[FrankWakefield]

Scot,

Good to see you're post, and to hear from you!

You've given me new descriptive words from that "in the wild" comment.

I have not ever cared for the term "raw" when thinking of the majority of my old cards. I thought of them as "normal" or "natural"... "ungraded."

And then there were those "slabbed" cards, or "graded", or "entombed".

Little did I know that what I have is both "wild" cards, and "confined" cards.


As to what your were describing, I'd think people could look at the 4 Cobb T206s and determine graded numbers, and then look at a few of the commons. Maybe do the same with the Cracker Jack cards of Cobb, Jackson, Wagner, and Mathewson; then look at a few commons. And then look at 1933 Goudey cards of Ruth and Gehrig... and a few commons. Those Cobb's, Ruth's and such are more likely to get graded.

It would realistically be true for the HOFers vs non HOFer commons. across the sets.


An aside... back in the day when we'd see binders holding tobacco cards, back when we weren't hesitant to touch them, I found that with a glance, most of us could easily see which ones were American Beauty cards without having to look at the back. AND, we could see uniformly rounded corners on a T206 and see that it had a flat surface (evidence of having been in a stack of such cards at some time), and we just knew that we were probably looking at a Series 150 card. Seems to me those cards got worn more than 350's, and again to 460's, because they were being caried around in the pockets of grubby little kids who weren't hesitant to handle them. There was something about looking at a sheet of 9,15, or 20 of those cards that allowed us to discern those differences.