Off-centered cards you love anyway...

[jchcollins]

Originally Posted by BigRedMachine1969

Great thread. Glad to see so many others not terribly bothered by centering issues.

I don't like miscuts or some "close to miscut" sliver borders. But for most vintage cards, it seems like a good many of them came out of the pack at least moderately OC, like 70/30 or so one way. While I can understand that we would all want 50/50 perfect cards if we had magic wands and that were easily attainable, what I don't understand is why mild to moderately OC cards are automatically shunned anymore here in the 21st century. Sure, if you have an eye for grading, maybe something goes off in your brain and you realize "Hey, this card isn't mint..." but that doesn't mean it's 100% ugly either. That's how they were issued, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that.

I think today's level of centering scrutiny is largely a con job pulled over on many of us in the hobby by professional grading companies. Think about it. Where in a spec for Topps or Bowman back in the day did it ever say that a card HAD to be perfectly centered? It didn't, because they were never intended to be perfect. In reality, not only did Topps QC not throw out OC cards, they didn't throw out most badly MC cards either.

To me anymore, cards in midgrade that still look nice and are not perfectly centered are just offering more proof that they are not doctored / altered here in the 21st century, because they look the way that many of them looked back decades ago. If I can pick them up at a discount because of that - well then so be it.