Are slabs ruining your best cards?

The short answer is yes. Still, the news may not be as bad as it sounds.

Slabbed baseball cards | Author's collection

There are several reasons many collectors choose to have their best sports cards graded.

• Ensuring the cards are authentic
• Understanding true condition and value
• Increasing resale value

Many collectors would add to this list that having cards graded is also an important means of protecting their cards from damage, something that should be important to collectors even apart from any buy/sell motive. However, a recently published article by Glenn Renick of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) offers a stern warning to collectors: slabs are actually ruining your cards!

Glenn's conclusion is a rather dramatic one, so let me state it again: SLABS ARE RUINING YOUR CARDS!

So that's the bad news, but there is some good news as well. According to Renick, all paper-based collectibles, slabbed or not, will eventually self-destruct, and there's literally nothing you can do about it. (You can read Glenn's paper for the details on this, but the short version is that in the battle of acid vs paper, acid always wins.)

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"So then my slabs are okay after all?" Well, not exactly. Though slabs will absolutely prevent certain kinds of damage (e.g., creases), they also accelerate the chemical processes that lead to paper's deterioration. In other words, put two identical cards in a safe, one slabbed and one un-slabbed. Come back in a really long time, and the slabbed card will have deteriorated more than the raw card. The graph below highlights this phenomenon.

Degradation Rates Compared | Glenn Renick (used with permission)

Though the message of the graph is clear (i.e., slabbed cardboard deteriorates faster than un-slabbed cardboard), collectors need not panic just yet. After all, the horizontal axis of the graph measures time not in weeks, months, or years, but in centuries! Even still, the takeaway isn't that it will take 300 years for the damage to occur. That's more like the amount of time it will take your card to disintegrate entirely. For collectors worried about even 1% degradation, that's something that may take only a generation.

At this point, knowing that tons of high-end collectors have their cards slabbed, you might be wondering whether anyone really takes this sort of thing seriously. Actually, yes, they do. As Glenn notes, the National Baseball Hall of Fame, owner of possibly the finest T206 Wagner in existence, removes cards from slabs as soon as they receive them. The reason? Preserving their paper-based collectibles as long as possible.

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Long before PSA ever graded its first card (the trimmed Wagner that earned an "8"), museums all over the world--not just the Hall of Fame--had been long engaged in preserving priceless documents, photographs, and other paper-based items. As you might guess, none chose to seal these articles in non-breathable plastic cases.

So where does all this leave collectors? In a perfect world, they might hope grading companies eventually work their way toward what Glenn describes as "buffered and ventilated" solutions. In the meantime, they simply have to come to terms with the fact that cards don't last forever. Then again, neither do we! In the end, all that's immortal about our sports cards are the legendary players they portray.

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