Post-War PSA Grading

[steve B]

Originally Posted by jchcollins

I am sure there are subtle things that in reality influence such decisions. What I am saying is that per the PSA standard, there shouldn't be a difference between a 9 and a 10 directly tied to the manufacturing process. As to why some mint cards are 9's and some (in some cases way less than what is expected) are 10's - that as a judgement of eye appeal of an "already mint" card should not have anything to do with the manufacturing process. An improvement upon "mint" (the 10) is a subjective, qualitative, 21st century eyeball judgment. The manufacturing process from the 1960's or earlier can't get to that. It can just get to mint. PSA's marketing / magic wand waving is responsible for anything further.

I will concede thusly: IF there is an aspect from manufacturing that leads a card to receive a 10 over a 9 (centered 3-5% better, registration 3% better, whatever) then ok, but that still does not explain the discrepancy as to why there are only twenty-five '80 Rickey Hendersons in a 10 vs. commons from the same set where the percentage of 10's is in the pop is easily higher.

I guess my overall argument is that I believe in a majority of cases - that a 10 Gem Mint is a fallacy. Take all the PSA 9's, pick whatever percentage of cards of the whole, and give them 10's. I bet that 99% of the people wouldn't be able to objectively point out the difference, or why this card is a 9 and that one is a 10.

I can agree with many of those points.

I could explain more precisely why those small differences would only apply to one card on one sheet, but it would be a long boring thing. If you want it I'll write it, but I suspect not. hardly anyone likes long boring stuff.
The printing done in 1980 was not much different from that done in 1960. I doubt Topps got more modern tech until probably 1992. (And the tech would be incredibly similar to printing in the early 1930's some stuff just didn't change much. )

Thinking about the pretty crazy ratio, I went and checked the SGC pop report. They have about a 24:1 ratio. Which almost convinces me, since I looked at the other star cards on SGC, and the 9:10 ratios are almost universally worse. They really don't seem to like giving a 10 to anything. But with the much smaller sample size, it's hard to really compare.