1977 Topps Ron Guidry PSA 9
Yankees70
Posts: 804 ✭✭✭✭
Card just sold on EBAY for $1136.
This has been an extremely hard card to find in PSA 9 (only 24 PSA 9's in existence). As a Yankee fan I'm trying to get every superstar Yankee in PSA 9 condition for the sets I opened and collected as a kid (1975-1980). I returned to collecting three years ago after being out of the hobby for over two decades and only once have I seen this card for sale. I was hoping to win the auction tonight but the card sold for over double of the previous sale. Plus the top right corner does not look that great.
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Comments
I find it unusual that you would criticize a card you were trying to win. Nonetheless, an uphill battle to get what the Registry warriors will overpay to own a label. The price won’t go down if another nice example pops up, if recently graded (the one above wasn’t) the bidding will be nuts.
Farewell Ryno.
That card for nearly all submitters is a 7 today
It's the singer not the song - Peter Townshend (1972)
Love that card and hope you get one. Getting high grades in that set is super tough these days. Such bad cardboard, miscuts and angled cuts.
Lightning is one of my all time favorites.
I don't think its a legit 9 which is why I did not bid that high. Not sure why that's unusual. Have you ever passed on a card that you really wanted because the condition was not up to your liking? Happened to me on multiple occasions.
If submitted by Dick Smith (your average dude) a 7 with an outside chance of an 8.
If submitted by 4SC a 9 with an outside chance of a 10.
To this day he's my favorite starting pitcher that I ever watched as a Yankee fan. When I was 14 he had the best year I can remember a pitcher having (from 74-present as anything before that I have no memory of watching the games) 25-3 with an ERA of 1.74. He also won the Divisional playoff game over the Red Sox (the Bucky Dent game) pitching on only 3 days rest. He followed that by clinching the AL championship by going 8 innings and only giving up one run against George Brett and the Royals. His next start he beat the Dodgers in Game 3 of the World Series (Yankees were down 2 games to 0) by only giving up one run in a complete game win that got the Yankees back in the World Series which they eventually won in 6 games.
"Louisiana Lightning" he was.
Sometimes I see issues with my card corners in the images and then when I get them back in hand I don’t really see the issue. There is some amount of distortion that occurs in imaging. I agree with everything else though. If I submitted that card I would get a 6. Or min size. I’ve got so many min size from 77 vending subs. They all measure ok for me but not to PSA I guess.
The only min size cards I have ever received back from PSA were 1977 Topps baseball. A Carew, Morgan, and Carlton that were all pulled from a vending box.
The cards were pulled by my buddy and I was present when he opened the box so I know 100 percent that they were not trimmed.
Absolutely I'd pass. I pass on almost everything, LOL. If you don't think it's a legit MINT card, why bid at all? Just asking. No harm, no foul. Personally, I think you avoided getting stuck with an overgraded and overpriced card, so good on ya. I've opened tons of '77T wax and vending over the years and never, EVER got a Guidry worthy of better than an 8. The majority of the pulls either had black ink smudging or a crease in the center of the card. Manufacturing flaws plague this card and I doubt many more true 9s will come around anytime soon. Best of luck trying to get one. If you ever find one to your standards, bid the living heck out of it and hope for a win. Good luck to you.
Farewell Ryno.
Skewed...and upper right corner. Looks like 7 today...
I just saw this video. Every vintage PSA 9 resubmitted was regraded a 7 on average.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=WAIZf42GkCo
https://kennerstartinglineup.blogspot.com/
Interesting video. It’s hard to know just how much variance is attributable to stricter standards vs. the inherent subjectivity associated with grading.
The explanation/theory provided by the guy in the video re: ‘min size’ makes sense. It’s also true that no one knows for sure.
I have no doubt the standards are different but im thinking it’s the grader. I got grades today and had great results yet last week I got a bunch of “altered” same cards same players just split into 2 submissions
One of my Fav Yankees all time. Got this signed at Yankee stadium at a private Guidry signing in person.
1948-76 Topps FB Sets
FB & BB HOF Player sets
1948-1993 NY Yankee Team Sets
Proper training, probably has something to do with it. But AI is making the grades lower, imo -- the grader scans it, AI grades and they move on.
What type of model classification system would you train for detecting altered cards? Could that be accurate at all? For Min size why would you use supervised learning? Wouldn’t it just be precise measurement? Some aspects of quality measurement do make sense to me but in most areas I struggle to figure out the artificial intelligence solution that could be applied. I wouldn’t consider myself either a novice or an expert in machine learning and there’s much about neural networks which I have no grasp of so don’t assume I’m saying there’s no approach that I’m unaware of. Curious if there is any truth to the AI grading stuff. I’m skeptical.
It seems AI would require less graders….is that the case at PSA? Automate the process of grading to eliminate subjectivity…but then can AI have the ability to assess eye appeal?
I think that's the question. I only know where I would start... not where I would end up.
The low-hanging fruit, at least as I see it, would be classification for centering and classification for PSA 10 vs. not. Centering is a simple stochastic, but it is probably, or can be, issue to issue specific. I think there are multiple right answers for that, but for what is a 10, I think that's the one case where you know what it is, and you can measure how far any particular card is from that using binary classification with 2 classification buckets. You can look at corners, edges, all the things... and you know when they're not perfect. But you're right about eye appeal and it's especially important at the lesser grades where it's a mix of blemishes which constitute the quality. I would only know enough to start with something like a k-nearest-neighbor, and I would train my data-sets using images of graded examples. It's fun to think about, but I doubt anyone has a good-enough solution yet.
I should also note. As far as the actual images, it wouldn't be comparing the pictures like you would find in secure scans. You would require sets of images, consisting of coaxial, non-coaxial, on-axis, and off-axis lighting scenarios with different frequencies of light, to include IR. This is usually the point where I stop thinking about it and watch some baseball. Tough.
Two aspects in the grading process seem not to be taken into account are skewness and registration either by AI or humans.
So, grading has been done by human eyes since the beginning but now it's by AI (to save time and make more profit) but all the customers need to send cards to a different company so they can be reviewed/graded again because no one trusts contemporary grading?!?
Something seems very off.
Once upon a time we were exposed to an idea. A really good one. So good, in fact, that many, many people started making tons of money from the implementation of the idea. The wealth was spreading everywhere but where the idea came from. So they came up with a better idea. For them.
Farewell Ryno.
we don't know for sure what, if anything is being done at PSA via AI
Don’t disagree Kepper but should transparency by PSA as to what AI is doing be appropriate to disclose?
Question not a statement: Has PSA been transparent in past regarding their grading process?
It's the singer not the song - Peter Townshend (1972)