Making the grade
It was the mid-1990s and Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) was struggling. PSA, which was launched in 1991 as a business dedicated to grading trading cards, wasn’t getting enough collectors and dealers interested in getting their cards graded by a third-party company.
Times were tough.
“I know that some of the people who did work (at PSA) were strongly considering shutting it down, because they couldn’t find a way for it to take off,” said Joe Orlando, the President and CEO of Collectors Universe, Inc., the parent company of PSA.
But PSA toughed it out. It’s a good thing it did.
What happened in summer and fall 1998 changed the shape of card collecting. St. Louis Cardinals slugger Mark McGwire and Chicago Cubs power hitter Sammy Sosa captivated the baseball world by having a race to see who could hit more home runs – both eclipsed Roger Maris’ single-season home run mark of 61. There was also a dot-com boom where the internet world was born, and a little known, 3-year-old company named eBay emerged. Those phenomena helped catapult the grading industry.
“I think all of that happening at the same time, it really was a perfect storm for (grading) to gain traction,” Orlando said. “It took a while…It wasn’t easy at first.”
A reflection of how long it took for grading to catch on: Between 1991-98, PSA graded roughly 1 million cards. From that point to the present, PSA has graded at least 1 million or more cards every year. Now, it surpasses the 2 million mark each year.
“It just blew up,” Dave Forman, who owns Sportscard Guaranty Corp. (SGC), said about the sudden surge in grading. “I would say between ’95-’99, it absolutely exploded, where every dealer started using them. There was no eBay, and you go to shows and you’d see none of them. No graded cards. It just snowballed at that point.”
SGC opened its doors in July 1998 in the heart of the grading revolution. Derek Grady was one of the first graders at SGC and had two stints
