The 1990s Baseball Cards Face-Off - Which Set is the Best, continued

Check this post to see my methodology, such as it is. This is going to be a long term.

I my last post we were working our way down the the first round of the Babe Ruth Division;

1998 E-X 2001 and 1993 Flair had advanced to the Red Round. Let's see which of 1998 Pacific Omega or 1995 Ultra has the stuff.

1998 Pacific Omega was a 250 card set in a horizontal format. The front and back is glossy. The front is divided by baseball stitches into 3 sections with player photos in the 2 left portions. The right side is foil with the middle image laser etched into the foil. The back has a player head shot, a short bio and the previous year's stats.

1995 Ultra is a 450 card set issued in 2 series. The cards are vertically oriented and are glossy and full bleed printed front and back. The front featured gold foil logos and multiple colored foils for the team logo and player name. The colored foil came in red, blue, silver and gold. It there was a rhyme or reason for the choice of what color foil was used for each player, it wasn't obvious to me.

The results: Although I'm not a fan of any year of Ultra, I'm giving this match-up to 1995 Ultra. The Pacific Omega card is a good example of 1990s excess. The front is not unattractive but it's just too much stuff going on. The baseball stitches take over the front. At least they weren't embossed. And I don't know what color that is on the back but it's horrible.

That's it for today.

William Penn's Phillies Cap Only $10,000 on eBay

According to a story in the Philadelphia papers, the giant Phillies cap that the Philadelphia's City Hall William Penn statue sported when the Phillies were in the 1993 World Series is for sale on eBay.

At $10,000, it's a steal. And it's 7 feet tall and 4 feet wide.  Got some spare space in your garage?

Better act now. Here's the link to the eBay listing.

The 1990s Baseball Cards Face-Off - Which Set is the Best, continued

If you haven't read yesterday's post, I suggest you read it first so you'll understand what I'm doing here. I'll wait.

We left off yesterday here:

Today's face off is between 1999 Topps and 1993 Flair

1999 Topps, unlike almost all other Topps base sets, features a gold border. The front a backs are glossy and the fronts feature gold foil. The backs, like all Topps base sets, has full career stats and a good size color photo. Pretty much all the cards feature action shots. There are a number of sub-sets which I am not considering.

1993 Flair was a high-quality premium product, in it's inaugural year. It featured full-bleed printing, front and back. It is, to my knowledge, the first card to feature gold foil on the front and back of the card. The front has two photos, the main photo and a 'ghost' image in the background. The cards have a heavy, very smooth gloss finish, front and back and features heavy card stock.

Results: 1993 Flair. The 1999 Topps card is nice but it's just a routine baseball card. The 1993 Flair was something new when it was issued and it's design still looks fresh today.

1993 Flair is the second set to reach the Red Level.

The 1990s Baseball Cards Face-Off - Which Set is the Best

I know that a lot of you baseball card bloggers think the 1990s was a great wasteland of junk wax but I feel differently. I think the 1990s were the golden age of baseball cards. There was so much variety, so many manufacturers, something new every day.  Competition was fierce which led to innovation, and, I'll admit, excess. There was a lot of junky product but some of the best ever baseball cards were produced then. I'm going to attempt to determine the best baseball card set from the 1990s (the period 1990-1999).

I started with a list of 256 sets produced during the decade. I wanted to include only the mainstream sets, eliminating parallels and update sets. I did not include insert sets, short boxed sets, cards that focused on something other than that's year's players (so no 1953 Topps Archives) or cards that came with food products. I also wanted to only include sets which appeared in more than one year (preferably every year) but had to include those short run sets in order to bring the total to 256. I'm going to have a tournament, with brackets like the NBA playoffs. I had to have 256 sets to make it work out properly. There will be 4 divisions of 64 sets each, going head-to-head until there is only one set left standing. The Divisions will be: the Babe Ruth Division; the Ted Williams Division' the Mike Schmidt Division; and the Nolan Ryan Division. I seeded the sets randomly into each division. I was going to devise some criteria for judging each card and a point system but I'd never stop arguing with myself over how this should look. So it's all going to be based on my own opinion. Feel free to chime in with your opinions.

I'll report the results by a quartile of each Division. The bracket for a quartile will look like this.

The yellow level will be the quarter finals of the whole division. Here's the 1st Quartile of the Babe Ruth Division.

I own at least one card from each of the 256 sets so all the cards I'll be showing are from my collection. Let's get going with the first two match-ups.

The first is 1995 Bowman's Best vs. 1998 E-X 2001.

1995 Bowman's Best came in 2 flavors: Blue was for rookie cards and Red for veteran cards. The fronts were bright foil and glossy and the backs were glossy.

1998 E-X 2001 cards were printed on clear acetate. The printing on the front was in gold foil. The part with the front printing was clear so the front printing appeared backward on the back.

Results: Right out of the box we get a difficult choice as I really like both of these sets. I'm going with E-X 2001. There are only a handful of sets where all the cards are printed on plastic. In my opinion, that's a edge, just the sheer novelty of it. The choice of card stock is just as much a part of the design as the graphics and the typography. But that's not the only reason I'm choosing it. I think the cards graphics are better. The Bowman's Best cards all start to look alike after awhile while the player graphic in the E-X just pops out and keeps the visual impact from card to card.

1998 E-X 2001 moves on to the Red Round. 

This has turned into a long post so we'll pick this up tomorrow.

Walking Trivia Question

Yesterday I posted about a recent repack. I'm already working on another. One thing I like to do with baseball cards, especially players I don't know, is to look them up on baseball-reference.com and Wikipedia to learn something about the player. Once in awhile I can get a good blog post from the information.

Here is a guy who is the answer to 5 baseball trivia questions.

Who replaced Joe Torre at 3rd base for the Cardinals?

Who appeared in his only All-Star Game, in 1980, as a replacement for an injured Mike Schmidt?

Who set a National League record in 1980 by committing only 8 errors (in 150 games played)?

Who hit a 2-run homer tying a Mets-Cardinals game in the ninth, a game then went on to 25 innings before being won by the Cardinals?

Who holds the record for most career plate appearances (5079) among non-catchers who finished their careers with fewer walks than times he grounded into a double play? This last one is kind of esoteric. I'm not even sure what it signifies.

I got all of this from his Wikipedia entry and make no claims to it's validity. 

It was Ken Reitz!

1982 Fleer #602

Repack finds

I like to buy repacks early in the year and then save them until later in the year when new cards get hard to find. I bought this one back in April. This was one of those 100-card Fairfield repacks that come in the plastic clam shells you need a laser cutter to get into.  Here I'm opening it up.

You have to be careful using these things as you can accidentally set the cards on fire. Or worst, cut a hole clear through to the basement.

Of the 100 cards in the pack, I needed 46 of them. Which I consider a good ratio. By the way, when I say I got a card I need, it's not necessarily a card I was looking for. That's how I got to 95,000+ cards, by keeping every card I buy, unless it's a duplicate.

Here are some of the better cards in year order.

1976 Topps #23 Brian Downing

 I don't have a lot of cards from the 1970s that aren't Phillies cards so I'm always happy to see some. These repacks always seem to have 4-5 of them. In the '70s I was more of a Phillies fan and not so knowledgeable about the rest of baseball, especially the American League. These red White Sox unis just blow me away every time I see one.

1976 Topps #437 Terry Forster

 Another of those red White Sox unis. I remember Forster mainly with the Dodgers and Braves in the 1980s.

1976 Topps #125 Don Baylor

I'm more familiar with Don Baylor as a manager rather than a player.

1976 Topps #256 Rowland Office

This is an 11-year player that I never heard of. Can you Braves fans out there give an opinion on whether or not this card is air brushed? I would vote yes.

1988 Fleer Glossy #184 Andres Galarraga

 I probably didn't buy any 1988 Fleer when it was new. In those days I was a Topps guy. But I kind of like this design and the Glossy version is very nice. There were two of the 1988 Fleer Glossy in the pack. The other was Sam Horn.

1988 Pacific Eight Men Out

 "Eight Men Out" was a 1988 movie staring, among others, John Cusack, Charlie Sheen, and Christopher Lloyd about the 1919 "Black Sox" scandal. Pacific put out this 110-card set featuring scenes from the film. I've pulled 10 of these now from repacks. If you're interested enough, and I'm not, you can get the 110-card set on eBay for around 10 bucks.

1988 Bazooka #13 Tony Gwynn

This is a nice little 22-card set that I now have 17 of.

1991 Topps 1953 Archives #94 William Kennedy

This 1991 set was, I think, one of Topps earliest attempts to utilize it's past to sell new sets. It is a beautifully produced 330-card set. I own all the Phillies from the set but just a handful of other players. The cards have nice color and a nice glossy finish.

1991 Upper Deck #668 John Wetteland

Wetteland found something to laugh about in 1991, even though it wasn't his best season. He was 1-0 in 9 IP with the Dodgers. He was traded to the Reds for Eric Davis and later to the Expos for Dave Martinez but didn't pitch for either team. This is an example of a card I actually want as I'm trying to complete this set.

2005 Leaf Limited #71 Milton Bradley

Another card I actually wanted as I didn't have any cards from this set. This goes right into the reference books.

2006 Topps National Baseball Card Day #7 Alex Rodriguez

Whatever happened to National Baseball Card Day?