So you thought you used to play 2D games. If you had taken a look behind the screen, then you'd have seen this. The featured game is Hoi (subtitled "let's play!") from Team Hoi, a 16-bit platform game for the Commodore Amiga, released in 1992.

Being one of the three Team Hoi members I created the original game's pixel graphics as well.

You're invited to Sevensheaven.nl for an extended impression.

Alternative box cover design for the Hoi Amiga game from 1992, executed in a minimalistic 1960s style.

More at Sevensheaven.nl

A few weeks ago, Reader Scott sent me a great big stack of blank-fronts, blank-backs, wrong-backs, misprints, and miscuts. To celebrate, I've put them with my other screwups in a binder.

The most interesting thing, besides the sheer quantity of screwups Scott sent, is that the blank-fronts he sent were broken down like so: 22 from 1989 Topps; 19 from 1990 Topps; and 14 from 1991 Topps. OK, that's a lot from each of those years. But here's where it gets crazy and leads me to put out a somewhat far-fetched conspiracy theory: the checklist numbers of the cards are grouped. For instance, here are the card numbers for the 1989 group:

237
246
681
685
686
690
691
692
694
697
702
703
716
717
718
722
723
757
783
788
789
792

So, that's like four separate checklist groups (and yes, I think it's awesome that #792 was included in the stack). And the same sort of breakdown is true for the 1990 and 1991 groups, respectively. It leads me to believe that there was at least one entire set from 1989, 1990, and 1991 (if not other years as well) printed as blank-fronts.

In other miscut news: I've been going through boxes, putting together the 1976 set (still need about 150 cards), and in the stacks of commons I've found miscut wrong-backs: Dick Drago (Wilbur Howard/Dave Parker) and Bill North (Father/Son Hegan/Father/Son Smalley).

Also, I offer no explanation on the double-prints, except to say that they may be the coolest cards I've ever seen. And yes, they're blank-backed.

Thanks Scott, you've totally made my year!

Every sport has at least one: a set with such a high quotient of rookie superstars that it’s not even fair comparing it to others. Basketball has three entries, simply because cards weren’t made all that often: 1957-58 Topps, 1961-62 Fleer and 1986-87 Fleer. Only in the last one were there a large number of actual rookie superstars, not just players enjoying their first card. In football, there are 1984 Topps, 1986 Topps and 1989 Score. Hockey’s got 1951-52 Parkhurst and 1980-81 OPC & Topps.

Baseball’s littered with sets like this: 1949 Leaf and 1952, 1954, 1965, 1975, 1985 and 1987 Topps come immediately to mind. And of course there are others, like 1992 Bowman. As an exercise of mental dexterity, I’m going to list the names of ten players who appeared in ’92 Bowman and I want you to tell me which ones had their rookie appear in another set. Ready?

Derek Lowe
Pedro Martinez
Jeffrey Hammonds
Mike Hampton
Manny Ramirez (two cards in the set!)
Carlos Delgado
Mariano Rivera
Mike Piazza
Trevor Hoffman
Garret Anderson

Only Martinez, Piazza, Hammonds and Ramirez had rookies in other sets. Now I want you to tell me if that mattered.

Of course it didn’t. 1992 Bowman was, is and always will be the muthafuckin’ set for early-Nineties rookies, and I’ll be damned if it mattered that Pedro Martinez’s only true rookie wasn’t part of it (it came in 1991 Upper Deck Final Edition). If you were a young player—and your name wasn’t Shawn Green—your rookie, for all intents and purposes, was in this set.

This was easily the biggest thing in the hobby in 1992. No other set even came close: ’92 was an off-year for the blossoming ‘premium’ craze as Leaf, Ultra, Stadium Club and Studio put out so-so sets. Only Pinnacle (Score’s foray into higher quality) made its debut. In other words, it was a perfect time for a below-the-radar set like this to take hold.

And thanks in part to a handful of short-printed cards, Bowman’s leap into foil (no more simple, thread-bare gold foil relegated to a corner icon, as in 1991) and at least three distinct rookie waves, it’s never had to loosen its grip.

As I mentioned in a previous post, 1992 was the most popular of the early Nineties Bowman sets. But was it the most deserving of the attention? I happen to like 1991 more, but that set doesn’t bring as much to the table as ’92.

1992 is in the top five of the early decade not just because it’s a rookie juggernaut. It’s in there because of the foil, the short prints and the general overhaul Topps did on Bowman between 1991 and 1992.

It’s fair to say that 1991 Bowman wasn’t much to look at. Actually, if we’re more truthful, the last time Bowman had released a good-looking set was 1955. Taking that into account, Topps printed 1992’s set on coated white stock with a bright action shot and thick white borders on the front and a color headshot on the back. All together it wasn’t a bad design; you could almost even call it attractive. In fact, you probably wouldn’t know the average card was a Bowman were it not for the completely indecipherable block of statistics on the back, the brand’s trademark inclusion.

The funny thing about this set is that it is one of the few modern-era sets that’s as relevant today as the day it was released. Simply put, every player of the last generation—regardless of his star quality—had a card in this set. Okay, at least a number of them did. And it’s not even that 1992 had such a great rookie class. It’s that this set managed to include a lot of guys years before they showed up in other brands. Take Derek Lowe, for instance. After his Bowman card in 1992, he doesn’t show up in another brand (besides Bowman) until Donruss 1998. Granted, he didn’t make the majors until 1997, but that was Bowman’s thing: get a guy early, way before the competition.

You see, this set is a bad mother--
(Shut your mouth)
But I'm talkin' about 94 Score
(Then we can dig it)

Admit it, you were thinking the same thing… and you’ve seen this set the same way since it came out. 1994 Score is a bad mother: it’s strong in the right places, it makes risky moves and they work, it’s classy and suave and no one understands it but its woman (I guess “its collectors” would be more appropriate). If this were 1994 and you lived in a magical world where baseball cards came alive, you definitely didn’t want to run into Score down a dark alley. Unless your name was Fleer or SP, it would beat your ass every time.

It would do this in a number of ways, least of all with its silent-but-deadly, take-no-prisoners blue border. It’s almost impossible to believe that the same company responsible for 1992 Score created this set only two years later. Where the former was card design in puberty—an experimentation of ugly gradients and bright colors—’94 was understated and mature. Look no further than ’93 Score for the initial design shift towards sophistication, and though it’s not a popular set with collectors, that set did most of the heavy lifting for the brand’s later editions, ’94 included.

Also, where ’92 was bloated (893 base cards), ’94 was lean (660 base cards). Granted, we probably should give 1992’s set a pass on its massive checklist, as it was produced a year or so before it became industry custom to strip subsets from base sets and upgrade them into inserts, a practice Score started in 1993. By 1994, formerly traditional base set highlights like Dream Team and The Franchise (represented in ’94 as Gold Stars) had been sequestered to life as hard-to-find inserts, cutting down on the number of base set subsets. The strategy worked. In 1992 it was fun to get a Dream Teamer in your pack. By 1994, getting one was the best thing to happen all week (and yes, ladies and gentlemen, that’s how sad my social life was as a 15-year-old).

But this set didn’t just beat you with a flawless base set or good-looking inserts. It beat you with a classy parallel. I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right: I do hate parallels. But we’re talking about 1994 here, fool, the year the parallel came of age. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if news came out that 1994 Gold Rush was hand-crafted by dwarves burrowed deep beneath the Misty Mountains. Seriously, I think Heaven is missing a baseball card-related angel: Gold Rush is the most perfect parallel set ever created.

And as if that weren’t enough for you, if by some fluke you were still conscious after this pummeling, Score would send you to the hospital with its version of the right-arm wind-up, left-arm knockout. I’m speaking of course of Rookie/Traded.

Sure, it included the awesome Alex Rodriguez rookie “Call Up” redemption card, but the real scene-stealer here was the R/T base card design. It looked, in a word, terrible (though putrid, ugly, forgettable and shitty also fit the bill). But that wasn’t the point. The point was that the cards didn’t look like the regular set.

Thinking forward once again, Score took the opportunity Rookie/Traded created and not only debuted a new company logo but debuted a new card design, one that would—with a few tweaks here and there—carry over into their 1995 product. It was an ingenious move. The set itself, besides the hard-to-find Rodriguez insert, was weak and forgettable. But the idea that it could be an extension of the regular set and be some kind of live testing ground for future sets, well, that’s pretty powerful.

What makes a set truly great? Are there certain things great sets possess that lesser sets do not? If a great set is the product of previous years’ evolution, then shouldn’t earlier years be considered great as well? Just what is it that pushes the great set to a higher plane? I’ve asked myself these questions a number of times while writing this countdown. And while their answers are hard to pin down in the majority of cases (because there are very sets that stand apart from the pack), 1992 Topps is different: There’s more than one thing that elevates it to greatness.

In 1991, Topps debuted gold foil stamping on some of the subset cards in the Bowman set. (Topps also added a small gold foil palm tree accent to a miniscule quantity of its flagship and sent them to troops as part of their Desert Shield distribution program.) Interesting in a footnote kind of way, the gold foil itself didn’t add much to overall card design. If anything, it was a ‘hey, look what we can do’ kind of thing. That changed for 1992, which saw Topps increase its gold foil stamp quotient exponentially, resulting in the Topps Gold base set parallel. Really, there were two parallels—Gold and Gold Winners—but nobody really wanted Gold Winners: they were much easier to find than straight up Gold (this difference could very well have been the first instance of tiered desirability). And though Gold technically wasn’t the first time Topps had done a base set parallel (the Tiffany sets of the 1980s were Topps’ first true parallel sets), it was the first parallel randomly inserted in packs (Topps Tiffany cards had been available only as complete, factory-sealed sets).

In addition to the introduction of widespread gold foil stamping, ’92 Topps saw an increase in quality photography. Unlike Topps photography in the 1980s, (it took the company nine years to reach its zenith in 1988), 1990s Topps photography peaked early. With the introduction of the Stadium Club brand (and by extension officially bringing Kodak into the fold) in 1991, the idea took hold that every card, not just those of stars, could feature nice photos. There were a handful of such ‘cinematic’ cards in the 1991 flagship issue, but 1992 saw 26, certainly a dramatic increase by anyone’s count. In fact, it seems like the Pittsburgh Pirates hired their own private photographer; just about everyone on the team got decked out across their own empty Three Rivers Stadium backdrop.

Any great set has to have a great checklist. The first thing you notice about this set’s checklist is that Topps cemented institutional hero worship upon Nolan Ryan (#1 in 1990, 1991, 1992). Up until that point, the company had bestowed subset hero worship on four players (Babe Ruth in 1962, Hank Aaron in 1974, Pete Rose in 1986 and Ryan in 1990), and institutional hero worship on only one: Ted Williams (#1 in 1954, 1957, 1958). This may seem like a no-brainer on Topps’ part, but remember that while certain checklist numbers through the years may have ‘felt’ like they should have gone hand in hand with certain players (#500 with Mickey Mantle, #600 with Willie Mays, #250 with Stan Musial, #200 with Warren Spahn or Sandy Koufax), very few numbers were given to certain players repeatedly. (As an aside, just wait until the Mickey Mantle estate ends their relationship with Topps: I bet that card #7, their current holy number, will go right back into circulation.)

1992 saw the return of the four-headed rookie card, on hiatus since 1978. It was also the fourth year in a row that draft picks were given their own subset, highlighted by Cliff Floyd, Aaron Sele, Manny Ramirez, Shawn Green, Pokey Reese and Brien Taylor rookies. Record Breakers, All-Star Rookies and All-Stars rounded out the subsets. The All-Stars were especially strong, with seven Hall of Fame caliber players (plus Bonds and Clemens). I think it’s telling that three of the five subsets were rookie-related. Add in a boatload of unmarked rookies and this set is literally crawling with them (110 total for the set). Chalk it up to the Bowman Effect. With Topps establishing the Bowman brand as the legitimate ‘home of the rookie card’ in 1991, the company built off of that assertion in the 1992 Topps flagship by including scores of ‘cup of coffee’ type players, older rookies and career minor leaguers briefly up in the majors. As a result we’re treated to cards of guys like Alonzo Powell, Jose ‘The 700 Year Old Rookie’ Mesa, Bryan Hickerson and John Wehner. For a lot of guys, 1992 Topps would be their only major league card for their career.

In the grand scheme of things, that’s not a bad proposition (What if your only card was in 1988 Donruss?). This set is one of the best-designed sets the company has ever released. You may regard that last sentence as pure hyperbole, but I beg to differ. Let’s break this down. Clean white borders had been a Topps design staple for most of their 40-odd years of producing cards (notable years without continuous white borders: 1962, 1968, 1970, 1971, 1975, 1986, 1987, 1990), so their inclusion in 1992 was no real surprise. If anything, the surprise is how well the borders play off the rest of the card.

On the front, thin lines framed the photo, with one specific to team colors, the other white. Player name and team were set against small team-colored rectangles that filled out along the bottom of the frame, though never touched the white border. The three card front elements (the accent frame and two bottom boxes) each featured a different team color. For the Rangers, the accent frame was in gray, the player name box in red and the team name box in blue. It’s done to complement the photo, and achieves this in striking manner. It’s interesting to note, but nothing besides an odd arm or leg ever touches the surrounding white border. That may not seem like much, but previous years’ design routinely allowed elements to touch or overlap the borders (see 1988, 1985, 1980 and various others).

So while the frame and borders evinced a certain Frank Lloyd Wright sense of design, the real star of the card was the photograph. The photo was given free reign over the frame, giving nearly every subject a larger-than-life, magazine cover presence. In those instances where the player didn’t seem to literally pop off the card, the photograph was interesting enough to make you think they did.

As for the card backs, 1992 was quite possibly, in my estimation, the best-designed Topps back since 1971. ’92 was the first Topps flagship back to feature anything in color, and instead of a meaningless headshot (like Fleer used for its 1991 back), Topps chose a panorama of that player’s home stadium. It was a nice touch; gave the card grounding. Besides, not all of the cards had a photo, only for those players with a few years experience. Most veterans had too many years of service to list everything and include a photo, so when you got one with a photo it seemed special. Out of 792 cards, 595 featured a stadium on its back.

One of the questions I’ve asked myself before ranking a set is whether the set in particular was a product of its time, or a product that helped create its time. In this vein, the innovations put to use in 1992 Topps (gold foil stamping, tiered parallel sets) not only added to the frenzy of card collecting at the time, it laid partial groundwork for the years that followed. Add in its glorious design, killer checklist and stunning photography and not only do you have a great set, you have the best Topps set of the early decade.

(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.

(This post originally ran on February 22, 2008)

The Popeye muscles. The icicles on the end of Chili Davis’ bat. The Pop art sensibility and the 35¢ packs bobbing like life preservers in a sea of overpriced, insert-laden deadweights. The short 132-card checklist. The fun facts and anthropomorphic baseball equipment trading knowing looks with players and fans. Topps Kids, we hardly knew ye. Well… we knew ye—and some of us really loved ye (just not enough of us for ye’s liking).

This set, while defiant in the face of the mo’ money, mo’ problems hobby, was a product of Topps talking out of both sides of its mouth. Little kids were getting priced out of a hobby that had been geared towards them for generations, and much of it was Topps' doing with sets like Stadium Club. And yet Topps, ever the quixotic cavalier, rode to their rescue with cheap cheap packs, fun cartoons and explanatory tidbits about the game and the hobby.

The set launched a niche within an already niche hobby: what I’ve dubbed ‘Kids Kards.’ Both Donruss and Upper Deck followed the Topps lead with their own Kids Kards sets (Triple Play and Fun Packs, respectively). But while its competitors each churned out a few sets (Donruss produced Triple Play from 1992 to 1994 and Upper Deck made Fun Packs in 1993 and 1994), Topps Kids only survived through one year. Why?

I have a theory. While the cards were fun, and have gained a bit of notoriety for their pre-steroids depiction of players as muscle-bound Goliaths, Topps overlooked one very important thing about the hobby landscape of 1992: kids may have been priced out, but they were still collectors like everybody else: they wanted bells and whistles. They wanted shiny inserts. Upper Deck and Donruss understood this and incorporated these things into their Kids Kard sets. And Topps, though sage to recognize a market ready for its own set, was too wrapped up in its nostalgia of simpler times and simpler cards to see that its creation patronized its target audience.

I loved this set when it came out (and no, I wasn’t a little kid). I loved its playfulness and, as a collector experiencing foil fatigue at the time, I immensely enjoyed the fact that there was a shiny-things-free lower-priced set out there. I also liked the gum.

Though I’d forgotten about the set for a number of years, my admiration of it has grown. I jumped at buying a box online last summer and live-blogged a pack for A Pack A Day (click on the link to read the entry).

Earlier today, I got a chance to pose a few questions to David Coulson, the illustrator for Topps Kids, as well as other Topps sets.


The Baseball Card Blog: How did the set come about?

Coulson: I'd been working for as a freelance illustrator for Topps on and off ever since I started freelancing in the early 1980s. I was initially brought on by Art Spiegelman to illustrate a non-sports display box, and continued working primarily on non-sports projects, although I remember also illustrating a baseball and a football sticker album.

BBC Blog: Did Topps approach you early on in the development process?

Coulson: In the early '90s I was contacted by Brad Kahlhammer, an art director there who I'd worked with frequently, to design the cartoon back for the prototype Topps Kids card. It was a product that they were hoping would get young kids into baseball card collecting again (after years of decline in that demographic), hence the fun look and the low price point.

They had already had an illustrator design a few rough samples for the fronts (Richard McGuire is who I remember). This soon developed into me drawing all of the cartoon backs for the series, and drawing all the illustrations and hand-lettering for the fronts and the packaging as well. Some of the front styles were based on the style of the previous samples, the colored pencil rendered bodies with the photo heads being an example. There were at least 7 or 8 different front designs, all illustrated by me and mostly colored by me, with the exception of the cartoon silhouettes and graphic shapes which were colored at Topps.

For the backs I did only black & white illustrations (and lettering) and they had several different colorists do the colors, which is why if you look closely you can see different techniques of color application.

BBC Blog:With a checklist of only 132 cards, player selection must have been tough (only four or five players from each team). Were there any illustrations that didn't make it into the set?

Coulson: I don't know how they decided which players to include. I was provided with a script and stats for each back along with photo reference for each player and uniform reference for each team. I was able to come up with my own sight gags and similar incidental word balloons based on the scripts.

As far as I recall there were no illustrations that didn't make it into the set, although there were several that had to be revised when a player was traded after their card was drawn but before being printed.

BBC Blog: Finally, I approach baseball cards like they are little pieces of modern art, worthy of attention and critique. Are you a collector? And if so, do you have any favorite cards (that you've worked on or otherwise)?

Coulson: I agree with you about cards in general, although I am not a collector myself (except for my own samples). More recent sports card jobs I've done for Topps include the Bazooka Baseball, Bazooka Football, and Bazooka Basketball full color comic strip inserts series (Don Alan Zakrzewski art director), meant to be reminiscent of Bazooka Joe bubblegum comics, but also very similar in feel to the Topps Kids series. Each of these was a series of 24 insert cards, and unlike Topps Kids, they each continued for at least 2 or 3 years. I also drew black & white cartoon spots for the main series of Topps Baseball and Football cards for the 2006 year (Erik Kroha, art director), which was probably over 500 cartoons!


Here are a few other Topps Kids and David Coulson resources on the web:

Local Cartoonist Wows Kids (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 7/12/06)

David Coulson, Topps Kids illustrator (official site)

Hi there. I’m Gary Sheffield. I was just pomading my phat-ass Kid’N’Play hi-top fade. If you're wondering how I keep it so perfectly coiffed... well, let’s just say a couple drops of flaxseed oil under the tongue helps.



This is one of the most underrated sets of the early decade in terms of design and on-card content (as opposed to checklist, which was mostly a dud). 1992 saw Studio incorporate a warmly lit color headshot (less Herb Ritts and more… stock photography? The creativity of the headshot photography in this set was a little suspect) set against a larger black and white action photo. Its border design bears a strong resemblance to the same year’s Gold Edition from Leaf, though in its inverse (large gold border highlighted by a thin black frame). The thin gloss coat makes the colors pop on the front and shows off a classy ‘Studio’ watermark on the back.

Like the other Studio sets, what really gave this set oomph was the biographical data it gave on the back. While not as punchy as, say, 1992-93 Skybox basketball, the Studio sets provided more than enough unintentionally hilarious information. For a lesson in the power of juxtaposition, look no further than Paul Molitor: Intense Individual:

Hobbies are golf and racquetball… Favorite singer is Bruce Springsteen; actor is Robert De Niro; movie is Silence of the Lambs; book is the Bible.

…can you imagine being roommates with him on the road? Yikes.

All right, so this set is ranked probably a little too high. But tell me, why am I a sucker for Senior Superlative sets? Were the other brands really that boring by comparison? It’s fascinating that a brand like Studio could survive more than one or two years, and yet it effortlessly transcended its novelty status in 1991 to a real set, with real cards—produced every year—that carried weight in the Hobby almost until the end of the decade (the last Studio set was released in 1998). The brand even gave the Hobby one of its most memorable insert sets of the early decade in Heritage (debuting in this 1992 edition).

I should amend my thoughts at the beginning of this review. This set isn’t underrated: it has a weak base checklist and the design—while quality—is about on par with other sets one step up from the manufacturers’ respective flagships. What this set is is surprising. Surprising in that it’s surprising that it was made, surprising that the hobby, while reveling in its own bloated-ness, could float a set like this for more than just a year, and surprising that as a brand Studio flourished for eight years, mostly on the combined strengths of the emotional angle of the cards and the one, excellent insert set.

While other kids my age were busy doing whippets under the bleachers after school, I was at home, in my room, by myself, blowing my mind with the three-photo cards found in 1992 Upper Deck. Upper Deck debuted the gimmick in 1989, but it was hardly old hat three years later. I mean, did you hear me? Three photos on one card! And they all overlapped! The concept rocked then, and it still rocks today (I’ve stared at this card of Ken Griffey, Jr. now for at least five minutes straight and still can’t figure out if I’m looking at three or four overlapped photos).

With cards like these stealing the spotlight, you almost forget that 1992 Upper Deck had all the hallmarks of a great set: a fantastic design, memorable rookies, fun subsets and a checklist that didn’t turn anybody away at the door. Toss in a bizarre (yet timely) insert of Tom “Mr. Baseball” Selleck, an autographed Ted Williams Hero(es) Worship card and enough holograms to start your own hall of mirrors and you were looking at probably the best set Upper Deck had assembled up to that point. Taking nothing away from its landmark inaugural set from 1989, 1992 Upper Deck was great simply because it didn’t look cheap, with its bright colors, inviting graphics and thinly glossed stock, even though it was.

And that’s an important distinction to make. 1989 wasn’t a cheap set to buy into, even though it probably should have been: the cards, while totally revolutionary at the time, have not aged very well (outside of the Griffey rookie and two or three others). They feel flimsy, with dull, muted colors and photography that doesn’t jump as far off the page as it probably should, given the set’s stature in the hobby. But cards from 1992? Perhaps because it was never going to be (or intended to be) considered a Pillar of the Hobby-type set, it hasn’t had as far to fall. My argument’s coming out all convoluted, but the gist is that because 1990 Upper Deck missed out on one of the biggest rookies of the year (Frank Thomas) and 1991’s design can best be described as ‘eye-gougingly painful,’ the expectations for 1992’s set were very low. Obviously, Upper Deck learned from the previous two years’ mistakes and had a few tricks up their sleeves, but if anything the set’s goal seemed to have some fun out there. And it passed with flying colors (not to mention with a stash of three-photo motion cards).

I should probably also mention something about the ill-advised Comic Ball 3 set, as it featured much of the same design as 1992 Upper Deck. All I can say is that the Upper Deck writers must’ve been on something more potent than junior high-strength whippets in order to come up with coherent dialogue between Jim Abbott and the Tasmanian Devil. I mean, writing for Reggie Jackson and Daffy Duck is easy: they’re both obsessed with themselves. But Jim Abbott and Taz? First, I thought Taz could only shriek nonsense, and second, I didn’t realize Jim Abbott had enough personality to carry a conversation, much less one with a cartoon character.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but lately I’ve been writing up a storm. There’s a reason: I’m moving and will have only limited access to a computer next week. Besides, I’ve made you wait long enough for more of the Nineties Countdown, right?


I should come right and say it: I was a Score Man in the early Nineties. After what I thought were ugly 1988 and 1989 sets, there was little the flagship could do wrong over the next five years (divided into two distinct parts: the free wheeling, massive mass-consumption trilogy from 1990 to 1992, and the more refined, scaled-back and grown-up sets from 1993 and 1994). That’s quite remarkable, especially for an era when the best description for the majority of sets was ‘treacherous.’

Score put the behemoths to bed in style: a futuristic base card design complemented by a handful of subsets (including the benchmark ‘Dream Team’), plus decent inserts, special factory set cards and a checklist of roughly six billion (alright, that’s a stretch, but I’m not off by much). And the best part of it all? It was easy to collect. Packs were cheap and if by 1992 putting together a set through packs wasn’t really your thing (and who can blame you, what with all the high-dollar inserts making pack buying more of a lavish exercise rather than a necessity), you could saunter down to your local drugstore and buy the whole factory set.

And the trick of it was that Score knew their sets were gigantic and that collectors would want a factory set option. Hell, they even encouraged such thinking amongst the rank and file (I bought the factory set from 1990 to 1992). Why else would they have included all those attractive factory set inserts (Cooperstown, DiMaggio, Yaz, World Series)? It was as if they were saying that the only thing you’d get from buying packs (besides possibly completing the set) was pack fatigue.

But the thing about buying the factory set that sort of ruined the experience was that you couldn't enjoy each card. A lot of kids I knew didn't even take the cards out of the box once they got it home. Not me. I dumped the set out and fully incorporated it with the rest of my collection. Today I still I have the empty factory set box, but damned if I know where its contents are.

And this was a set that was meant to be thumbed through, you know? Out of 893 base cards, there were 60 denoted subset cards (including the crazy, Cool World-esque mind-bending cartoons-in-the-real-world All Stars) and at least 141 rookies and top prospect cards. That's a quarter of the set right there. That most of them didn't pan out (or their 1992 Score incarnation wasn't their real rookie) hardly mattered in the end. Overall, a glorious, gluttonous set.

If we remove the overt references to astrology, 1992 Leaf is the baseball card equivalent to the premise of The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh. Struggling brand/team that nobody wants? Check. Hare-brained schemes crazy enough they just might work? Check.

All right, the comparison is a bit of a stretch, but let’s step back for a moment and take stock of where Leaf was heading into 1992.

With its spectacular mix of winning design, hot-ticket rookies and limited availability, Leaf’s re-birth from Canadian Donruss to full-bodied super-premium set was the talk of the hobby in 1990. On the heels of that unbridled success, something happened that should have been avoided, but also probably expected: 1991 Leaf was a bloated, ugly mess, not only devoid of rookies within the base set, but released in such mass quantities that it pushed the brand from thoroughbred to laughingstock overnight.

Faced with the harsh reality that nobody really looked to their product for hobby gold anymore, the company did something interesting. While other brands added scores of new bells and whistles to make their products stand out, Leaf managed to give their set relevance again by adding only one: the Gold Edition parallel. By simply seeding one gorgeous gold-foil-on-black-border card per pack, Leaf was back. Oh sure, it helped that 1992’s design was cleaner than the hideous cards from the previous year, but a parallel set was something entirely new at the time*, and no set had done black borders since 1987 Donruss, a design motif that added a certain emotional weight to the card.

Was 1992 Leaf a great set? Not really (it wasn’t ever really a powerhouse set). But what it lacked in pizzazz it more than made up for with a clean design and simple, forward-thinking inserts.


*1992 also saw the introduction of Topps Gold, though those were harder to find than Leaf’s one per pack. Leaf’s 1992 Gold Edition would be the brand's only base set parallel until 1996’s Press Proofs set.

35. 1993 Leaf
I’m sorry, but even white boys have to shout: Even though this marked Leaf’s first foray into full-bleed photography, foil stamping and shiny hologram printing, the night skylines on the back outshined whatever bells and whistles they could throw in. It should have been the front design. With all apologies to Sir Mix-a-Lot, 1993 Leaf is the ‘Baby-Got-Back’ set of the early Nineties.

The checklist? A snooze, with no major rookies to speak of (unless you count Curtis Leskanic as a major rookie), and Ben McDonald slated on card #1. Also: 106 inserts seeded over three series, including possibly the first cross-brand cards: Frank Thomas Hero Worship. I remember these cards in 1993 Studio; they were in Leaf as well.


34. 1992 Stadium Club
It is for this set (and 1991 Leaf) that ‘sophomore slump’ applies the best. Oh sure, I’ve thrown the term around quite freely over the course of this Countdown, but it is the very definition of 1992 Stadium Club.

Coming on the heels of one of the most iconic sets of the early decade, Topps tried to make this edition even better than the previous one. Because we’re talking about 1992, that meant adding inserts and send-away offers, not to mention opening up the checklist to seemingly include every major leaguer, and everyone they went to high school with–a whopping 900 cards in all (up from 600 in 1991). And yet even with all these base cards, and in one of the best rookie crop years to boot, there are few (if any) major rookies in the whole base checklist.

Instead, they were lumped into the special ‘SkyDome’ box set, along with the other subsets that Topps should have included in the base set: All Stars, Draft Picks and World Series Highlights. Maybe these cards weren’t included in the regular set because of timing. I don’t know. What I do know is that this special 200-card set is more exciting than the 900-card behemoth it followed, and had Topps cut out 200 cards from the base to include these SkyDome cards, 1992 Stadium Club would have been a more logical follow-up to 1991.


33. 1994 Studio
It was hard not to like Donruss’ Studio brand: the photography was amazingly sharp, the checklist wasn’t bloated, the overall base design was attractive and for the most part, it seemed like the set had little if anything to do with baseball. Of course, it had everything to do with the game, but since its inception in 1991 with those hideous charcoal-background portraits, Studio was all about infusing the stars of the game and the game itself with an artistic sensibility, like Diamond Kings come to life.

And like every other brand in the early Nineties, Studio was not immune to the insert craze. But because the base design was so classy, naturally it rubbed off on the inserts (actually, I shouldn’t say ‘naturally,’ because even some sets with the best base designs had some terribly-designed inserts; 1993 and 1994 Donruss come to mind). Studio debuted the tiered Silver and Gold Stars sets, as well as the filmstrip ‘Editor’s Choice’ (the film strip design motif seemed to be a big deal in the early Nineties, probably because of the heightened emphasis on quality photography). 1994 also saw the continuation of the ‘Heritage’ insert (contemporary stars dressed in historic uniforms), a personal favorite.

So if this set is so great, why does it rank somewhere in the middle of the pack? Simply put: it’s fluff. 220 base cards hardly constituted a major issue, and if it was real statistics you were after, Studio was not the place to look. But if it was senior superlative, yearbook-type body copy and old-timey boardwalk dress-up you wanted, Studio was your set.

This trade comes in from Bob of Manchester Center, Vermont.

Giving: Scott Kazmir, #142 (red back)
Getting: Top Prospects 1B, 1992 Topps

Despite their randomness in pairing, Scott Kazmir and Ryan Klesko have something in common: first, their former teams gave them up for practically nothing, and second, they either played out the balance of their career (Klesko) or are playing currently (Kazmir) in relative obscurity. They are both also very, very good at what they do.

Just one other note about the Klesko card. I've always been intrigued by John Jaha. It's probably due to his uncommon last name, but I really bought into those rookies I would never have heard of if it weren't for baseball cards. Guys like Jaha, Matt Mieske, Chad Mottola, Midre Cummings. You can add Jermaine Allensworth to that list. Funny thing about Jermaine Allensworth...there was a skit on SNL about a hundred years ago with Tracey Morgan where Morgan kept repeating the words 'Jermaine Allensworth' until they had almost no meaning. It was a running joke that nobody got. I don't know why I remember that.

#61 & #60. 1992 & 1993 Triple Play
When we sit by the fireside, maybe in a few years, with a blanket wrapped around our legs, one hand poking at the fire with a long stick, the other matting down the last few strands of our hair with the spittle collecting at the corners of our mouth, what will we be thinking about?

Please, please please—let it not be these godforsaken sets, with their hideous renditions of orange and black. Let it not be silver lettered surnames, writ large and wide like proclamations, like billboards worthy of our time and energy. Nor let it be the emotionless action photos of crashes at the plate, or the scratch-off game cards that subliminally spawned the deep-seated-yet-hard-to-pinpoint-quite-
how-it-started-so-very-long-ago love for instant win lottery cards.

No no no—no more Roger McDowell in funny getups, doing funny things in funny situations. No more Phillie Phanatic rain dances on the dugout roof. No more cards from Paul Molitor’s gap-toothed grade school glory.

Let’s not think about these lame little brothers to Topps Kids and Upper Deck Fun Packs. Let’s remember that these set names shorten to TP for a reason. Let’s try to forget that we spent $15.00 at one point for a box of the 1993 version.

Yes, let’s hope that we’re watching TV. And not thinking about any of this.

#59. 1992 Fleer
Here’s another set I’d rather not have to think about ever again. And yet every so often, I find myself looking through that old Beckett from 1995 and I can’t help but search out my shoebox of cards from 1992, just to make sure for the thousandth time if I had any of those insert cards. And I don’t, though I did buy a Frank Thomas Rookie Sensation for fifty cents at a card show a few months ago. (Oh, how the mighty have fallen.)

Because that’s what this set had going for it: insert cards. You could argue that if Upper Deck brought inserts and autographs into the spotlight, the guys at Fleer kicked in the footlights, the fills and maybe even the houselights in the insert bonanza. Think about this. From 1986 to 1989, Fleer produced four straight years of 660-card sets, 132-card updates and 18 total insert cards. In 1990 they kept things cool at 660/132 and upped the insert total to 30. In 1991 they bumped the regular set to 720, kept the update set at 132, and took the insert total down to 22. But 1992? That year saw the regular and update sets stay at 720/132 and the number of inserts climb to 97. 97! That’s an unbelievable 441% increase from the year before.

And yet as ridiculous as that jump is, 97 individual insert cards is on par with almost every other product line for the year: Donruss had 67; Leaf had 24; Pinnacle had 135; Score had 124; Stadium Club had 3; Studio had 14; Ultra had 65; Upper Deck had 98 and Leaf and Topps had parallel sets.

The other thing that Fleer had was its Update set, one of the few sets in 1992 to have a card of Mike Piazza, the 1992 National League Rookie of the Year and a sure bet for the Hall of Fame. It also had first cards of mid-Nineties hobby superstar Kenny Lofton, Tim Salmon, Tim Wakefield and the immortal David Nied, the original member of the Colorado Rockies. (And for ten points: name the first Florida Marlin.)


#58. 1992 Fleer Ultra
1992 Fleer Ultra had to exist, so right away it’s set itself apart from many of those ranked before it. Why did it have to exist? For a number of reasons, the first being that the hobby had to find out if 1991’s Ultra was a one-trick pony or if it had legs.

And not only did Ultra have legs for the long haul—it’s still going strong today, sixteen years later—but it had four legs, as the marbleized 1992 design hoofed its way across baseball, basketball, football and hockey. Not only that, but it cemented the Fleer mothership in the somewhat uncharted waters of random autographed insert cards and cribbed a page from the Topps playbook on Hero Worship before Topps had a chance to capitalize on the idea. Case in point: by the time Topps got around to worshipping their forever-sober/strong-kneed version of Mickey Mantle in 1996, the idea seemed a little warmed over to the early Nineties generation of collectors, as Fleer and Fleer Ultra had, by that time, been playing the Hero Worship card for going on five years.

Why else did this set have to exist? Because it completely elevated 1991’s Ultra. More so that Upper Deck and Leaf, and with the exception of Pinnacle and Stadium Club, 1992 Fleer Ultra had some heft. It felt like what a premium card should’ve felt like: glossed up, with matrix-y computer graphics on the back. Plus that polished marble on the front and those little gold rookie flags around the fireball logo. And cards that Tony Gwynn autographed (and probably didn’t exist anywhere except as words on the box)

Yeah, it’s not worth jack now. Yeah, the graphics haven’t aged well. Yeah, it feels tired in the grand scheme of things. But to put it plainly, 1992 Fleer Ultra was the shit.


More Countdown coming soon…
By the way, if you answered ‘Nigel Wilson’—ten points to you!

Last night I finished reading Pete Williams’ Card Sharks, an excellent read. The book, currently enjoying a round of renewed attention thanks to Michael O’Keeffe and Teri Thompson’s The Card, is great not only because it confirms my personal thoughts on Upper Deck, but because it helps me appreciate how the other companies approached UD, both leading up to its debut in 1989 and how they reacted and played catch-up in the early Nineties. It’s especially poignant in regards to this latest Card Critic Countdown.

It’s also interesting to note that there aren’t very many written accounts of the history of the hobby, and certainly few from the collector’s point of view. Not to be too self-indulgent here, but I think the recent burst of collector-fueled blogs is exactly what this hobby needed. Finally the collector has a way to express his or her own history in the hobby, how they approach collecting, what they’ve taken away from it and where they see it heading.

Anyway, the book is a good litmus test to see how much of a diehard collector you are. If you can make it through this book and still be in love with collecting cards as much as you were before, despite all the crap that the Upper Deck executives pulled, and how under the guise of “making a better baseball card” they mostly just sucked the soul out of the hobby—then congratulations, you’re really in this to the bitter end.

One last thing not related to the current Countdown. Yesterday I bought a hobby box of 2007 Topps Series 2, and although I got almost every card except Daisuke Matsuzaka (which leads me to believe his card may be as hard to find as Griffey Jr. in packs of 1989 Donruss), it didn’t really bother me, as I got this unintentionally funny card of Fernando Rodney and Pudge Rodriguez. Rodney is really into it; it looks like he’s waiting for a smooch. Too bad Rodriguez is still in his mask and pads.



#65. 1990 Topps
Ah, good ol’ 1990 Topps. A jewel in the rough. Yeah…not really, but sometimes it’s fun to pretend. It’s actually pretty amazing that this set was as bad as it was. Think about it: draft picks cards, Nolan Ryan Hero Worship, a decent crop of All-Stars, good Turn Back The Clocks (especially the 1975 Freddie Lynn, perhaps setting the precedent for later Archives Best Years and other retired players sets where they turn four-headed rookies to one-headed rookies with ease and grace), various other subsets and of course, Ken Griffey Jr, poised on the dugout steps gazing up into the sky, hopeful for a long, achievement-filled career. It’s a set brimming over with optimism.

It even had a high-profile error card, back when Topps was in the error card business by mistake. A quantity of Frank Thomas’ draft pick card, already one of the best cards in the set, were printed without his name on the front. Prices on the secondary market went through the roof and have stayed high, even after almost eighteen years and despite problems with counterfeit error cards.

Unfortunately, in terms of design, when Topps shot for ‘computer-gradient cool’ it missed widely and instead delivered ‘patchwork puke.’ This was one ugly set. Actually, you could say that it set the bar for the decade in terms of ugly design. Any ugly set that followed had to be compared to 1990 Topps to put its ugliness in perspective.

I want to say that this set has aged gracefully, that today’s sense of fashion, design and sensibility have grown and changed enough to be able to accommodate for Topps’ hiccup. But I can’t, because while the world has progressed, this set is woefully stuck. Instead, here’s what I appreciate about 1990 Topps: the unreadable backs and the ill-advised 3-D front, not so much for what they are as for what they symbolize: these design choices sum up just how much Topps (and the rest of the non-Upper Deck companies) had riding on predicting Nineties pop culture and style better than Upper Deck. Thumbing through a stack of 1990 Topps is like staring the end of the Topps Dynasty in the face.

Once the Traded and inaugural Major League Debut sets came out, it all but confirmed what the regular set had established: Topps was on the brink of becoming just another card manufacturer.


#64. 1992 OPC Premier
It was a big deal when O-Pee-Chee came out with their Premier line in 1991. I remember paying over a dollar for packs of Premier in 1991. But 1992? There was no hype, no buzz, nothing surrounding the set. And the set itself was like a minor tweak of 1991. Historically, that shouldn’t have been a problem. 1982 and 1983 Donruss differed only slightly in their design. But it was a problem with 1992 OPC Premier.

The player name, the crux of the 1991 design that was at once so crisp and delicate, was suddenly large-print size in 1992. The photos themselves were also softer, the backs were portrait instead of landscape and there were more cards in the set. But the real difference was that it was something in 1991 for a set to have a full-color back, with a color headshot, especially since not everybody could afford Upper Deck and Stadium Club. By 1992, that novelty had worn off. Too bad O-Pee-Chee didn’t get the memo. Ultimately, this set needn’t have existed.

#63. 1994 Pacific
God, how I loathed this set. Bad photos, unreadable front type, stupid company logo, cards that stuck together, bad back design (complete with torn linen resumé paper bottoms). The only good thing was that it was half in Spanish. Everything should’ve been in Spanish. The way it was, it seemed like a half-assed job to me. Think about it: the Player’s Association should of let Topps just make cards in Spanish, like they did with O-Pee-Chee for French-speaking Canadians. They could’ve built off the resurrection of the sets Topps released in Venezuela in the Sixties and early Seventies. People would’ve become interested in those hidden gems, if however briefly. Anything would’ve been better than Pacific’s set from 1994.

#62. 1994 Topps
I kind of liked this set when it came out. It was a derivative of 1993 Topps, only with a better design, better photos and a nice thin gloss varnish on the front and back. I call it derivative of 1993 Topps because it was released in two series over the course of the season and Topps Gold parallel cards were seeded one per pack, which was kind of neat. There weren’t too many All-Star caliber rookies (though Konerko and Jason Schmidt made an appearance in the Traded set), and All-Stars were head-to-head AL/NL by position. Really, there’s not much to say about this set.
That’s because it’s not who’s included in this set that is important, but who’s not. Topps had three chances to include a card of Alex Rodriguez in this set, but didn’t. Only a handful of sets did include the A-Rod rookie (SP is the most notable), and those that did were rewarded with more interest from collectors.

I guess the only thing I can add right now is that I unearthed this card of Barry Bonds over the weekend. When this card came out in 1994, it perfectly summed up the hero cloaked in stoic greatness. Today it’s still perfect; a perfect photographic metaphor of the shadows that have enveloped much of this man’s game.




More Countdown Coming Soon

#69. 1991 Donruss
1991 Donruss is one of those sets that don’t deserve your time or your energy in analysis. Here’s my review of this set, in ten words or less. Blue. Green. Two series. Cheesy Donruss Elite Inserts You’ll Never Find In A Pack. OK, so that’s fourteen words, but that’s about it. Also, there were something like two hundred Rated Rookies, probably to better compete with Bowman and Score.

#68. 1994 Select
When I got my hands on sample preview cards from this set back in early 1994, I couldn’t help but ask what the point of issuing this set might be. The fronts had two photos separated by a thick gold foil band with the player’s surname stamped out, so that the photo behind it showed through. It was just way too busy a design for anything to register. It was almost like having an epileptic fit, even though nothing was moving.

In essence, Score had to release this set: with Select they effectively had a product for every price range—Score for the cheapies and the kids, Select for the middle-of-the-road and Pinnacle for those deep-pocketed, discerning collectors. The only problem was, 1994 Select was garbage, so middle-of-the-road collectors took their money to other brands.

#67. 1992 Donruss
This is one ugly set, in both design and checklist. The only card you’d be happy to get in a pack of 1992 Donruss was the randomly-inserted Ripken autographed chase card, and the chance of finding one of those was so astronomically small that opening pack after pack of this crappy set was like some kind of baseball card purgatory.

And it’s too bad, because this set had certain makings of a great (if not at least good) set. It was the first Donruss set that not only had a headshot on the back, but more than one color back there. It was just the second Donruss set that came in two series, and one of the only flagship sets to be issued in two series, giving rise to the possibility of multiple special subsets (in order to drive sales throughout the season). Instead, 1992 was the first year Donruss pulled the Diamond Kings from the regular set, putting them instead into an insert set.


Without Diamond Kings to infuse a little Dick Perez into the set, the checklist was a perfect example of monotony. This set became top and bottom blue bar hell. Granted, it was the first set without the trademark Donruss Tron-inspired borders, but without any hint of dark colors to separate the photo from the background, Donruss actually hurt their standing in the hobby. They had spent almost ten years building up an image in terms of design (very masculine, with straight lines and sparse use of color) and transitioned away from it without even the faintest whiff of pause or regret, stranding those collectors that appreciated a geek-inspired design to help them through the summer. Too bad Donruss didn’t see it that way.

#66. 1993 Select
I wanted to like this set. Hell, I did like it. It's just that, well, this set was bad. And there were a lot of bad sets in the early Nineties. A needless set that may have been decent, with decent design, but had only come about because hobby had become a virtual free for all in the early Nineties. Most were unnecessary, but some of those sets had historical significance. 1993 Select is one of those sets that I liked, were bad, and had balls enough to make a difference for sets that followed.

It’s important for its design, as it was the first Score/Pinnacle product to feature a slightly off-kilter graphical border; going all the way back to Score’s 1988 debut, all previous front-of-card design had plopped the photo in a traditional rectangle (only the two-toned infield of 1989 Score deviated, and then not even very much, as that element was layered over the photo). 1993 Select was also one of the first sets regardless of manufacturer to bleed the photos all the way to the edge (but only on two sides, and then not all the way on either side). Only the premium brands Fleer Ultra and Topps Stadium Club beat Select to the punch, and for the record, photos bleeding to the edge as a design advancement was very 1993, as Select, SP, Flair, Studio and Leaf all made the jump. By 1994, borderless fronts were par for the course.

It’s also important because it was one of the first sets promoted across two different product lines. In 1992, Donruss inserted a packet of 1992 Leaf preview cards in each of its 1992 Donruss factory sets. On paper, that’s a pretty good move: I know I was underwhelmed by the freezer-burn blue of 1992 Donruss and no way did I find myself wanting to purchase packs, let alone the factory set, but the incentive of Leaf preview cards was intriguing.

With the launch of Select in 1993, Score took this idea a step farther. Score inserted Select Stat Leaders, a mammoth though rather pedestrian set (much like 2007 Topps’ Generation NOW), one per pack of 1993 Score (an incredibly underrated set). Granted, there were a ton of cards in Stat Leaders (90), almost more cards than actual statistical categories, but odds were you’d never get the same card twice, and, if you liked the design and the gloss (oh yeah, Select had a glossy front), you might try a pack of Select.

So then it’s a shame that this set came entered the market as another needless premium set debuting the same year as SP, Finest and Flair, three vastly superior sets against which Select could only compete in vain.

I guess that's why they called it 'Select'--only a select few of us chose to collect it.




1990s Countdown Sets #65 to #62 Coming Soon