Weird - the image looks identical from your graded sample to this image from the Card Cyber Museum - in other words no cropping differences. What this means (considering those borders ARE too wide) is that the image (including the artistic elements) was either printed smaller on this sample, or the card in the slab is larger than the standard size in both dimensions. Neither one seems plausible - I've never seen any other example of uniform image shrinking (though others here have far more experience than I), and if the card were that much bigger there would have been slabbing issues, to say nothing of the fact it would be a major miscut.
So the only thing I can conclude is that this is a reprint card and someone at BVG was really asleep at the switch. I have seen other Topps reprints over the years (1997 Willie Mays reprints in particular) that have a smaller image than the original.
Be interesting to see the reverse.
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