(Note: I figured out what set I had overlooked, so everything's okay now. Enjoy #12.)

Life is full of existential moments. Moments when you look around and say 'Goddammit, I'm alive!' Moments--however fleeting--when you can honestly admit you haven't the faintest clue why your life took the path it did, but you're willing to make the best of it.

I get this feeling every so often. Maybe it's because I'm mercurial by nature. Or maybe it's because I've been a card collector for so many years. My addiction has led me down strange roads, through countless binges on crap sets, depositing thousands upon teeming thousands of unnamed commons in boxes, bags and stacks in my closet, on my dresser, under my bed, in my thoughts and dreams. If somebody somewhere thought 1990 Fleer was a good idea, then there's no reason why I shouldn't exist too.

This is kind of a depressing tangent to indulge, but I wanted to somehow swing it back round to highlight just how welcome a set like Pinnacle's inaugural was in 1992. But I can't figure out how to do that, so I'll sum up my introduction like this: By the late winter of 1992, my class of baseball card collectors had been guzzling down set after lousy set, at least 19 since the start of the decade. We'd pined for Leaf and Stadium Club, ridiculed Fleer Ultra behind its back, kicked ourselves for stockpiling Ben McDonald and Greg Anthony and generally wondering how long we'd be able to keep collecting in the face of rising prices and our own waning interest.

Cue Pinnacle. The black borders. The silhouetted player photograph and gradient. The thin gloss on front and back. The Team 2000 insert set. The stars, the rookies--even the commons were awe-inspiring. On the whole, 1992 was a very good year for baseball card design, and Pinnacle was at or near the top of that heap. It was also one of the last mid-level 'premium' debuts before manufacturers began introducing high-end sets like SP and Finest in 1993.

It felt like there was a hierarchy with Score: Select was preferred, Score was the workhorse and Pinnacle was there to fill in the gaps. As a middle child myself, I was always endeared to this set for that very reason. This argument is not to say that the company did not invest in making Pinnacle a great brand; it did.

It was the quality of Pinnacle (more so than Select, if you ask me) that allowed the company to elevate itself back to the standard the premiere Score issue set back in 1988. It was a necessary move, especially as the perceived quality of the Score flagship brand began to diminish with its over-production in 1991 and 1992.

I never bought more than two or three packs of this set when it came out, but I remember pooling money with a friend to purchase the Series 2 set for $15 and going out of my way at shows to buy singles of my favorites. Why even mention this? My only point is that the checklist is a non-factor in my ranking this set as high as I do. By 1992 the checklist of a set became almost a non-issue in choosing a set to collect (key word here is 'almost').

With the explosion of the hobby came more rookie oversight. For instance, Bowman and Upper Deck included Kenny Lofton rookies in their 1991 sets (I consider UD's Final Edition as part of the 1991 set). You could chalk it up a casual exclusion by the other sets or as a Fred McGriff-type rookie scoop UD and Bowman got on their competitors. Whatever you want to think, it's very different from the old Donruss sometime-practice of including guys as Rated Rookies in more than one year (Danny Tartabull, Lance Dickson) and throws a wrench into the idea of knowing for certain which card is Lofton's rookie. Especially when Pinnacle includes him twice in its 1992 base set and again in the Pinnacle Rookies tack-on end-of-year set. And with confusions like this one, considerations towards checklist fall behind design in terms of determining a set's desirability.

Luckily in Pinnacle's case, the set's got design in spades.

Black borders and a single white hairline surround crisp photography. Player name along the bottom, team name along the top. Thinly glossed. And a full-color back (de rigueur by 1993), featuring a simple, elegant headshot on what looks like a sponge-painted, GlamorShots backdrop. The only faults may be the choice of body copy font, the little dots that separate the information on front and back, and the Pinnacle logo itself. Otherwise, it’s one of the most striking designs of the early Nineties, and possibly one of the simplest.

You could characterize 1993 Pinnacle as a ‘sophomore slump’ set. The brand’s 1992 debut was a hard act to follow, and the by-then classic Score mindset took over for 1993’s checklist: choke ’em to death with subsets. Of the 620 cards in the base set, only 437 had no extraneous logos, and weren’t part of a subset. But it wasn’t only subsets that killed this checklist—it was an overkill of inserts. Though some of them were good, even great, and all of them of flawless design, there were just so many of them: 195 in all. That’s practically enough for a third series of cards!

Collectors harp on sets with a glut of inserts, not because we don’t like getting them in packs (we do). It’s because it’s a daunting proposition, as if the manufacturer understands neither the collector nor the climate of the hobby. A collector may like your product, even so much so that he or she decides to collect your set. But inevitably they will like other sets as well, so if you overwhelm them with inserts, you will most likely end up with a number of beleaguered collectors turned off by your product. This same thing happened to Topps recently with the Generation Now and Home Run History inserts. There were so many (seemingly) different inserts that collectors (or at least this one) were turned off to the product. But I digress.

Like 1992, this set was released in two series. Like 1992, the black borders and backs set off the clear, somewhat washed-out colors of the photos. The highlight of the set is without a doubt the “Now & Then” subset, horizontal cards featuring a slew of veterans shown in two photos: one taken in 1992, the other in their respective rookie years (like this one of Robin Yount doing his best early Larry Bird impression). It makes for a classy card, and I don’t think I’m too far off base by naming it one of the early decade’s best subsets.

I want to like this set more, but I just can’t. The rookie class is weak beyond Jeter, the Expansion Draft subset has a chokehold on much of the checklist, and the inserts, despite their overall quality, outweigh the base set. It’s really the Now & Then subset that keeps me coming back, and really only–you guessed it–now and then.

Say this in your best Christopher Walken voice: "Guess what? I gotta fever... and the only prescription is more countdown!"


45. 1994 Pinnacle
There are two ways a set or a year could be deemed a Hobby Turning Point. The first is in content, ie rookies, subsets, corrected/uncorrected errors, major stars included, and perhaps the last cards of retiring stars. The second is in the medium and the technology in its presentation. For example, 1981 was a hobby turning point in medium: the hobby went from one manufacturer to three. 1987 provided a hobby turning point in content: it was one of the strongest rookie classes of that particular decade, squarely focusing future hobby attention on the seemingly endless waves of strong young stars.

I bring this up because I’ve been trying to figure out just where 1994 fits in. The year saw Upper Deck’s and Score’s first parallel sets and the first Bowman’s Best set, all of which clearly expanded the hobby landscape in a technical sense (I’m not counting UD’s gold hologram set from 1993, as that was released in factory-set form only). But it also saw the introduction of one of the decade’s defining rookies in Alex Rodriguez, a player who has become so important that all rankings, lists and analysis of sets from his rookie year must be made with his inclusion in mind.

This point sort of contradicts one of the pillars of my thoughts on how to rank a set. One great card does not a great set make; the set should be judged on its entire checklist. A great example of this is between 1986 Topps and 1986 Fleer. That year’s Topps set was iconic, even though it didn’t include a card of Jose Canseco. Fleer, on the other hand, could be best described as Canseco and a pile of commons. In other words, a given set shouldn’t be punished if it doesn’t have the big rookie from a given year.

I’m thinking I might need to amend this rule, simply because in 1986 it didn’t matter quite so much that Topps didn’t have Canseco, because there were so few sets (and Topps had subsets and other cards that Fleer, Donruss, and Sportflics didn’t). But because by 1994 there was so much parity in a hobby landscape of literally scores of sets, it certainly did matter if a given set didn’t include Rodriguez. Accordingly, in a countdown like this, sets without Rodriguez should be given a demerit.

That’s why it pains me that 1994 Pinnacle doesn’t rate higher. This was one of my favorite sets that I couldn’t really afford to collect: Clean, crisp photography on a full-bleed glossy stock, minimal front-of-card graphics and understated black backs. Just a great looking card, not to mention what has quite possibly become my favorite parallel set of all time (narrowly beating out the run of Silver Signatures sets from mid-Nineties Collector’s Choice): The Museum Collection. By championing the use of Dufex, Pinnacle created a gorgeous, shimmering card, and an excellent, poor-man’s stand-in for Topps’ refractors.

Unfortunately, that’s where the niceties end. The checklist seems stale in hindsight (especially without a Rodriguez rookie), with no real deviations for subsets within the base set, complemented by a smattering of boring inserts. All of it seems a little fishy, too, because 1993 Pinnacle had great subsets and massive, fun-to-covet insert sets (like Team 2001 and Then & Now), which seemingly disappeared from one year to the next. It’s too bad, because 1994 Pinnacle had its shit together in a big way in terms of its design. And that’s no small feat.


44. 1994 Bowman
No, this set didn’t have an Alex Rodriguez rookie, either. In fact, only eight sets had him on one of their checklists in 1994. Still, by 1994 Bowman had firmly established itself as a major player, if not the player in the rookie game. It didn’t really need Rodriguez to prove its position, even though many 1994 rookies weren’t surrounded by as much hype, nor made an immediate impact.

It took guys like Derrek Lee, Trot Nixon, Torii Hunter, and Billy Wagner a few years to get things going. And, like earlier Bowman sets, many rookies never got it going. Guys like Cleveland Lavell, Arquimedez Pozo, Gar Finnvold, Duff Brumley and the immortal Ruben ‘Derek Jeter Wanted Me To Steal These” Rivera. But the thing that brought attention to Bowman—even to a weak set like 1994—was that there were so many rookies. First came the flameouts, then guys like LoDuca, Renteria, Edgardo Alfonzo, and Wagner. Then a third wave of Lee, Hunter, Posada, Nixon, and others. By no stretch of the imagination can we compare this set to 1992 (or even to a lesser extent 1993) Bowman, but three waves of rookie interest does give your set some staying power.

Rookies aside, the rest of the checklist never struck me as exciting, fun, or even interesting. At just under 700 cards, I have always approached this issue as ‘just another set with all the same guys.’

The mantra of producing a set in the Nineties was that to compete you had to give collectors what they wanted: presumably a thousand versions of their favorite players, be it from the base set, as part of a subset, and/or in a mixture of inserts. But because every manufacturer was following this rule, you also had to be sure that your product stood out from the rest. So what did Bowman do? They slapped some shiny foil on the some of the cards. They gave every card hideous strips of metallic gold. But most of all they made it about the base set, meaning no inserts. Collectors might have come for the rookies, but why should they have stayed for the rest? I’m still trying to figure that one out.


43. 1994 Leaf/Limited & Leaf/Limited Rookies
I think I can explain the logic behind these sets. Obviously they are ‘These Go to Eleven’ sets from the Donruss and Leaf executives. Let’s start in 1990. Leaf comes out, trumping Upper Deck’s mind-blowing inaugural 1989 triumph. Then in 1991 Fleer chisels out the Ultra line, and Topps debuts Stadium Club, teaming with Kodak to melt some faces with full-bleed photography and full-color backs. (Donruss replies with unintentional comedic gem that is Studio.) 1992 sees the introduction of Pinnacle from Score, a beautiful card with crisp photography, black gradient borders and a thin gloss. 1993 raises the stakes even higher, with Topps’ Finest throwdown, Upper Deck’s stylish SP, and Fleer’s cigarette-cased Flair. Oh sure, Donruss still had the Leaf line chugging away since the 1990 bow, and a few of the sets were relatively decent (1992, 1993), but the manufacturer didn’t have an answer to Finest, Flair, or SP. Then in 1994 they released Leaf/Limited and L/L Rookies, super-premiums that accelerated the arms race for the deep-pocketed, new-card collector.

And truthfully, even though I considered the appearance of sets like these as a sign of the hobby apocalypse, they aren’t bad looking. The base card looks like a cross between a playing card and the cardboard back to a new razor, with squares and dark lines harking back to those heady old-school Donruss days of 1985 and 1986 (albeit L/L is a little classier).

The base checklists are tight: L/L is at 160 cards; L/L/R at 80. And yet no one stands out. That’s because the star of this show is not in one of the base sets. It’s in the L/L/R insert set ‘Rookie Phenoms.’ I’m speaking, of course, about the Alex Rodriguez rookie, gold-foiled up the wazoo and serial-numbered to 5,000. Talk about summing up the future of the hobby in one card.

But let’s get back to the actual base sets for a moment. Were they even collectable? I’m not sure. Besides being wowed by the super-premium-ness of it all, what were collectors after? Without the inclusion of the Rodriguez rookie, these would rank lower than late-run Triple Play.

It’s 1986 Fleer Syndrome all over again. Too bad Leaf threw their Canseco stand-in in as a hard-to-find insert, leaving almost everyone with the pile of commons.