade, just like if we cracked out PSA 10s and sent them to BGS. So every company is independent. There is no universal scale. There's no universal interpretation. Just like submitters, we've had send in a card to XYZ grading company, get it back. Hey, cut this out. I want to try it again. And not every time, but a lot of times I'll get a different grade. Sometimes better, sometimes worse. That is the subjectivity of grading as opposed to what we all wish there was objectivity from every grading company and that every company was consistent and that we were the exact same consistency as every other grading, but as I should say, as the grading companies, because we're not. But you don't want to send them in in our label or anyone else's label. You want to send them in. A perk is that there's only two people looking at it. Only four eyeballs total. Pre grading cards. Yeah. Yeah. Doug Giles has been our head of our grading and pre screening division for years, and he handles 90% of it. I'm more of the backup guy and I've looked at hundreds of Thousands of cards myself, of course, and I do a large amount of the work for our own company as far as screening collections we buy. I prep a ton of those myself that we send off to grading. So I do have quite a bit of experience in it myself. That is one thing. Those who want to use the service there will be great consistency because you know you're not going to send a card in and hey, they hired a new guy last week and he gave me my pre grade estimates. That's never going to happen. All right, two last questions. Will you pre grade non sports cards like Star Wars, Pokemon? Oh, absolutely. Anything goes. Yeah, as long as it's licensed. As long as it's something that we can identify and we're well aware there's going to be. I told someone this yesterday. I said this is a Great Service for 98%, 99% of the cards out there. I said there is going to be those cases where we get some bizarre 1880s non sport card or something. We're like, we've never seen this. We can't identify it, we can't tell the card stock because we haven't had another one to compare it to. We're going to have those situations where we just have to refund the money and say we can't assign a pre grade estimate of this. But for the great. I mean we process for years and years. We have averaged probably 10 to 12,000 cards a month coming through our hands every month for years and years and years. Hundreds of thousands. And that doesn't include our own stuff that we're handling. That's just for submitters, sending stuff here. So we've seen, I can't say we've seen it all. You know, we've handled Mantle rookies, we've handled T206 Ty Cobbs, we've handled multiple Ruth Gowdies, we've handled 1880s Guinner cart. You know, we've handled it. We've handled countless Jordan rookies, countless fake Jordan rookies have come through that we rejected. But you know, we have all your mainstream stuff. You know, first year Pokemon 4, you know, we've handled so much different stuff. But you know, we're not the be all end all of all pre grade evaluation companies. We're here for that 98% of widely traded stuff we're going to handle. But you know we're not perfect. No actual grading company is perfect and neither are we. But we're going to give it our very best effort on every submission that comes through here. Yeah, all Right, last question. Are you considering doing on site pre grading at shows like the National? That is in the works. We would not be doing on site real time. What I mean by that, that would be compromising the integrity of the process. We are in talks. Doug and I are planning out a way in which we can be able to take the cards one day, return them the next day. And we haven't figured out a price point for that yet. We're going to have to see what our volume we're dealing with regularly already at that point when we get to the National. But we do plan to offer pre grading at the National. Right now the plan is to offer a 24 hour service but I don't know at what price point and we think that'll be really helpful because depending on what the actual grading companies are doing, I mean we did this last year, we did on site pre screening at the national and one day turnaround and it just wasn't ending up in a pre graded holder. We think that can be really beneficial because sometimes it's really pricey to grade on site hundreds of dollars per card. And so if we can do that at a small percentage of that and help someone get a good estimate, it'll help them make better informed decisions as to whether or not they want to turn it in to BGS or PSA or whoever's doing on site grading. I've heard all the big four are going to be there and I would assume tag, I think of them as number five. I would think they're going to be there too. But I don't know any of their plans as to who's taking what. You know, who's going to charge what if they're doing on site. Yeah, well, thank you for answering all those. I know it clears up, I'm sure a lot of questions for people around and if people have questions, I mean we're an open book. Yes, we are. Email us. Yes, whatever. We've changed things on our pre grade site already to make sure that people have as much information as possible. Yeah, yeah, you've done a ton of if you like the pre grades that got pre grade site. Here's the man who's done it. So yeah, you've done a ton of updates to make sure everyone is as informed and so that's as clear and transparent as possible because as we said, we want the service to be affordable, we want it to be timely, we want it to be transparent. So we want to be transparent in everything when we do what we do. Well, thank you, Joe. Sure thing. So next episode of Cup O Joe, I'm going to not talk about pre grading or PSA or any of the grading companies right now because it's going to be light hearted, it's going to be fun. It's going to be what many of you have asked for. I've teased it so many times over the last year and I'm finally going to do my first episode about cartoon rookie cards. That's right, you've asked for it. It's technically first appearance cards, but I've literally had people in the shop saying, when are you going to do that episode, Joe? About the first appearances of cartoon characters. So it's going to be fun. It's going to be a more chill episode. We've done a lot of intense industry insider stuff these last few episodes, so make sure you join us for that one. But thank you all for joining us today. Remember, most importantly today, my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ loves you. He wants a relationship with you. So I am so thankful for all of you and I think you're all awesome. And Taylor thinks you're awesome, too. Yeah. So thanks for joining us, y'. All. We will catch you next time.