How important is centering to you

[jchcollins]

I will admit to biting hard on the centering trend when I first re-entered the hobby as an adult in my late 30's. But it seems I've lost more and more interest in that with every passing year. I've always been an image / focus / print quality person first and foremost, and at some point decided to quit trying to do everything. Also, the realization I keep going back to is that as a kid when I first discovered vintage cards - I couldn't have given less of a flip about centering. I didn't even know what it was at first. My first old card that I really cared about was a super sharp '66 Koufax that my mom paid about $15 or so for I'm guessing in about 1988. A few years back, I found a picture from my childhood that had my copy of that card in it, and I was shocked at how OC the card was left to right. Virtually zero left border, yet I never would have been able to tell you that during the time that I owned that copy. It wasn't something that even registered for me.

Increasingly as the hobby has become more "professional", and we find ourselves disillusioned with card doctors and graders and those who would pull the wool over our eyes, to me a poorly centered or miscut card just offers some additional possible visible authenticity protection that you don't have to get from a TPG or in some other fashion. All of the "Well, that's not how it was supposed to look..." logic to me is suspect at best; when did Topps or anyone else ever claim that cards were supposed to be a perfect 50/50 all the way around? They didn't. People speak of poor "quality control" as if it was even a thing for cards that were produced before 1980.

So my conclusion here is for me personally, but based on the direction that I think cognitive bias and groupthink have kind of led us down the road of expecting these things, cardboard ephemera, in many cases to be something they were never intended to be. Don't get me wrong, each unto his own. I love a dead-nuts centered card as much as the next guy - they are beautiful. If that is your thing, then more power to you. I just don't inherently hate the ones that didn't leave the factory that way and thusly can often be had for large bargains today as long as I still find them marginally attractive. As I am also interested in the "how" of card production - I understand OC / MC cards, and in some weird way I guess I have come to appreciate them.

Both of these cards probably set me back less than a third of the amount they would have cost raw had they been well centered. Both have good color and image quality. Works for me. Also, I love that you can see a sliver of the printer's mark that was on the sheet on the right side of the Reggie: