Quote:
Originally Posted by marzoumanian
Unmasking altered sports cards is extremely difficult work. Just ask the fine people at Blowout Cards. Back in April 2019 they blew the whistle on the trimming of a raw 1952 Topps #311 Mickey Mantle card.
I’m not going to rehash the whole story. But this particular card had been trimmed and ended up being graded a 4.5 by PSA. More diligent work revealed that Long Island-based Gary Moser was behind these alternations.
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A few years back, I posted on the Blowhard forums. I was primarily only interested in the 'Grading' subforum, as I found the majority of the site to be mostly intolerable. Anyhow, it landed me on a lot of these altered card threads and I read through every page and post at the time (literally thousands of pages worth of posts on the topic with thousands of cards that were called out as being altered).
I was blown away by what I read. Not so much blown away by the fact that there are a lot of altered cards out there (duh), but rather I was surprised by just how easy it was for someone to post a card, make an obviously false claim about that card, and have seemingly EVERYONE believe that claim and perpetuate it into perpetuity. The 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle that you called out above is the most prominent example.
This card was absolutely not trimmed. 100% not trimmed. Yet somehow, nearly everyone there believed that it was simply out of ignorance (no offense intended, I just mean that word literally). You can measure the borders digitally and count the pixels (which I did). But you don't even need to do that. Hell, just look at it and look at identifying marks. They are all the same distance from the edge of the card in both the before and the after pics. So why do people believe that it was trimmed? It's because the edges look somewhat rough/dinged up in the before pic and they look nearly flawless in the after pic. But that doesn't mean the card was trimmed. This is where everyone on Blowhard got it wrong. The card was soaked in water and dried flat. It's clear as day. If you've ever soaked a vintage card, you'd know this instantly just by looking at the before and after pics. I pointed this out in that thread and just got absolutely sh*t on by nearly everyone there. Then they started following me around bullying me in every thread, accusing me of trimming cards, shilling for PSA and PWCC and whatever other nonsense they could come up with. That place is an absolute cesspool.
That's not to say that there weren't other cards that were uncovered as trimmed, because there definitely were a ton of cards that were, but there were also a lot of cards being posted that simply weren't altered at all. They really muddied the water.