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Posted By: Bob

One thing which causes confusion (especially to PSA when they grade them) is the term "blue back." Some collectors take this to mean the blue background cards and others believe this means the color of the printing on the back. This has caused a lot of mislabeled cards to be floating a round the hobby, especially in PSA holders because PSA has a hard time getting this right.
The M116s may be divided in to two categories: pastel backgrounds and blue backgrounds. The blue backgrounds are solid and refer to just that- the backgrounds (on the front) which surround the player's picture. Now, on the pastels, there is a series in which the printer used black ink on the back although almost all M116s have the blue ink-printed backs. Off the top of my head, you have cards like Tinker, Young, Devlin, Rucker, etc. which have the variation of having BOTH blue ink backs and black ink backs. (The Young card also has another variation because the picture of Cy was cropped differently on one of his cards and so you have the big head and little head variations. No jokes here please )
Most collectors have always assumed that the black ink print variations are the scarcer of the two but recent statistics tend to show it is the other way around: that on those handful of cards which exist with BOTH black and blue ink backs, the blue ink backs are the tougher, although you rarely see the price premium on them at auction because of so much misinformation and I suppose because very few of us actually collected both blue and black ink variations in trying to complete the master set.
This is all probably clear as mud but at least you won't have to shake your head in disbelief the next time you see an M116 encapsulated in a PSA holder which says "blue background" and the card is clearly a pastel with the back printed in blue ink. I have cracked a number of these out and submitted them to SGC or GAI.