1971 Fleer Chop Chop??
 

Is this a trim job???

The 1971 Fleer World Series 'update' cards are really hard to find at a decent price. If you're unfamiliar with them, check out this cool blog posting I stumbled across (by net54 member Fleerfan):

https://fleersticker.blogspot.com/20...s-mystery.html

So I decided to spend a pretty penny on the tough 1975 card, and grabbed a PSA 9 OC, because it didn't look too far off to concern me. Straight 9's can go for crazy money. After I bought it, I ran across a PSA 8 card that looked real short top to bottom and a bit short side to side. When I checked the cert. numbers, I saw that the pair of cards were only 3 digits apart, meaning they were obviously sent in by the same submitter. I don't have a lot of info on whether or not these cards suffered from a lack of consistency with the sizing, but it does seem evident to me that MAYBE the one card was trimmed to avoid the OC scarlet letters (straight PSA 8's sell for a good deal of money)?? Not sure. Check out this animated gif I created. You may have to watch it a bunch of times for it to hit you how small the PSA 8 is...

https://i.imgur.com/ihBFtKz.gif

Focus on how similar the bottom border spacing is. It is almost exactly the same, so my guess is someone (possibly) took a hatchet to the top of the 8.

Thankfully, the card I bought looks quite snug in the holder, so I have no reason to believe any doctoring was involved.


Edited to add:

Here's a version that's focused on the colored image itself, showing the drastic size difference...

http://i.picasion.com/pic89/00711108...d371acd9b6.gif

neat the way you did the comparison, if the TPG companies would use the same technology maybe they could determine trimmed cards better

Nice pickup!

Having gone through likely a 1000+ of both the 70 and 71 Fleer WS cards over the years to build my two sets, I came across many higher and lower grade cards from both issues that were either long in one or both directions, the correct size, or finally short in one or both directions. I went through so many cards from each set to find examples that measured up , so that my sets would have properly sized cards.


The fact that both higher and lower grade examples had the varying sizes indicates to me that Fleer had some QC issues with their cutting during this time frame, and possibly into the later 70's when the last 7 cards were issued as discussed in the article. Is it possible that PSA realizes that these varying sizes are due to QC issues (versus trimming) and takes this into account when grading these Fleer WS cards?

I think OPC in the late 60s and early 70s might have had better QC than Fleer.

Thanks for your insight, Larry. It makes me happy that 'hopefully' there was nothing nefarious going on.

Love the time travel aspect of the flip!

Other than snagging the 71 Clemente WS card, I went with the later sticker backs for the other subjects from the extension series they ran off for a half dozen years. Those are tough man!

That Fleer blog is a great resource for us Fleer collectors. Right up there with Dave's Topps blog ... and the Lemke blog... as a resource

Thanks for the kind words about the blog! Glad it is a helpful resource as that was my intention.

I use Barry to supplement it a little :)

I had no idea it was a member's blog that I referenced. Great stuff!! Will edit the post to get your screen name properly credited.