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Comments: Yogi was one of the first
HOF portraits I purchased. In the late 1990s I purchased a raw
1957 Topps card and it was beautiful. The color was a perfect
Yankee blue. The centering was spot on. I submitted the card to
PSA and they responded with "Altered". I couldn't believe it.
Turns out, the card was power-erased. Somebody had stripped away
some of the color on the right side of the card to make the white
border match up more closely with the left, to make the card appear
more centered. I took the card back to the dealer and he was kind
enough to provide me with another slabbed card - a PSA 8. It's
still one of my favorite Yogi Berra cards. But, I decided Brooks
Robinson would represent the 1957 issue so I needed to find another
portrait. I settled on the 1961 Chemstrand card and purchased
this PSA 9 in January, 2008 from dealer and hobby friend Marty
Pritchard (All Marty's Stuff) via eBay. There's been a PSA 10
example I've been eyeballing for quite some time….if the price
is right, I'll pull the trigger.
UPDATE: I have saved eBay searches for most of the cards in the
collection with hopes of finding an upgrade. For Berra, "Chemstrand"
would occasionally result in a PSA 10 example. Unfortunately,
they were all listed with very high Buy It Now prices hovering
around $700. It wasn't a high priority for me to spend this kind
of money to bump my PSA 9. But, in the first week of April 2014
a seller listed a beautiful 10 on eBay and let the opening bid
ride. In the last 24 hours the price was just above $50. I had
no confidence the price was going to stay under a $100 but placed
a snipe for fun and hoped. I couldn't believe it when I won the
card from seller nutzaboutcards for $70.99 including S&H. I paid
almost 7X that for my PSA 9 so I was shocked at the final hammer
price. Hopefully, it was a lucky win at a great price and I could
recover some of my money invested in the PSA 9. I have feeling
there's just been a huge drop off in demand for this one.
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