1965 Topps Hank Bauer Blue-In-Ball "Variation"?
 

While looking through 1965 Topps Hank Bauer cards for a different reason, I noticed that quite a few of them have a print flaw of the ball in the upper left having stray blue ink, and most of them are pretty uniform. I think the 1961 Topps Ron Fairly Green-In-Ball is hands down one of the worst variations that PSA ever recognized so I certainly wouldn't want them to recognize this one.

I wonder if like the 61 Fairly this defect exists in other cards in the set

The Bauer card is in C1 of a row of the slits/sheet. Pinson is next to Bauer and Robinson is next to Pinson.

Cepeda is below Bauer, so perhaps there is something similar on that card.

OK I went through the cards in the COMC Data Base.

Bauer has the most ink seeping into the back baseball

There are a few blue inks seeping into the Cepeda Baseball

I did not see any seeping ink in either Floyd Robinson or Vada Pinson

If someone sees something that needs to be fixed in the COMC listings please let me know.

Rich

The leading cards (i.e., C1) for the eight rows in the 4th printing are:

Yellen (292), Carty (305), Stewart (298), Lynch (291), Mantle (350), Gentile (365), Bauer (323), and Cepeda (360).

The C2 cards are: 337, 310, 273, 335, 288, 325, 355, 302.

Bummer...I have 3 65 Hank Bauers...zero blue bleed for me...

I checked two Bauers and three Cepedas. No blue on mine!

Have the Bauer but not Cepeda

Al:

If you check the cards I broke out on COMC, it is my opinion the Bauer's are much easier to tell and take up more of the baseball.

The Cepeda's take up only a small portion on the bottom and are hard to tell

The Bauer is definately a blue bleed.

Looking at my Cepeda, there is blue in the number circle but it looks like it is from a slight misallignment.

Notice there is white above the circle as well as above the "O" and "C" in his name.

To me, a blue bleed means more than the normal amount.

Mike

Attachment 483043

Attachment 483044

Rich---really appreciate all the work you do to get variants listed separately on COMC

Mike---agree with your alignment comment. The example on COMC is like yours with very slight abnormalities in the ball and the name

TY Al for the kind words, doing this type of research is one of the real fun aspects of my COMC work

I'll agree with all but we do separate similar cards so I'm OK with the Cepeda Breakout. I will also note that I'm not going to do card by card comparisons of all 14 cards noted but,,,, if someone finds a bleed on those cards I'll be happy to go and break them out.

This is, of course, not just limited to the 65 set :)