T206 Marquard Armpit 8 Variation

[Al C.risafulli]

This was a really frustrating revelation for me, and further evidence that THE HOBBY NEEDS A STANDARD CATALOG, and whichever entity currently owns it and is not publishing it should hand the assets over to the SABR Baseball Card committee so that they can take ownership and resume publishing it. There is currently nowhere to report discoveries like this.

A T206 collector who participates on this board brought this card to LOTG back in 2017, with a number of scans of other examples, and asked if we could help him get the card catalogued, and then sell it for him.

We did a little more research on our own, read Mr. Lemke's writing about it, and then presented all our findings to the Standard Catalog. The Standard Catalog publishers (SCD, at the time) agreed that it was a legit variation and advised me of their plan to begin including it with the 2018 edition of the catalog.

Based on this, PSA agreed to begin recognizing the variation and slabbed the example that we sold (which is linked in one of the posts above).

Of course, the Standard Catalog has not published since 2017, no 2018 version was ever produced, and in the seven years that have elapsed, PSA has not been consistent about slabbing this variation (I know of two examples that were submitted and the variation was not noted, because it was not catalogued).

I wrote about this on our blog one year ago here: https://loveofthegameauctions.com/th...ndard-catalog/

In the meantime, we are about to post about yet another discovery that changes the information in the Standard Catalog. There's nowhere to report these discoveries that dozens of collectors make each year - new errors, variations, new additions to checklists, discoveries about the origins of various sets. There is no longer a single hobby "Bible" that serves as the clearing house for this knowledge, and the hobby is much worse off for it.

Anyway, the "Red 8" is a legit variation.

-Al