Ugliest Morgan Dollar? 1897 O - NGC - (eBay)  

 

Must agree - that coin doesn't bother me at all!

It is a case where eye appeal makes the lower grade a better choice.

I wouldn't call it the ugliest Morgan . More like a chatter box Morgan .

I don't mind it at all.

mtuma3: When it comes to Morgan dollars, that's kind of what you get with low MS ones(and other coins in general, but Morgans especially so). This is because the coins were large and heavy, so when they were bagged up to ship to banks, the contact they made with each other cause lots and lots of scratches(appropriately called "bag marks"). The marks aren't particularly deep, but on a mint state coin, they 're quite visible. It's likely that when this particular coin was bagged, it was somewhere near the bottom of the bag, so it had to deal with a lot of weight along with the contact. remember that these coins werent treated with care, and the bags probably weren't handled nicely.

Yeah, grading is incredibly weird. A coin can look incredibly ugly with a bunch of (natural obviously) marks, but if it doesn't have wear, its an uncirculated coin. PL is a different designation entirely, and can actually be somewhat objectively observed. if the fields are reflective enough, it'll get a PL designation regardless of how many marks there are. Usually on a PL coin you can take a ruler up against the coin and legibly read the numbers up to a certain amount of inches(I highly doubt this is how they designate it for grading services, but it's a good general observation for PL potential). I'm willing to bet that this particular coin looks significantly better in hand, and the fields are much more "metallic" looking than the pictures show.