The 1990s Baseball Cards Face-Off - Babe Ruth 2nd Quartile

Check this post to see my methodology.

Let's get back to the 1990s. Here's the opening bracket for the 2nd Quartile of the Babe Ruth Division.

To me this looks like a weaker division then the 1st Quartile. Too many gimmick cards (like 1996 Pinnacle Aficionado). We'll see.

1996 Leaf vs. 1999 Upper Deck MVP

1996 Leaf #42 Mickey Morandini

1996 Leaf #68 Travis Fryman

1996 Leaf starts out strong with bright full bleed photography on the front then blots out the left and bottom edges with team-color coordinated foil. The player name is hard to read in the foil bottom and the team name is almost impossible to read, wrapped around the Leaf logo. The backs aren't too bad with another full bleed photograph about as large as the photo on the front. There is also a porthole photo which seems to have been popular with the 1996 Leaf-Donruss family (see 1996 Studio from the 1st Quartile). Current year and career stats in too small printing, especially since they had room to make it larger. The cards are glossy front and back.

1999 Upper Deck MVP #202 Fred McGriff

1999 Upper Deck MVP #27 Mike Mussina

There is a lot of design on this card. The photo shades into a team color-coordinated blur on the left. A pixelated MVP is picked out in silver foil, plus MVP is spelled out in dots in the background. Silver foil lines and circles are all over. Player and team names are hard to read. The back has a small headshot in a circle with full career stats and some bio information. The card number is small in the upper left while the player's uni number is in larger font near the bottom left. This can be confusing. There are more lines and circles. The cards are glossy front and back. 

The results: I don't really care much for 1999 Upper Deck MVP, the cards are needlessly busy. But I really dislike 1996 Leaf. So I'm giving it to 1999 Upper Deck MVP as the lesser of two evils.