Mail from Pennsylvania! (Another rookie card!)

I was in the middle of a virtual work meeting when my wife propped up an envelope next to me. I could see the USA International Postage Forever Stamp and the return address for Tim, who posted a comment on my 'Gaps in the Wantlist' page a short while ago saying he would send me some cards. 

That meeting took forever to end!

When it finally did, I was able to open the envelope and see what cards Tim had sent me. I was not disappointed.

Tim lives in Pennsylvania, supports the Padres and collects Tony Gwynn cards. Tim posted a video of his collection on Twitter and I am envious of his binders, let alone his cards! 

Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that one of the cards is the fourth of Tony's rookie cards from 1983. I blogged last weekend about acquiring the Fleer card that completed the trinity. I now have the "Fundamental Four" (Tim's term), although I think I'm going to refer to this as the 'Quaternity', which was a suggestion that came from one of my fellow UK collectors on Facebook.

So with no further ado...

Card Number 613: O-Pee-Chee, 1983; #143

This is a straight reprint of the Topps card #482, except for the change of logo and the addition of the word 'voltigeur' under Tony's name.

There is more French on the cardback. The pressure to make this card bilingual meant they shrank the font size and dropped one of the factoids in the box at the bottom.

For comparison, here's the Topps cardback.

The O-Pee-Chee cardback is noticeably lighter cardboard. It also says it's printed in Canada.

As someone who has experienced the difficulty in producing bilingual documents, I share the pain of the O-Pee-Chee designers trying to include as much information as possible in two languages. It can be really difficult to do, especially when one language requires more words than the other. (Typically, anything translated into Welsh takes at least 25 per cent more space than the English.) Fortunately, I don't have to produce bilingual baseball cards!

I want to say a huge thank you to Tim for sending me this card (and the others, which I will blog about soon!) and for helping me with this fourth rookie card. It nicely bookends them when they are all together.

Total: 613 cards