YES, That's a BIG 10-4!
Much greater than 50% of all under age 30 (or so) collectors in this hobby never had a Price Guide to give them even the slightest bit of hobby INSIDE INFORMATION, "Reader's Write" in Beckett was gone years ago (where if you knew enough things about the hobby, you could learn more by what Beckett DID NOT say to answer a collector question- than by what they did say!) and Beckett's only purpose that they have served in this hobby for over TEN years was to promote EVERY product, every card company told Beckett to heavily promote and that was their SOLE JOB! You see Beckett has always WORKED FOR THE CARD COMPANIES, but never more-so that after 2004. Mike Payne who was the President of all of Beckett in 2001 told me in an e-mail "You do things we could never do- because we are afraid of losing advertising dollars from card companies that we couldn't go on without." I'm paraphrasing of the top of my head, but everything in that statement I just typed was discussed between Mike & I at least once in 2001 with the exact meaning of that statement. That was him admitting that Beckett worked for the card companies and not for collectors at all anymore- AND NEVER AGAIN!
Most dealers became so jaded and greedy that they'd never dare tell anyone anything that they considered to be "hobby secrets", so where in the world were these below 30 collectors going to learn anything conducive to being a smart collector who know what products to stay away from, and what to collect? THIS GENERATION HAD NO ONE!!! So this created an environment where they decided to come up with their own interpretations of what goes on in this hobby and 90% of it COULDN'T BE MORE INCORRECT! In short, this created an entire generation of hobby egotistical DUMMIES who listened to no one who tried to help them for free by sending LONG explanation e-mails after people like myself saw them being ripped-off by BIG Full-Time eBay Sports Card sellers who nearly all OVERCHARGED for Shipping & Handling which has ALWAYS been against eBay's Rules! Then to stop this, eBay made all bidders and winners of items ANNONYMOUS! So the most educated buyers/sellers on eBay could no longer warn this UNEDUCATED generation which was the worst thing eBay ever did. It also made it quite difficult to spot SHILL-BIDDING which occurs FREQUENTLY in the Sports Card area on eBay since they made bidders mostly ANNOYMOUS!
Since I embarked on ridding this hobby of as much fraud as I possibly could- all by myself in 1997 online, I knew for a fact that I would have a rather large following even though there was no such thing as: Labels or web site/page Tags yet to help put your pages in Search Engines. This had to be done manually for EACH PAGE which was a long boring process or if you were rich you'd have to pay someone to do your work for you. I always believed that money means NOTHING at all when you are fighting a just cause because if you have that fire in your belly to fight the good fight- there's not enough hours in a day to work on doing the fight of your choice and I enjoyed fighting Card Company & Price Guide fraud more than most could ever understand.. I KNEW this had been occurring since I started in this hobby as a full-time collector in early 1987. So I spent over 14-years gathering as much inside info from every angle in this hobby so that one day I'd know this hobby far better from every angle than any other single person that existed. I hit that point in early 2001.
After the first two years of having my web site "Sport's Collector's Scoop" on AOL's FREE Web Site service, I had a mailing list of close to (200) hard-core, very educated collectors who wanted to know anytime I uncovered anything new as far as previously UNKNOWN wrong-doings by anyone that would directly negatively effect collectors who I put on my e-mailing list. Most times it went out Monthly, but anytime I uncovered something important, I'd send an UPDATE to the whole group.
You need to understand that the only people who PAID others to set-up and run web sites for them in the 1990's was relatively obscure web sites like: small bakeries, specialty retail shops, and stuff like that. I was the very first person to have a web site devoted to fighting fraud in any hobby run by just one person 100% FOR FREE and I did it only to HELP ALL COLLECTORS, especially children that most hobbyists (and Price Guides, Card Companies way before anyone else, etc.) seem to have totally forgotten about; which is simply SHAMEFUL!
Until everyone gets on board to FIGHT all Card Companies/Price Guides starting with the worst (as of November 2015) - Topps, Beckett, Upper Deck, then Panini: everything will continue to get worse and worse for collectors and our hobby will be GONE FOR A VERY LONG TIME until a baseball year like 2001 comes along again (free of steroids this time) if that's even possible which I'm not sure it is.
James McCay -my direct e-mail since 2004: cardcop04@gmail.com
You need to understand that the only people who PAID others to set-up and run web sites for them in the 1990's was relatively obscure web sites like: small bakeries, specialty retail shops, and stuff like that. I was the very first person to have a web site devoted to fighting fraud in any hobby run by just one person 100% FOR FREE and I did it only to HELP ALL COLLECTORS, especially children that most hobbyists (and Price Guides, Card Companies way before anyone else, etc.) seem to have totally forgotten about; which is simply SHAMEFUL!
Until everyone gets on board to FIGHT all Card Companies/Price Guides starting with the worst (as of November 2015) - Topps, Beckett, Upper Deck, then Panini: everything will continue to get worse and worse for collectors and our hobby will be GONE FOR A VERY LONG TIME until a baseball year like 2001 comes along again (free of steroids this time) if that's even possible which I'm not sure it is.
James McCay -my direct e-mail since 2004: cardcop04@gmail.com
