[jchcollins]

I spent about half an hour with this card out of it's holder and several other '54 and '56 Topps commons last night. My observations, in no particular order:

1. No arguing that the cut is wonky if nothing else. When the bottom border is made level, the two vertical borders slant slightly to the right, both of them at the same angle. Thus the corners are not true right angles.

2. Yes, when held and especially when viewed in the SGC image, the top border looks as if it slants down to the right. This is an optical illusion. If you look at the SGC holder, the bottom border is not straight in that take either. When I put the Jackie in it's vintage OT, and ensure the bottom edge is totally flush with the rail - the top edge is flush with the small gap too. It's the vertical edges on both sides which then throw things off, and are not straight.

3. Respect to those of you that can look at an edge and "just tell" if it's trimmed regardless of size. I'm not one of those people. I did again look at all edges of the card carefully. Nowhere is there any type of jagged anomaly from a home scissor or exacto knife job gone wrong. The top and bottom edges display as slightly different (tighter) pattern in the cardboard than the edges on the sides do, but they basically match. If something is just smoking gun wrong here, I can't find it.

4. Maybe most importantly at least to me - size. I put this card with the deck of other commons, and made a stack the way a kid might have done 60 years ago. The exceptions to the "squareness" aside, this card is not small. It simply isn't. It's the same size as my '54 Ed Mathews vertically, and if anything it's a hair taller than my recently acquired '54 Gil Hodges. The '56 Topps cards were a bit more difficult to compare to because they were printed on thicker cardboard stock. But in the comparisons I did, my observations on size were similar.

To conclude - the card is now back in a vintage One Touch and sleeve, and will be staying in my collection. I'm looking at it this way: Is it trimmed? Maybe. But if we treated cards the way we do other things in this world, there is certainly not an obvious flaw or "definite" evidence that it is trimmed. It wouldn't be convicted in a court of law. To me that's going to have to be good enough. The truth of the matter is that many vintage cards left the factory miscut, and were not 100% perfectly square going into the packs. My own guess is that it's just easier for some TPG who is not going to spend even 2 minutes on my card to look at the overall appearance - which yes, I'll give you is strange - and say that it's trimmed.

On a day at least where SGC said that about one of my cards, and sent the other one home slabbed with a pube in the holder - you'll understand if I'm not just over the moon confident on their overall professionalism and judgement right now. I'm going to give my card the benefit of the doubt...