Thursday, March 4, 2021

Score shows some heart

It's been a while since I last blogged about a Score card.

Card Number 607: Score Hobby Reserve Heart of the Order insert, 1997; #25


So, this gets a bit confusing. There were 18 'Heart of the Order' insert cards in Score Series 2 in 1997, and another 18 'Heart of the Order' in Score Hobby Reserve. According to Trading Card database, Hobby Reserve was "a hobby release that paralleled 1997 Score Series 2. Cards are slightly thicker than the Retail version and have white fronts with a "Hobby Reserve by Score" gold stamp." Hobby Reserve cards have 'HR' in front of the numbers.

The card shows Tony photoshopped over a virtually empty Jack Murphy Stadium. The arrangement makes it look like Tony is swinging in the top deck of the stadium. The red foil squiggle is a stylised ECG line with the word 'Heart' written above it. 

Tony's sleeve patch is the Jackie Robinson 50 years commemoration, so this is a photo from 1997 on a card issued in 1997.

On the back the stadium in the background has a lot more people in it. There's also a rare photo of Tony wearing glasses with regular lenses in.


It was easier to find these inserts in Hobby Reserve then in the Score Series 2. The ratios respectively were 1 in 15 packs for Hobby Reserve and 1 in 23 packs for Series 2. That meant you had mildly better odds of finding a card of Tony than for any of the players on the 18 cards inserted in Series 2... as long as you could find packs of Hobby Reserve to buy.

Total: 607 cards

4 comments:

  1. Kind of a strange design. I'd never seen him in glasses before!

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  2. Jon, you keep sharing cards I have never seen before. Excellent work.

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  3. Thanks Jeff and Rod. It is an odd design and I'm amazed you hadn't seen it before, Rod.

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  4. Put me down as the 2nd Padres card collector who hasn't seen this card before. I'm off to COMC to see if there are any Giants or A's in this set. I'd love to see Candlestick or the Coliseum in the background of one of these inserts.

    P.S. The glasses are cool. Do you know of any other cards where he's wearing glasses... that aren't sunglasses?

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