Another royal title

DonRuss repeatedly honoured Tony as a Diamond King during the 80s and 90s but Fleer crowned him as a different kind of king in 1999.

Card Number 1033: Fleer Ultra, 1999; #13RK

The spectacular design on the front of this insert card masks the complete lack of logos or identifying features on the picture. Like the Leaf Legacy card I blogged yesterday, this could be a card from the era of unlicensed cards if it wasn't for the full team name included at the bottom. 

The photo of Tony on the back was taken in that brief window when he experimented with a beard in the late 90s. 

The shadow that has been added to the photo is weird and unnecessary - nobody would think Tony is actually standing in front of a big swirly mandala thing.

As noted in the write up, Tony had taken the lead in the Padres all-time franchise stats for RBI by the end of the 1998 season. He is still the Padres all time RBI leader with a career total of 1,138. (He is also the all-time Padres leader in walks with 790, which I didn't know until I looked up the RBI stat!)

Additional bonus point for this card doing what Fleer always did on their late 20th / early 21st century cards and include the year of issue under the logo. 

Total: 1033 cards

Sweet Little Mystery (...Finest)

This blog has really opened my eyes to how weird the 90s was as a decade. Baseball cards started out as cheap things on brown cardboard that came with gum and by the end of the decade some of them were CD-Roms. We talk about the pace of change now, but the 90s was the decade when the pace accelerated. In a way, change itself changed.

Looking back on the mid-90s now puts me in the curious position of knowing I lived through it but also feeling like it's an utterly alien decade. It doesn't help when trying to track down a baseball card that becomes symbolic of how complicated things got in the 90s. 

Card Number 608: Topps Mystery Finest, 1998; #M9

"Topps Finest, you say. Why, that should be cinch to find on Trading Card Database."

Narrator: It was not easy to find on Trading Card Database.

The Mystery Finest cards were inserts in the Topps flagship set. There were a few different types. This is from the 20-card set labelled 'Borderless' on TCDb.

It's a very foiley card and it doesn't scan very well on the flatbed.

The overhead scan was much brighter. The baseball in the background was a recurring motif on Finest cards in the 90s.

Oh, on the back there's a clue to the card's set, as it says 'Mystery Finest'. Of course, that only helps if you know that Mystery Finest was different to regular Finest, which I didn't.

Bonus point for a cardback that reminds me of something I had forgotten - Tony left it late in his career to record his first (actually, his only) season batting in more than 100 runs. (This factoid also appeared on his Fleer Ultra card from 1998, but I'd forgotten it until I read it again here.)

Total: 608 cards

Back to Base - Fleer Ultra at the end of the 90s

I haven't done back-to-back Back to Base posts before, but I've got a backlog of Fleer Ultra cards to blog, so this is my back-to-back Back to Base backlog blog post.

Card Number 306: Fleer Ultra, 1997; #283

Another photo of Tony swinging at the plate. There are a lot of empty seats behind him.

The swoosh of the name is quite attractive. 

The cardbacks have shifted from minimalist stats boxes to a full career box. 

The ghostly sepia version of Tony on the back is a look that I mentally class as 'Jedi Spirit Tony'. In the colour photo Tony looks spooked. Maybe Jedi Spirit Tony was only visible when the photo was developed! (Yes, I know I'm being silly!)

Card Number 307: Fleer Ultra, 1998; #108

Superficially, this card design looks a lot like the card from 1997, particularly the lettering on the player name. 

On the back the stats box is so huge Tony is having to peek over the top. It's almost as if he's standing on tiptoes to see.

This cardback has a new feature - factoids. The third one is new data to me - when Tony scored over 100 RBI in 1997, aged 37, he became the oldest player to achieve that for the first time in his career. That's testament to how he kept on doing new things, and also just how good he was for a couple of years in the mid-90s. In his career Tony rarely came close to hitting 100 RBI - his next best total was 90 in 1995 and he had a few seasons where he posted over 70 RBI. 

Card Number 308: Fleer Ultra, 1999; #59

After a couple of years with photos of Tony at the plate, in 1999, they showed him at the wall. That's a serious leap!

The design of the players name was even more elaborate this year.

The back saw another return to orange. It's a cheerful colour.

The career highlights are cool little factoids again. They chronicle Tony's hit off Roger Clemens in the 1998 All Star Game in Denver, and Tony recording his 1,000th career RBI the previous season as well. He managed his only RBI century season in 1997, as we know from his 1997 Fleer Ultra cardback, and so it's no surprise it had taken him a long time to amass 1,000.

(As an aside, I've heard people say "Ribby"when talking about RBI. I always pronounce the letters - ArBeeEye - which is correct?)

Unlike the career highlights, the 'Did You Know?' factoid goes all the way back to Tony's college days and his achievements on the basketball court. That information crops up several times on cardbacks, so it was probably much more likely that people would know it compared to the bullet point about RBI.

That closes out the Fleer Ultra decade. I'm missing one card, right from the middle, and have added it to my wants list. I'm sure it will appear on this blog at some point in the future.

Total: 308/394