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...
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...
