Posted By:
Al C.risafulliGil, I didn't always buy into the centering concept, either. It seemed silly to me to focus on finding well-centered cards when miscuts were the norm in vintage baseball. And while I'll still pick one up once in a while, the best examples I can give are from the '38 Goudey set. Here are two cards with the same grade:
Despite the fact that the second card is much more toned and has a weird spot on the upper right corner (that is not paper loss), I was happy to obtain it. The first card was sold on eBay earlier this year, and I did not bid very strong.
This particular card, for some reason, is a bitch to find without weird centering and that left-to-right tilt. Although I've never seen a high-number uncut sheet, if the sheet is identical to the low-number sheet, this card was layed out in the upper-left corner of the sheet. I suspect that it was layed out slightly crooked on the sheet. As such, it almost always has that funky tilt.
Finding a well-centered version - and I've owned two now - was like finding a buried treasure to me. The one I own now (the one on the right) is still tilted, but it's probably the best example of the card that I've seen, centering-wise. When cards from this issue are off-center, I wince. They look so much nicer when the image is positioned properly on the center of the card.
In my opinion.
-Al