1989 Fleer Randy Johnson #381 Marlboro Errors - 30 Years Later

[bnorth]

Here are the 3 different green scribble versions. Anybody else have all 3 versions?

[Hatorade]

There was a previous thread about these cards and someone mentioned the 1985 mother’s cookies cards that had the Marlboro ad edited from a couple of them. I wanted to include those images from Jack Murphy Stadium here since that has become part of the topics being discussed in this thread. Also pictured is a more modern card, of an old image, of Randy pictured in front of another almost complete image of a Marlboro ad. More info coming soon.

[bnorth]

Originally Posted by Hatorade

There was a previous thread about these cards and someone mentioned the 1985 mother’s cookies cards that had the Marlboro ad edited from a couple of them. I wanted to include those images from Jack Murphy Stadium here since that has become part of the topics being discussed in this thread. Also pictured is a more modern card, of an old image, of Randy pictured in front of another almost complete image of a Marlboro ad. More info coming soon.

Those are cool, thanks for sharing.

[steve5838]

Originally Posted by hatorade

there was a previous thread about these cards and someone mentioned the 1985 mother’s cookies cards that had the marlboro ad edited from a couple of them. I wanted to include those images from jack murphy stadium here since that has become part of the topics being discussed in this thread. Also pictured is a more modern card, of an old image, of randy pictured in front of another almost complete image of a marlboro ad. More info coming soon.

That is really cool. Thanks for sharing the pictures. On a somewhat similar note, I cropped the Marlboro sign from the stadium picture on your FB page and pasted over top of it a cropped scan of the sign on the clear version. I could make the clear sign version look a little lighter by putting it under better light but I didn't. Anyway, then I increased the transparency little by little on the clear sign card picture. My idea was to make a GIF of this and maybe using other versions too but I haven't figured that out. Steve

rj4.JPG

[steve5838]

I wanted to circle back on the two light blue box stencil cards I referenced in post #249. I was able to get a few $50 PSA submissions and couldn't resist getting these slabbed. PSA just returned the cards. Overall nothing unexpected. PSA disagreed with me and both got the "Ad Partially Obscured" label.
Steve

rjblueboxdefault_fullcolor_clarity.jpgrjblueboxdefault2_fullcolor_clarity.jpg

[Hatorade]

What is usually a simple answer for 99.9% of cards is a problem too much of the time for PSA with the Marlboro error variations.

Let’s start with what should be an easy question. What is this card? Let’s say you own a 1989 Fleer Randy Johnson card and you ask yourself this simple question. According to PSA what is this card?

For pretty much any sports card ever produced you can answer this simple question by naming a few characteristics about the card. What player is on the card? What manufacturer produced the card? What year was the card produced? What is the card #? For the vast majority of cards ever made this will give you the answer for what card this is according to PSA.

Those questions don’t answer which of the above three variations the card is according to PSA. So what does PSA do to determine which of the versions they will label the card? Has anyone ever seen the definition of Ad on Scoreboard or Ad Partially Obscured or Ad Completely Blacked Out according to PSA? They’ve been using these labels for several years. With some of the biggest Marlboro collectors contributing to this thread I would think someone here could let me know the definition of each according to PSA?

[Athos01]

PSA is very inconsistent with grading these for sure. I have many that would be classified as ad obscured that were marked as blacked out.

I would tend to say that if the Marlboro words are legible (usually with only a lighter red tinting), PSA usually will call it Marlboro Ad on Scoreboard, especially if there is no dark red box covering the ad.

Any green tints/scribbles usually seem to be labeled Marlboro Ad Obscured, and if it stands out clearly to PSA, a dark green box covering the ad will also get this same label.

This is similar to all the Ripken varieties, PSA does not seem to want to identify all the different varieties, and only identifies 5 different, whiteout, white scribble, black box, black scribble and FF.

[hockeyhockey]

Originally Posted by Hatorade

What is usually a simple answer for 99.9% of cards is a problem too much of the time for PSA with the Marlboro error variations.

Let’s start with what should be an easy question. What is this card? Let’s say you own a 1989 Fleer Randy Johnson card and you ask yourself this simple question. According to PSA what is this card?

For pretty much any sports card ever produced you can answer this simple question by naming a few characteristics about the card. What player is on the card? What manufacturer produced the card? What year was the card produced? What is the card #? For the vast majority of cards ever made this will give you the answer for what card this is according to PSA.

Those questions don’t answer which of the above three variations the card is according to PSA. So what does PSA do to determine which of the versions they will label the card? Has anyone ever seen the definition of Ad on Scoreboard or Ad Partially Obscured or Ad Completely Blacked Out according to PSA? They’ve been using these labels for several years. With some of the biggest Marlboro collectors contributing to this thread I would think someone here could let me know the definition of each according to PSA?

it's a great question and PSA may not even know the answer to it themselves.

i have a bunch of them, all that you can certainly see the marlboro sign. and all of them are ad obscured. i've seen tons of them online that are marlboro on scoreboard that look like they barely have the sign on it. i'm at a shoulder shrug with this at this point, but would love to hear anyone else that knows more about it.

[steve5838]

Originally Posted by Hatorade

What is usually a simple answer for 99.9% of cards is a problem too much of the time for PSA with the Marlboro error variations.

Let’s start with what should be an easy question. What is this card? Let’s say you own a 1989 Fleer Randy Johnson card and you ask yourself this simple question. According to PSA what is this card?

For pretty much any sports card ever produced you can answer this simple question by naming a few characteristics about the card. What player is on the card? What manufacturer produced the card? What year was the card produced? What is the card #? For the vast majority of cards ever made this will give you the answer for what card this is according to PSA.

Those questions don’t answer which of the above three variations the card is according to PSA. So what does PSA do to determine which of the versions they will label the card? Has anyone ever seen the definition of Ad on Scoreboard or Ad Partially Obscured or Ad Completely Blacked Out according to PSA? They’ve been using these labels for several years. With some of the biggest Marlboro collectors contributing to this thread I would think someone here could let me know the definition of each according to PSA?

What is this card? My vote is that it is a card with a range of parallel versions (something I've heard others express and that just seems to fit my perception). My uneducated guess is that it was targeted for correction very early on due to the clarity and boldness of the sign in the clear version. I don't believe the sign would have been an issue on any of the tinted ones, but the clear sign is really in your face in comparison. I can imagine someone in quality control looking at the cards after an initial print run, seeing the clear sign on this particular card, and saying something like ok, we have to do something to take the focus away from the Marlboro sign here... if they had noticed the FF at this point the history of that card would be quite different too.

I don't think the TPG's have a standard process in place for assigning their label descriptions to this card. I don’t know how it actually works at PSA but here is my theory on why labeling for this card has not improved and may actually be been getting worse. We know there are at least 3 clear examples that have been graded by PSA. Around the same time the last one was graded (around September 2021), I saw a bunch more otherwise "Ad on Scoreboard" cards labeled "Partially Obscured"... and yes, I bought these up. My thought is that if a PSA grader's reference is the clear version all others look somewhat Obscured (particularly if there isn't a standard process they follow for identifying the version, e.g., holding under a given light brightness or scanning under the same settings, etc.). I'm wondering if during the "research" stage their staff searches online, sees all these photos of the 3 known clear cards (which for better or worse now appear much more often in web searches) and incorrectly assumes this clear card is the "typical" Ad on Scoreboard version.

While other versions try to correct the ERR of the Marlboro sign in different ways and to varying degrees the clear one has no correction applied at all. I believe it would be helpful if the label on the card better reflected the version of the card so that population numbers would be available for this particular “no-tint” version. If it would help operationalize things at the TPG's I'm actually in favor of some aggregation of versions with labels with something like: 1. No tint, 2. Blue Tint, Red Tint, Green Tint, 5. Low Tint, 6. Scribble, 7. Red Stencil, 8. BLUE Stencil, 9. Partially Obscured, 10. Completely Obscured. I agree this will likely never happen but dream it could. I've tried unsuccessfully for some time to get PSA to let me add a "set" of the Ad on Scoreboard variations but unfortunately to them everything with this label is just the same card.

Steve

[steve5838]

Case in point for buying the card and not the label -- particularly for this card. I'm not sure how anyone could label this one as Ad Obscured. Regardless I'm very happy with the non-preferred label discount.