The Curious Case of 1972 Harmon Killebrew...

[JollyElm]

Sorry, I just don't buy that the cards were improperly laid out causing them to be tilted on the sheets. Every time you see an old Topps uncut sheet, it is mathematically perfect. The one in this thread with the Killebrew card is such. A perfectly symmetrical layout in every sense. Someone could claim it looks like that because it was 'corrected,' but come on, that's a reach. I have never in my life even heard someone posit that theory until this thread.

At some point logic and simple common sense have to come into play when talking about miscut cards. What is the one thing we absolutely know about Topps? Their centering sucked!!! An outsider would say they didn't care what the cards looked like, they just wanted to get them out of the factory, into packs and shipped to the stores that sold them. There weren't problems with the alignment and lay out of the sheets, no, the problems came from the actual cutting process. Anyone can do a search on ebay for "1972 Topps" and see what an absolute joke that year was for quality control. Ignore the sellers who are only auctioning off nicely centered cards, and what you are left with is a very wide spectrum of off-centered and tilted cards. Choose whatever silly trope you want, Occam's Razor or "Think horses not zebras" and you reach the simple conclusion that the tilted and off centered cards are solely the result of the poor cutting processes Topps utilized. It couldn't possibly be any clearer.