$2.35 million baseball card may have been altered

[Number9]

I realize this isn't game used, but it does mention Mastro:


New York — The 1909 T206 Honus Wagner that Las Vegas businessman Brian Seigel sold to a mystery collector in February for a record $2.35 million has been touted for years by hobby officials as the Holy Grail of baseball cards. But it has also been dogged by shadowy, persistent rumors that it was cut from a sheet decades after it left the factory — a major taboo in the world of vintage cards — and later trimmed to enhance its value.

The hobby rumor mill was fueled by reports of photographs that proved the card, once owned by hockey superstar Wayne Gretzky, had been altered to improve its condition. Few collectors or dealers, however, have ever seen those photos, and they have never been made public.

Until now, anyway. The New York Daily News has obtained photos from a hobby insider that show what Alan Ray, a New York-area collector who sold the card to memorabilia king Bill Mastro in 1985, has been saying for years: The card was cut from a sheet and later doctored to enhance its appearance and value.

full long story:


http://www.ajc.com/sports/content/sports/stories/2007/06/24/0625card.html

[worldchamps]

They later found out this Wagner card is perfectly alright, it has a Lou Lampson LOA.

[staindsox]

For those of you who don't collect cards from this period, this is another dirty little secret of the hobby. Millions upon millions of dollars have been made doctoring cards, not just gamers. For example, it has been found that the 206 set is alterable. If you wet the card and then press it, it expands slightly (I forget if it was 1/16 of an inch or something). Anyway, this is enough for a card to be trimmed. This is enough to turn a PSA 7 into a 10 which can mean 10s if not 100s of thousands of dollars for a single card!!! It has also been rumored that major auction houses are deeply involved in doctoring. There has been speculation to which ones, but obviously nobody will say who in particular because of lawsuits.

Chris

[David]

Within the hobby of early baseball card collecting, a majority of collectors assume the card was trimmed and almost all have at least heard the rumor. Some very big and respected names in the hobby, like Bill Heitman (author of an early, respected guide to T206s) and Keith Olberman have either stated or implied that believe the card was trimmed. For those who didn't know, Olberman owns an expensive collection of rare cards, is very knowledgeable about cards and, as a teenager, wrote and edited the backs for 1975-6 SSPC baseball card set.

[34swtns]

A fascinating article and thanks for sharing the link. However, I'm puzzled by a quote from the article:

Still, the questions surrounding the card never went away, and in a 2005 interview, PSA grader Bill Hughes, a member of the team that inspected the Gretzky T206 Wagner, admitted he knew the card had been cut from a sheet when he graded the card. "We were aware of that when the card came to PSA," he is quoted as saying in "The Card." "This particular card was obviously cut . . . The card is so outstanding, it would have been sacrilegious to call that card trimmed and completely devalue it."

Are we to assume from this quote that at least one member of PSA chose to overlook a serious aspect of the grading of the card simply to avoid "devalue"-ing it?
I've got to say I'm not encouraged to hear that coming from the most popular and prestigious memorabillia grading firm in the world.