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PD? PD??? P-effing-D??????????
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I just bought this 1964 Topps Giants Mickey Mantle graded PSA 8 (PD)...
Attachment 326682 ...and I can't for the life of me figure out what the PD refers to. I've looked this Mick over a thousand times in the clear California sunlight and still have no idea what the fine folks at PSA were thinking. (My scanner doesn't have that graded card component, so the pics aren't clear as day, but they should be adequate enough.) The white mark on his hat brim is on every one of these cards, so it's not that, and the back is perfectly clean. On extremely close examination, there are a few tiny bits of snow to the upper right of his hat, a couple next to his Adam's apple and to the right of his shoulder. Any and all of the snow really only comes through in the scan. In reality (without the power of the scanner) they are virtually non-existent. Could those be the 'problem'? To say they are unnoticeable is the understatement of the century, but I am at a complete loss. I truly believe the graders struck out on this one. Help!! Does anyone see something that I'm missing??? Anyone??? Bueller??? |
print defect
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Is the blue print in the baseball blurry or is it the scan?
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Yes, snow can qualify as PD.
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Looks correctly graded to me there is clearly a large area of “snow” to the right of his hat. This is still a nice looking card would probably have a value around that if a psa 6 give or take a couple dollars.
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Yowza, if those 6 or 7 microscopic pieces of snow represent 'PD,' I am going to grab up as many PD cards as I can!!!
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It's also a very old grade. You may want to crack and resubmit. I doubt it would get the PD today.
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sure, PD would be the annotation for significant snow if there was, but of all the annotations, PD is perhaps the most subjective, and I think defined by how much it takes away from overall 'curb appeal' (sorry, wife was watching HGTV and my brain is mush and can't think of an equivalent phrase that I mean for cards).
On this card, I would agree with you that the snow effect is barely noticeable--unlike if there were a bunch of giant fish eyes covering the face or something very distracting like that... What bothers me more on these is the 'line' along the bottom, which is present seemingly in half of these and not in the other. I don't suppose that is deemed a PD for the issue, given that there are two 9s right now on ebay that have the same line effect. |
I 'discovered' that 1964 Topps Giants Mantle variation (and others) in a thread here a couple of years ago. I remember thinking how bizarre it was that nobody noticed it before. The cropping of the picture is different in the two versions. And I agree with you, there's no way that line area accounts for the PD.
Edited to add: Found it: http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=218122 |
Yeah it's the snow, but that's kind of harsh in my opinion. Nice card.
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naturally I'm not holding it, but from those scans I agree with whoever before suggested sending it back for re-grade.
To the extent that PD is shorthand for 'something that makes a card look substantially uglier than it otherwise should', I agree that your side by side comparison shows there is simply no sensible attribution of PD to the card on the right. |
except that the side-by-side scan merely fails to show the snow visible in the original scan. Presumably the card itself looks like what is shown in the first scan, which does exhibit snow.
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Just to clarify, the first shot is zoomed in via my phone in an attempt to determine what the PD designation could possibly be referring to. The second shot (seemingly matching the one it's compared to) is a straight-on scan with no photoshop retouching work done except for the 3 standard moves: auto tone, auto contrast, and auto color, to correct for the limitations of the scanner. It shows exactly what the card looks like and you would never even see the tiny, tiny bit of snow. It is basically imperceptible. I still say they just flat out messed up, printing the wrong label or something. Perhaps, like someone noted, it was the way PSA graded cards in their earlier days?
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Short for Punking Darren.
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