First two years of Baseball Card Collecting

[Alaskanmade]

I just remembered another thing thats been on my mind.

When it comes to condition most of the criteria for evaluating a card is the same regardless of what kind of card you are collecting. However the one area where there is a huge difference is when it comes to miscut cards.

With a TCG (Trading Card Game) if a card is off center most people do not really care (with the obvious exception of people who send cards to be graded), and when a card is miscut it actually becomes many more times desire-able, and can increase its value by a factor of 10x to 100x.

In vintage baseball cards off-center cards are significantly less desirable then another card in the same condition, and if they are miscut it can cut its value by half or more.

The often stated rationale behind this being that from 1900 - 1940 quality control of baseball cards was very sloppy, and the number of miscut cards is quite high. Compared to TCG's which had much better quality control, and you get the difference in price.

When checking the PSA population report, it is easy to see that this is at least partly true. Looking at T206 cards, around 6% of each card graded has a qualifier. Looking at the PSA pop report for a notible Vintage TCG (MTG) you can see around 1% of cards include a qualifier. There are problems with this direct comparison of course including regrading, the relative popularity of grading between hobbies, what cards are selected for grading, only using PSA information as a reference, and the the other qualifiers which are not Offcenter and Miscut. However based on personal experience buying TCG cards I can contest directly to the rarity of miscuts, and the rarity of offcenter cards.

Regardless of this in both vintage baseball cards and MTG, miscut cards are "rare". In MTG they are very rare, and in vintage baseball cards, they are rare-ish. My guess is that the relative level of rarity is what makes one a desirable oddity, and one a defect.

I bought a T205 Walter Johnson graded PSA 4 with a miscut you cant see from the front, for less than %50 of what it should have sold for. Long story short, if anyboday had a PSA graded misscut T205 Cobb send me a PM