1971 Topps Baseball Set Collectors- Card Centering Question

[JollyElm]

One that definitely flies under the radar in the world of tough-to-find-centered cards (at a cheap price, I mean) is the knuckling Hall of Famer, #248 Hoyt Wilhem.

[jchcollins]

Originally Posted by JollyElm

One that definitely flies under the radar in the world of tough-to-find-centered cards (at a cheap price, I mean) is the knuckling Hall of Famer, #248 Hoyt Wilhem.

I checked and my #248 was mostly spared by the centering gods for whatever reason…




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[inceptus]

Beckett used to publish a magazine called Graded Card Investor & Price Guide, and back in 2007 they did a nice data-rich piece on graded 1971 cards.

They focused on heavily/moderately/sparsely submitted cards, and among other things looked at tough cards within those respective cohorts. Within those tough card groups I suspect you'll see a lot of the cards that are difficult to find well-centered. (Claude Raymond was/is one of the more-notorious examples.)

Of course the data is almost 20 years old (!) at this point, but it's sill an interesting and potentially relevant read.

[Tere1071]

I made a list of approximately 75 cards that I found to be a bit more difficult to find centered. I'm not going to list all of the cards on my list, but here are some of them:

131 Blefary
133 Lolich
141 Quilici
187 Abernathy
246 Taylor
320 McNally
351 B. Williams
351 Shellenback
377 Garrett
451 Keough
513 Ryan
537 Egan
539 Brown
557 Satriano
564 Fitzmorris
568 Campisi
577 Lonborg
580 T. Perez
585 W. Davis
608 Wegener
617 Darymple
632 Jarvis
634 Regan
635 Murcer
650 Allen
651 Robertson
681 Butler
719 J. May
727 Lamb
734 Gardener
735 Shannon
750 McClain

More information to follow tomorrow PST.

Good night.

Phil aka Tere1071

[jimq16415]

I might just be unlucky but all of my 536 claude raymond are off-center. Long time ago I tried to upgrade and everything I found was also bad.

[rjackson44]

nice copies are getting more expensive

[Tere1071]

Last night I began to ponder that virtually every year of Topps has cards that are condition sensitive that will command a higher price in near-mint to mint condition. Then what makes the 71 Topps Baseball cards more unique? The black border presents its own challenge, but that would affect virtually every card in the set.

Since there's a challenge in finding the best card possible under budget constraints and that the 71 is one of my favorite sets that I'm trying to tweak a bit, I wondered if other collectors have run into similar issues. If I had the purchasing power to assemble a registry set, centering wouldn't be much of an issue, and I don't think that I would spend that amount of money to get the perfect Bobby Murcer anyways. I spent less than $30 each for my Munson and Ryan cards, any improvements will cost far more that my initial expense and I'd still be far from perfection.

I still prefer sharper corners over 50/50 centering, but there's that drive to better some of the harder cards to find centered. So, I'm going to post some of the examples from my set to illustrate my point. Please feel free to share examples from your collections.

Phil aka Tere1071