December Pick ups

[MattyC]

Originally Posted by jchcollins

Nice card. Finding that one centered well is quite a chore, I've learned after nearly 30 years of collecting. I once had an example that was a solid NM or better, but centered L-R probably a tad worse than yours. Mainly because of that, I didn't hang on to it. Years later, I kind of wish I had because the color on it was really beautiful, and in my old age I'm trying to be a bit more tolerant with things like centering for my personal collection. (It's staggering this day in age when you can quickly look at many different examples of a single card for sale on eBay just how damn many of them are centered poorly - in some cases it's like 80% of the cards for sale outside of PSA 8's and above...and anymore those aren't always even centered that nicely unqualified for some issues). Anyhow - always thought the '57 Mick was one of the neater looking ones - but they are indeed a bear to find centered (and diamond cuts are pretty common too...) or without at least some type of moderate print damage.

Great analysis of the 57 Mick, and jives with my experience as well. As someone who's been collecting pretty much only Mantle basic cards for a year now, I'm continually amazed by how his cards across the board are so often poorly centered, or with specific print defects, making nice ones very hard to find-- in any grade.

For every ten examples I see of a given Mick...sometimes zero are centered. For the 57, few are focused with crisp print, for that 1960 card, whew, a slew of print issues alongside centering, the 67 has that red dot on almost every example above the 'S' in YANKEES, the 53B and 54B cards feel like they show up centered .00000001% of the time, LOL, we've discussed the 51B here, which is infamously hard, the others all have their similar issues-- it all makes assembling a nice run quite the challenge.