About

Hi, I’m Mark Marino

I run Hub City Collectibles 617 on eBay and I built CrackorKeep. I grew up in the ’80s and started collecting sports cards just before the junk wax era — and like a lot of collectors my age, I hauled boxes and binders of thousands of cards from house to house for decades before finally sitting down to sift through all of them in early 2025. It turned out to be one of the most nostalgic stretches of my life.

The card that matters most isn’t the most valuable one. It’s a 1985 Topps USA Baseball Mark McGwire my aunt gave me when I was a kid home sick with mono. I had it graded years later — it came back a BGS 6 — and it’s still my favorite and most sentimental piece in the collection. These days, as a lifelong hockey player and fan, I mostly buy, sell, and collect hockey cards. The grail chase is a Connor McDavid Young Guns.

On the professional side, I’ve spent more than a decade in digital marketing and SEO — which is probably the only reason a card guy ended up building an app instead of just complaining about the problem.

Why I Built CrackorKeep

After one too many submissions came back as 7s and 8s, I started using AI to double-check cards before paying to grade them. It helped — but the answers were inconsistent, and I wanted something that would give a realistic estimate every time and actually pinpoint the issue: the centering, the corner, whatever was going to cost the grade.

So I built it. CrackorKeep looks at the same four things a professional grader looks at — centering, corners, edges, surface — and tells you what it sees before you spend money on the real thing. I’m constantly evolving and improving the tool, and I hope you find it as useful as I do.

Why Trust the Estimates?

Fair question — the internet is full of tools that promise more than they deliver. CrackorKeep’s grading logic is built on the publicly documented standards from PSA, CGC, BGS, and SGC, and tuned against how professional graders actually evaluate cards, not guesswork. And I use it the same way I tell everyone else to: as a first look, not a final answer. It’s not a replacement for an official grade, and the site says so on every page.

The blog works the same way. Every price, turnaround time, and grading standard we publish gets verified against current sources and dated, because grading economics in 2026 change fast enough that last quarter’s numbers can cost you real money.

Outside of Cards

I’m a Massachusetts native, born and raised — the 617 in the shop name isn’t an accident. The highlight of every year is our family summer vacation to Maine: my wife, our three kids, and our dog, Boston.

Find Me

I love feedback — the tool gets better because people send it.

• CrackorKeep questions or feedback: [email protected]
• My eBay store: Hub City Collectibles 617