Anyone know anything - 1964 Ed Mathews blue line

[Cliff Bowman]

Not surprisingly the Mathews was on the right edge of the sheet and on one of the Slits in the bottom right corner, it was probably the one in the bottom right corner that had the blue bar too close to it before the printers realized it and corrected it.

[mikemb]

It is listed on Richard Dingman's variation listing.

Mike

[G1911]

Originally Posted by Cliff Bowman

Not surprisingly the Mathews was on the right edge of the sheet and on one of the Slits in the bottom right corner, it was probably the one in the bottom right corner that had the blue bar too close to it before the printers realized it and corrected it.

This is where the hobby boundaries start to make no sense to me. I agree entirely with this theory, it seems to clearly be what happened. This is an intentional change creating a variation, but this card is almost certainly always going to be bucketed into the recurring print defect group. A lot of these cards are more likely variations, just ones most don’t care about and the $$$ companies don’t recognize. Sometimes it’s clearly a recurring defect, sometimes it’s clearly a variation, and a lot of the time we don’t really know.

[ALR-bishop]

Agreed in most cases we will likely never know. The 55 Purkey you mentioned recently in the Variations thread is a another good example. There always seems to be either a very visible blue dot or a less visible greenish dot. Did they attempt to make the blue dot defect less noticeable ? Who knows?

In the 63 Bombers Best Card did someone at some point try to make the bat handle in Mantle's crotch look less obvious ?

Trying to limit the definition of a true variation to an intentional change in the card only solves things if you can always tell when an intentional change was made....unless you limit it to situations where there is no doubt the change was intentional, like the 59 trade/option cards