Help? Tell me why one card is a PSA 8 and the other is a 10?
 

I am looking at buying some Mike Schmidt cards and am trying to get as many as I can as PSA 10s. So I was on ebay looking at a 1980 Shimidt PSA 10. Here is the deal - The PSA 10 has a ton of flaws:

-Yellowing on the right hand corner
-Cat-eye between the All-Star
-Brown spot under the "E" in Phillies

So I took a look over at COMC and found a 1980 PSA Schmidt that looks a ton better then the PSA 10! Centering looks spot on and no ovbvius flaws.

So can anybody more knowledgeable fill me in why on is a 10 and the other is an 8?

PSA 10

Attachment 298121

PSA 8

Attachment 298122

Different graders or the same grader on different days or in different time frames.

It's so subjective at the high grades, especially.

The 10 looks over graded. And the 8 may or may not be under graded. Hard to tell without seeing in hand. Surface flaws and other minute issues are hard to see in scans.

But both cards very likely are more like psa 9s.

Like they say... buy the card, not the holder.

The yellowing may be on the holder or the scanner bed...........or it could possibly be mold spores that grew on the card after grading.

I know I picked up a 1978 PSA 8 OPC card years ago from 4square and the card looked like it had been held underwater for several hours and then dried out while still in the holder, it had so many surface bumps all over it. Likely would have graded an "A" if I cracked it out.

It was a cheap card not worth sending back, so I just kept it. Knew PSA couldn't have graded it like that, but a little annoyed the seller just even offered it for sale, seeing the card was obviously still not the card it was graded in.

The PSA 10 with cert # starting with 4 means it was graded over 10 years ago. The PSA 8 #237... was graded 2-3 years ago; they have gotten more stringent on grading for the most part in the last few years.

right..there are lots of 'new' companies we see with tons of 'gem mint 10's over the years...if those same companies ended up getting 75% of the market share 10 years later im sure they wouldnt be handing out 10s like they did before........you know those companies like the KSAs of the world etc

Fish eyes don't usually effect grade too much, unless it really brings down eye appeal. the location of this one doesn't take away too much in my opinion. Also, there may be a slight surface crease or defect in the card stock that got it the 8. Scanner and photo won't pick that up. I had a 84 Topps Mattingly RC i was sure was gonna be an 9 or 10, but came back a 5. Under the 60x loupe i was able to find a surface ripple i couldn't see with the naked eye. However yes, I see the yellowing. Other than that it looks ok to me.

Hard to see from the scans but my guess would be corners.

WHat's been said above but also those two cards have been scanned with two dramatically different settings. The 10 was scanned with heightened brightness which allowed you to really get in there and see every flaw, even in the black area. I would suspect that if you got the 8 in hand and then scanned it yourself with some brightness you would find flaws that aren't visible in the scan you're looking at now.

Arthur

Cool that you are collecting Mike Schmidt!

For many years, I owned perhaps the largest collection of PSA 10 Mike Schmidt cards in the hobby. Alas, I have moved on with my collecting interests, but still own many of my rarer/cooler Schmidt cards.

As a pro tip, I'd say really spend time with cards if you want to know the difference between a PSA 8, PSA 9 and PSA 10. You can't eyeball this stuff from a scan and be able to tell with a high degree of confidence.

Back in the day, I probably owned 15,000+ Mike Schmidt raw cards. I promise you, if you want to really get in the head of a grade, buy yourself a raw lot of a few hundred Mike Schmidt cards. This wouldn't be an expensive proposition with something like 1988 Donruss, for example.

If you look through them raw, one-by-one, under a high-powered lamp, you can quickly get the feel for differentiating between grades due to corner touches, centering and surface blemishes. I feel like with a stack of raw cards, I can tell between PSA 8 and PSA 10 quality cards 95% of the time. I think there's also a bright line between PSA 9 and PSA 7 cards. It is true that there is some fuzziness between ±1 grade. I could never consistently tell between raw cards I submitted that came back as PSA 9 and those that came back PSA 10. Sometimes the cards I submitted that came back 10 I thought were only MINT, and vice versa. But with enough practice, you should be able to differentiate between two grading levels, and from there it is a matter of practice and perhaps a second or third pass on card-by-card review (louping the corners for instance)

Good luck!

The main difference between these two cards was the 10 was submitted by a bulk submitter, and the 8 was submitted as a one-off, or small lot. Hearing these explanations for the physical differences is comical. IMO, if your going to submit post '77 cards, submit 100's at a time, not 10.

What is the trick to correlating the psa cert number to the approximate year it was graded?

I see a 4 you are stating is 10+ years ago and a 237 is 2-3 years ago.

For some reason, all the ones with flips starting with 30,000,000, 50M, and 90M were all graded very long ago. At some point, they restarted with numbers closer to zero and continued on that path to current day. When I first started grading cards 5 years ago, they started with 20,000,000. They've graded about 1-1.5 million a year since then, so they're about to hit 30M again. Not sure what numbers they'll use once they hit 30M, because they've already used some of them.
You can tell the age of some based on whether the flips have the Grade Text and number on the same line (like VG-EX 4) or the 4 on a separate line. Ones with the grade number and text on the same line are older. Then they added the first edition hologram on the front, and then the "lighthouse" flip most recently. I am not sure there is an official list of which cert numbers were used when. But I bet a bunch of us could manufacture one.

Here are numbers from my submissions over the years:
May 2014: 22,822,017 (no hologram front)
April 2015: 23,522,338 (no hologram front)
June 2016: 25,848,903 (hologram flip, bar codes on back)
May 2017: 27,367,603 (lighthouse flip)
I submitted one in November that hasn't been graded yet, so I don't know what those cert numbers are.

Thanks for the info. Is there any place to go to see the history of PSA flips/gilders?