Is Beckett Grading Services Failing?

There is a feeling that Beckett Grading Services is just treading water. Their share of the market consistently decreases. The once dominant company in the collecting space is now done with about 50,000 submissions.

More or less the business that PSA does in a day. Aside from that, there is a general lethargy evident at the company, which is under new ownership as of December 2024.

They do not make dramatic changes or have notable sales or promotions. That is a terrible sign for a company that is dead last in the market. What happened there?

How the woes at Beckett Grading Services started

In 2019, Beckett was one of the biggest grading companies in the business. But things started to go wrong. The founder and former chairman of Beckett Grading Services was indicted and then convicted for bribery.

Then, a scandal arose surrounding a former employee who was getting Black Label grades (that is, perfect grades; more on that later) on all his cards.

But their biggest failing was during the pandemic. PSA and BGS were heavily backed up with grading submissions during those heady days.

The former used that time to grow their facilities and become the well-oiled machine they are today. Meanwhile, Beckett just slugged along. Meanwhile, SGC moved ahead of them to take their place as the number two company in the business.

The grading change flop

One criticism often leveled at BGS was that their scale could have been more appealing to new investment-minded hobby enthusiasts.

People want to get a 10 when they submit cards. And BGS had a system where tens were rare, and 9.5 was more common. A lot of people find that dissatisfying.

Therefore, Beckett decided to change their grading system. But the rollout of the new system could have been better. The company got a ton of pushback and ended up canceling it. As I wrote at the time:

“Perhaps the most controversial of the changes was the proposition to lower the status of the gold-label 9.5 grade from Gem Mint to Mint Plus. Many of the concerns circled back to a specific issue: What would happen to the value of BGS 9.5 cards already on the market?

By denying the Gem Mint status for future 9.5, collectors fear the value of the cards they hold will be undermined. Of course, the difference between a PSA 9 and 10, or their BGS equivalents, can be massive. Sometimes, a PSA 10 can be worth several times more. So, there were concerns that values could collapse.

As a result of these problems, the Beckett Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter pages were inundated with negative feedback.

As always, a Blowout Forum user said it best: “85% of current gem mint slabs have subs that are less than 9.5/9.5/9.5/10. If grading standards are not relaxed, then in the future, only 15% of cards that would have previously been deemed gem mint will still be gem mint.” And that is the main problem here.

Since then, the company has seemed dead. No one really talks about them or thinks about them. So what is keeping them alive?

The Black Label advantage

If there is one thing that BGS does have going for it, it is the Black Label. Beckett introduced this in 2014 as a mark for a perfect card.

Beckett has four types of subgrades: centering, corners, edges, and surface. A card will only get a Black Label when it gets 10 out of 10 in all four of them. That means the item is entirely pristine. The Black Label is the best mark any card can get in grading from any company.

While BGS has fallen behind in many ways, the Black Label offering still gives it a unique advantage over anyone else. But how permanent is that advantage? There are two potential challenges in the long run.

First, because people are kind of over Beckett, they may not take the Black Label advantage seriously in the future. After all, it is a reminder of an era when BGS was one of the two big graders, and a Black Label was a huge deal. Now, you don’t hear that many people thinking about it anymore.

Second, it is mystifying that none of the grading companies have yet decided to emulate the Black Label designation.

One reason is that no one is worried about competing with Beckett anymore. But if PSA or SGC (and this would perfectly suit their brand as meticulous garters) decided to make an equivalent, it would strip BGS of their one remaining advantage

SGC Gold Label

Indeed, SGC does have an equivalent: the SGC Gold Label designation. The SGC grading scale used to be 1-100, and if you got a 100, you would be considered pristine—a rare and very valuable distinction to have on your card.

Once they moved to a 1-10 scale to be more in tune with the competition, SGC turned the 100 into a Gold Label.

However, it has never taken on the significance of the Black Label in the hobby. This is partially because the holder is less attractive. Let’s get real; we are pretty superficial in the hobby. But also because they are far more rare than Black Label.

Indeed, they barely use it. According to the numbers at Gem Mint, SGC did not classify a single card from Topps Now as a Gold Label. Considering these are the easiest grade sports cards, that is alarming. In the past, the Gold Label levels were around 0.2%-0.3%. Now, it is not even reaching that threshold.

The unattractive package and the extreme rarity are currently stopping Gold Label from taking a bigger place in the hobby. They could easily change that. If PSA adopted something similar, it could destroy BGS for good.

What are people still submitting To BGS?

There is an outsized presence of Topps Now and Bowman U Now cards submitted to BGS. At least 10% of all sports cards submitted to them are from that release. Those cards have a reputation, well earned from what I have seen, for being printed well and with fewer flaws than most.

They tend to grade particularly well. You can see where this is going. If these cards are immaculate and well made, they are much more likely to receive Black Label marks from BGS.

This is a point that NEO Cards & Comics has backed up with an excellent use of the data. For example, he brings the 2023 Bowman U Caitlin Clark #49, commemorating her reaching 3,000 NCAA points.

It has an estimated print run of 47,962. Over the last 30 days, the Black Label version of this card went for around $150. Meanwhile, a Pristine 10 version of the card sells for around $70. Meanwhile, a PSA 10 goes for around $60.

That is a massive difference, and you can see why people would want to try to get a Black Label version of these cards. The Pristine Ten version is getting watered down by the prevalence of the Black Label grade in this space. A product of how (relatively) easy it is to get that grade here.

According to his analysis, Beckett is now building its business mainly on the back of Topps Now, and he says that “to me, that seems a little concerning.”

Chasing a Black Label

While getting a Black Label is always great, trying and getting one is not always efficient. It is, in most cases, a wild goose chase. There is a service that specializes in trying to get these grades.

However, it can be challenging to get. The values of Pristine BGS 10s are low. Therefore, your chances of getting your money’s worth when submitting to BGS aren’t that big.

Even your most packed fresh card from sports is unlikely to get this designation. The big exception is, as we have said, the Topps Now cards.

These are the top releases of all time in the Black Label category:

• 2022 Pokémon Scarlet and Violet Promos Japanese
• 2019 Pokémon Sword and Shield Japanese Promos
• 2023 One Piece Wings of the Captain Japanese
• 2022 Pokémon Sword and Shield High-Class Pack VSTAR Universe Japanese
• 2023 Topps Now Offseason
• 2021 Pokemon 25^th Anniversary Edition Promo Pack Japanese
• 2019 Pokemon Sun and Moon Hidden Fates Shiny Vault
• 2011 JUCO World Series Draftee
• 2022 Pokemon Sword and Shield High-Class Pack VSTAR Universe Japanese
• 2020 Pokemon Sword and Shield Champions Path

You can easily see that TCG is dominant here, and only one Topps Now release has begun to compete. There are only a few other sports releases near the top at getting the Black Label designation. They include:

• 2024 Topps Now Baseball
• 2001 Upper Deck Golf
• 2023 Topps Now Draft

Crunching Gem Rate numbers

There is no question that the Topps Now releases are vastly overrepresented here. If you look at the gem rates for Topps Now at the different companies, the picture becomes even clearer:

PSA – 83%

BGS – 92%

SGC – 71%

CGC – 74%

We can see that aside from the higher chance that you have at scoring a Black Label with the Topps Now cards, you also have a higher chance of getting a gem mint at BGS overall with Topps Now. They have a preference for this card, whether intentionally or not. These numbers make it clear why people submit many Topps Now cards to this grading company.

Here are your chances of getting different types of gem mint at BGS once they get a 10 from the company:

Gem – 41%

Pristine – 38%

Black Label – 14%

So remember that there is still a tiny chance of getting a Black Label designation. But it is not negligible. It’s 1.5 per ten-card order.

There is always a chance that BGS is intentionally giving a relatively large percentage of Topps Now cards Black Labels to maintain its business. But considering these cards generally look better, that seems unlikely.

The TCG entries for Beckett

It is no secret that Pokémon is the biggest TCG on the market and dominates submissions. One Piece has been gaining followers and collectors lately, and there has been a particular amount of excitement around Monkey D. Luffy.

However, it is still generally dwarfed by the sheer volume of Pokémon submissions. But interestingly, the data for BGS is quite different from that of the other grading companies. At PSA, 77% of all TCG cards are Pokémon items, while only 9% are One Piece.

Meanwhile, at SGC, the balance is even more one-sided. 87% of the TCG cards submitted there are Pokemon. Meanwhile, only 2% are One Piece. CGC, specializing in TCG cards, has a balance of 75% Pokemon and 2% One Piece.

However, BGS has created a significant niche for One Piece cards. At Beckett, Pokemon cards are only 44% of the TCG total and about half of the other graders. What is taking up the rest of the real estate?

Much of it goes to One Piece, which is 27% of the submissions. That is more than ten times as much percentage-wise as at CGC and SGC. That means that One Piece collectors are specifically targeting BGS for their submissions.

Why does all this matter? It shows that BGS relies on particular users in narrow categories looking to score a Black Label. As low as recent submissions to BGS have been, the number of people going there just because it’s their preferred grading company is a lot bigger.

Beckett has set the standards for Black Label for sports cards impossibly high. Even if it is a nicely made pack-pulled card, you will likely get a poor score on all subgrades. The process of putting them in a pack is enough to make the cards ineligible in most cases.

The turnaround problem

Every grading company’s turnaround can be unpredictable, but Beckett has developed a particularly bad reputation for that. Despite the occasional promise to fix the issue, it never seems to get better. If the complaints of the folks at Blowout Forums are to be believed, it has only gotten worse.

One user wrote, “What in the world has happened to BGS’s shipping department in the last few months? I just praised them a few posts ago on this thread about how much the grading time has improved (and this part is still true). But since then, my last order sat in the “graded – awaiting shipping” stage for about a week and a half. It’s not a huge deal. This stage had always taken less than 48 hours in the past, so I thought this order was just a minor fluke. My most recent order has been in that stage for over 2 weeks.

This erases all the positive progress they’ve made on turnaround time. There’s really no difference between your order getting graded in 2 weeks and then taking 2 weeks to ship compared to taking a month to get graded but then shipping the same day.”

Anther wrote on November 14^th, “2 Cards graded
Standard 20 – 25 Business Days

Received: 9/29/2024
Graded: 10/10/2024

And that’s it. No labels status, no population report update. Sent an email last week and have yet to receive a response. Will be using PSA going forward.”

There are better ways to win users back than that.

A final word on the woes of Beckett Grading

BGS is barely skating by. We are talking about what used to be the most important company in the hobby, known for its price guides.

But now they don’t seem to have a place. Relying primarily on Topps Now and One Piece cards to survive is not a path forward. Unless something changes there, do not be surprised if BGS closes shop.