This blog will be about grading, but may wind up being broken into about 20 different blogs through the next couple months because there's so much to talk about. Aside from the endless questions about card grading, there's also bat grading, signature grading, photos, etc.

First, I started writing this one with the intent to focus on grading signed baseballs through PSA/DNA. Do you grade them or not? It's obvious that if the ball is a modern signature and the ball has smudges all over it and is yellowed, you don't grade it. Or if you've got a snow-white Babe Ruth-signed ball with a perfect signature, you get it graded. Everything else is a gray area. How about a Pete Rose single-signed baseball that's a perfect signature on a perfect baseball?

There's a $20 authentication fee along with a $15 grading fee so you've already got $35 into it. Looking at last year's auction results, PSA/DNA Gem Mint 10 graded baseballs sold for the following amounts: $120, $131, $84, $94 and $49. A PSA 9.5 also sold for $40. Sure, some of this depends on the auction house, but it appears that you'd have to get a 10 on it in order to make it worthwhile. His ungraded balls go for $30-$50. We know that with card grading, this is not easy and when you are banking on a 10 to make something worthwhile, it's usually not worth it, especially with the upside only being $100.

Let's look at Barry Bonds now. An ungraded Bonds ball sells in the $150-$200 range. A PSA 9 sells in the same range. A PSA 9.5 sells in the $200-$250 range, while a perfect Gem Mint 10 jumps all the way up to roughly $300, but can go for a lot more. Thirteen results that I can quickly find in our database yield the following final prices: $287, $263, $263, $359, $448, $418, $287, $263, $311, $335, $359, $313 and $417. That's an average of $333. Bonds authentication fee is $30, plus the $15 for grading so it seems like a great $45 risk if you think your signed ball is that nice. What's your take?

It's also worth mentioning that PSA/DNA has a new fee schedule for authentication. Guys like Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Joe Montana and John Elway that used to cost $75 are now $20-$25. Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Nolan Ryan, Rose and Ernie Banks were all $50 before and are now $20. Makes the whole thing a lot more tempting with less risk.