Weird 1967 Willie Mays Anomaly(?)
 

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark...

A while back, I showed how a few 1962 green tint numbers 'always' appear thinner than normal, and it was clearly due to the cutting process at the factory and not a mass trimming operation undertaken by collectors from all across the country (LOL). Well, recently I was looking at a decently priced 1967 #200 Willie Mays card and I saw it was swimming in the PSA holder. It was way short side to side, and that gave me great pause to buy it. Perhaps someone PWCC'ed it?? I dunno, so I began looking at all the PSA versions of the card on ebay (none of these are mine and I have no idea who is selling them), and to my great surprise I saw that the vast majority of them (clearly over 90%) were short side to side. The amount of space varies, but the same anomaly occurs across all grades. Does anyone have any insight into this situation? (Assuming the PSA slabs are all the perfect size) If the cards were all cut thin, then other cards in the Mays column/row should suffer from the same malady. I haven't looked into it.

These screen grabs might not be large enough to clearly tell, but every single one of them has the card definitively short side to side (and this was just a quick ebay and auction prices realized search, not an in-depth investigation whatsoever)...

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43085306 is actually my card and it's not swimming in the holder. I can't speak to the others :)

And people will believe what they want but this card was purchased from the Card Collectors Co, back in 1967. Sat in a shoebox till around 1980 where it was transferred to a plastic sheet. It sat in the plastic sheet until Jan 2019 when I picked up the collection in Kansas City from a man who collected it as a youth, kept it with a 67 Giant team set (in the plastic pages). I sent it for grading and that is the complete history of the card.

Again, people will be what they wish but the knowing the history of the card is really cool to me. Especially in these times. Carry on!

I don't know about this Mays specifically as I only have 1 copy of this card to compare (it is very slightly undersized, low grade crap condition that I can't imagine anyone would trim), but this is normal. I've noticed many 50's/60's cards tend to run slightly small or large (I would presume the cards location on the sheet is why that specific card tends to run one way or the other). If you take a stack of cards, almost no 2 are exactly the same dimensions if you look very closely or have the ability to measure to small fractions of inches/millimeters. Taking out my 2018 Topps, even with today's tighter factory tolerances, they are all ever so slightly different heights, enough to see with the human eye in good light if you get up close.


If I may say so, I think this is largely why the grading companies struggle with ID'ing trimming - any tolerance based on card size (no matter how you set it) will miss some trimmed cards and falsely ID cards that aren't actually trimmed.

I hope people aren't mistaking what I am saying. It seems pretty obvious that a good number/percentage of these cards came out of the factory thin side to side. It seems a real stretch to believe that they were all trimmed. Certainly one here and there has been trimmed by someone trying to game the system, but I think there was clearly a cutting problem at the printers/Topps plant.

I have 3 raw 1967 Mays (NFS) that were taken directly from freshly opened cello packs at an early 70s card show in NY. Two of the 3 are just slightly short, but not to the extent that they would "swim" in a holder.

You could be right, but why does it matter? PSA will not grade any short cards if they actually take a second to measure it. If they didn't, they have obviously graded some trimmed aspects as well sadly.

I have personally been minsizerq'd numerous times, but always just send it back in with next order in a fresh CS 1, and it typically has graded the second time.

I recently bought a decent '59 Topps Koufax #163 raw at my LCS. It would be maybe a 4 or 5 if graded.

I was surprised when I got it home and was going to put it in a one touch, that it wouldn't fit into any I had...it is just a hair too tall. Like Maybe a 16th of an inch. I compared it to several other '59 commons in my collection and it bears out the height thing. I guess it's just the way it was cut - it's obviously real and I'm guessing it would be pretty improbable that anyone would have "altered" the card to make it bigger...

-John

Darren, also with your '67 Mays example -

Some may appear to be "swimming" in the PSA slab because they have tilt or a slight diamond cut. Both are incredibly common on '67 Topps. I do buy into your theory however that microscopic differences in size are also very common. Cards that "swim" in a TPG holder for whatever reason are one of my biggest pet peeves. It's just the annoyance of seeing them move more than any fear that they will get damaged that bugs me most, but I will generally liberate a card from any slab if it moves too noticeably. Toploaders and penny sleeves and you don't have that problem...

Call this one Literal Tommy John Surgery...

I ran across another obvious anomaly that is most likely the result of poor cutting practices at Topps, because once again it is hard to believe that all of these cards were independently sliced short side to side by wannabe card doctors. The last card in the 1967 set, #609 Tommy John, is overwhelmingly found to be short side to side and swimming in the holders (as usual, the uploaded scans make some of them hard to see, but each is too thin). Check it out...

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