The Canadian Gretzky comes back off-centre half as often again as the American one

We counted every PSA-graded listing this index has classified for the cards it tracks, and worked out what share carried an OC or MC qualifier. Cards with only a few dozen examples are included where the difference was large enough to notice; the Jordan figures rest on several hundred each.

First, what this number can and cannot tell you

An OC label is a floor, not a full count, and the reason matters before any of the figures below mean anything.

For years PSA let submitters ask for no qualifiers, taking a lower straight grade instead. Many did, because a straight number is easier to sell. Then in May 2021 PSA changed its default: centering now normally lowers the numerical grade, and an OC is kept for cards where the centering is a clear outlier on an otherwise strong card. Miscuts and marks are still labelled every time.

So plenty of badly centred cards sit in holders as plain 5s and 6s, invisible to a count like this one. What the OC and MC share measures is how often a card's cutting was bad enough to be named.

That still lets us compare cards with each other, as long as they were graded under similar conditions. It does not let us state what fraction of any card is truly off-centre.

The same card, two printers

This is the cleanest comparison in the data, and it confirms something we have argued elsewhere.

The 1979 Gretzky rookie was printed twice: by Topps in the United States and by O-Pee-Chee in Canada, same photograph, same number. Across a similar number of graded examples of each, the O-Pee-Chee carries an OC or MC label close to 10 per cent of the time, against under 7 per cent for the Topps. Roughly half as often again.

That is what you would predict from how O-Pee-Chee cut its sheets: a confectionery company, a dull blade in a basement, a deep stack and no clamp. It also fits the gap we found in why only two perfect O-Pee-Chee rookies exist.

The card at the top was a scratch-off

The highest rate on the whole index belongs to a Gretzky, but not his rookie. It is 1980-81 Topps #3, his Record Breaker card for becoming the youngest player to score fifty goals, which carries an OC or MC label on roughly one listing in seven.

The 1980-81 Topps hockey set is remembered for its fronts: the player's name was hidden under a black disc shaped like a puck, meant to be scratched off with a coin. Dealers who handle the set describe it as having major centering problems as well.

Oddly, not every Gretzky in the same set shows it. His base card and his All-Star card from that year come out far lower here, and two of them carry no centering label at all. The samples are a few dozen each, so we would not make much of the difference, but it is a reminder that centering is decided card by card on a sheet, not set by set.

The Jordan surprise

The 1986-87 Fleer Michael Jordan has a reputation for being hard to find centred. It may be. But among his three Fleer cards, with several hundred graded examples of each, it is the least often labelled: around 3.6 per cent, against 4 per cent for the 1987-88 card and 5.4 per cent for the 1988-89.

Two readings, and we cannot choose between them.

The simple one is that the 1986-87 cards were cut no worse than the following two years, and the reputation belongs to the set's value rather than its production.

The other is about behaviour. The more a card is worth, the more reason an owner has to crack an off-centre copy out of its holder and resubmit it hoping for a straight grade, or to ask for no qualifier in the first place. If owners of the most valuable Jordan do that more often than owners of the others, its OC rate would be pushed down by the very thing that makes it famous.

Then the labels almost stop

The 1989 Upper Deck Griffey is labelled OC or MC well under one time in a hundred. Tom Brady's 2000 Bowman, across hundreds of examples, not at all.

Part of that is real. Upper Deck built its reputation on printing quality, and cutting technology improved enormously over the 1980s.

But part of it is timing. Modern cards were graded in huge numbers during the boom that began in 2020, much of it after PSA stopped applying OC by default. Vintage cards were graded over decades when the label was routine. So the gap between a 1951 card and a 2000 card is partly a gap between grading eras, and we would not put a number on how much of each.

What to take from it

Within an era, the comparison is fair. The O-Pee-Chee Gretzky really is labelled for centering more often than its Topps twin, and a buyer should expect to search harder for a well-centred one.

A missing label proves nothing. Since 2021 especially, an off-centre card is more likely to carry a lower straight grade than an OC. Look at the card, not only the label.

And if you are buying a labelled card, you are buying a discount. We measured it in what a PSA qualifier actually costs: around 40 per cent for off-centre, on matched pairs. The cards here that carry the label most often are the ones where that discount is easiest to find.

The thing worth sitting with

How a card was cut in 1979 or 1980 was decided in a few seconds by a blade and a stack of sheets, and nobody involved imagined it being measured.

Forty-odd years later a two-letter label records it, and the Canadian printing of the most valuable hockey card ever made carries that label half as often again as the American one.

This index tracks every grade and qualifier of these cards separately, which is what makes a count like this possible. There is a related piece on how a design decision rather than the cardboard decides which cards grade, and you can read how we work the numbers out.

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