30 Day Baseball Card Challenge Day 13

Day 13: One of your favorite cards from the 1990s

1993 Upper Deck #755

An impossible task to look through my 1990s cards. So again I decided to narrow down to a favorite set and pick from there. 1993 Upper Deck is a set I didn't used to like, but in recent years I've come to appreciate. So here's a player I collect signing autographs for kids.

Repack Bang or Bust #6

Today's edition of Repack Bang or Bust is, unfortunately a total bust. This was an 11-pack box from MJ Holdings I got at Walmart a few weeks ago. The box brags "Including one hobby pack in every box". 4 of the 11 packs were this.

2012 Triple Play. 

This was just an awful set. I did pull one of the generic relic cards but that hardly makes up for the 28 of the 72 cards this product represented in this box.

As I said, I don't like this set. The original Triple Play in the early 1990s was aimed at kids. I imagine that kids have even less interest in baseball cards today than they did then. And cards like this don't seem like they would draw kids back into the hobby.

Both of these examples would likely cause nightmares in impressionable youngsters. Especially the Strasburg card.

2007 Upper Deck Series 2

I guess Upper Deck was on its last legs in 2007. This dull offering was their flagship set.

Half of the 8 cards were of the horizontal orientation which I think looks worse than the vertical. I'd have been happy to have this pack when it was new, as 3 of the cards were Astros. But by now I already have those cards.

2015 Panini USA Stars & Stripes

It's always interesting to pull from a repack something I've never seen before.

Not a bad looking set. 150 cards of college baseball players. Some of the players I pulled have been drafted by major league teams, although Ober apparently hasn't. Two design problems. The large Stars & Stripes logo on the front makes it look like the player is straddling the logo on many of the cards I got. And why would you design a card back to have a large color photo just to repeat the front photo? As long as I collect cards I don't think I'll ever understand that.

This is a 150-card insert set featuring the same players, in the same order, as the base set, but with a different photograph. The card has the look and feel of Topps Chrome. 

2016 Babe Ruth Collection

I never saw this set live but it's been showing up in repacks since last summer. I've got about half of the 80-cards set now. There were two 5-card packs included in this box but there was only one I didn't have.

There were also two packs of this.

I opened them, looked at them and threw them away.

So, there turned out to be 27 cards of the 72 that I needed (needed being a very relative term when speaking of 2012 Triple Play). I usually like a repack to be around 50% productive to be satisfied. 

Hall of Fame Inductee Jeff Bagwell Cards

Jeff Bagwell finally got nominated for the Baseball Hall of Fame this year. I've already made one post recently about him, and I've got enough Bagwell cards (536) to do several more. With this post I want to show some recently acquired Bagwell cards.

I was idly searching for Bagwell cards on eBay the other week and came across an offer for 30 different Bagwell cards for $10.75 (including shipping). The seller was nice enough to actually list the cards he was offering and I saw that I needed 27 of them. Most were 1990s inserts and parallels.  Here are my favorites.

1992 Score 100 Rising Stars #35

 24-year-old Bagwell looks like he just ran in off the high school playing field on this card.

1993 Topps Inaugural Rockies #227

Topps put out an entire parallel set to honor the new Rockies and another for the Marlins inaugural season. I believe these were only available as boxed sets. I had one other from the Rockies set but I've never seen one from the Marlins set. Pretty rare, I'd say.

1994 Pinnacle Power Surge #16

Not only a Bagwell card I didn't have but an insert set I didn't know about. This goes right into the reference books.

1994 Stadium Club Golden Rainbow #108

1994 saw a sharp rise in parallel sets. And this was how it was often done, putting foil on the front, or if the card already had foil, putting different foil. These weren't particularly hard to get in packs of 1994 Stadium Club.

1994 Upper Deck Electric Diamond #480

I always like this parallel. My recollection is that it was a tough pull in 1994 Upper Deck.

1995 Fleer Update Headliners #1

I have several cards from this insert but never noticed the text on the story from "The Fleer Times" behind the photograph on the front. It's describing a Phillies game where Tony Longmire hit a pinch hit home run to win a game over the Cardinals. Since Tony Longmire only hit 3 home runs in 1995 it probably wouldn't be too hard to find what game it was. I looked at the other cards I have and they all have the same background.

1995 Ultra Hitting Machines #1

1995 Ultra Hitting Machines Gold Medallion #1

I had the Frank Thomas version of the base card. Now I have the Gold Medallion version as well.

1996 Collector's Choice Crash The Game #19

Pretty extravagant finish for a contest card.

1998 Leaf Fractal Foundations #149

Leaf had a pretty complicated system of parallel cards in 1998.

1999 Sp Authentic Home Run Chronicles

1998, of course, was the year of the Home Run. I only have a few of these cards and find them unattractive. Lots of gold foil nonsense on the front. Since the card mentions a specific home run on a specific date, you'd think that maybe the photo would be of the player hitting that home run. Not in this case since the Astros were at home and Bagwell is in an away uniform.

2002 UD Superstars Keys to the City

This is an insert in a 2002 multi-sport set that I never heard of. 

Repack Bang or Bust Part 4

It's time to open up another repack and see if I got a bang for my money or just a bust.  This is one of the Fairfield plastic boxes with 250 loose cards and a couple of packs. All together that's about 265 cards working out to about 4 cents/card.

My baseball card collecting mantra is "If it's a card I don't have, then I need it". I judge a repack like this on two criteria, how many cards did I need, and what was the quality of the cards. This box was not too bad on the number of cards I needed as I pulled 110 cards from it I didn't have. Normally I'm happy if I'm near 50%. On the other hand, I got some good (in my opinion) stuff in it. I'll give this a:

1981 Topps #193

The Mad Serbian. This card almost made the whole box worth it.

1982 Topps #342

A good player from a good set.

1987 Topps #564

I don't get excited seeing 1987 Topps in a repack since I have the entire set. One hazard of early Topps cards is gum stains. I think this may be the worst gum stain I ever saw. It not only ruined the back of the card but the front as well.

1990 Star #98

Nothing special here except he's a player I never heard of. I like to look guys like this up on baseball-reference.com. Scruggs appeared in 6 games, getting 6 at bats in April 1991. He had no hits or walks but managed to score a run as a pinch runner.

1992 Topps #430

I'm guessing that Sax is going into a slide at second. Look at where the ball is relation to Sax. Sailing into center field.

1993 Ted Williams #96

Let's get excited about a checklist. I only have 30 cards from this 160 card set and I didn't have a checklist. This goes into the reference books.

1994 Leaf #221

I have over 500 Jeff Bagwell cards, but I didn't have this one, and I like this year of Leaf as well. Like many glossy cards from this era, the card shows some damage from being stuck to other cards.

1996 Collector's Choice

Another card for the reference books. 1996 Collector's Choice was a 730-card set with a lot of subsets. I didn't have any of the postseason cards from the set.

1996 Finest #139

Does anybody remember the great peel or not to peel debate of the mid-1990s? My advice, peel 'em.

1997 Pinnacle Certified #30

Another card with a peel. This is only the second card I've ever seen from this product. I have a red mirror parallel of a Phillies rookie I got in a trade a few years ago. This is one of those cards that are impossible to scan. It's basically a mirror on the front. And get a load of the pinwheel o' stats on the back.

2002 Topps 206 #45

Here's a set I wish I had bought more of when new. Hobby boxes of this product are going on eBay for $146.

2002 Upper Deck #92

What a mess. Upper Deck MVP was produced from 1999 to 2005 and I didn't like any of them. Especially this year. you can get 2 hobby boxes of this product on eBay for about $25.

2003 Fleer Splendid Splinters #29

In the early 2000s, Fleer produced a bewildering number of sets.