Scoring a triple in 1995

Three cards from the same manufacturer released in the same year today! 1995 was right in the middle of Tony's mid-90s peak. 

Card Number 997: Score, 1995; #28

Let's start with the base card from the Score set that year.

Tony is wearing a batting practice top but has a dirt stain on his knee so has obviously been taking practice seriously. The 'ragged' edges of the photo and the blue box with Tony's name on are the kind of framing that I associate with the nineties, especially combined with the 'drop shadow' at the bottom. The green colouring on the borders adds a dash of colour without being overpowering. 

There is a full height portrait on the back. Tony looks relaxed in the outfield. Notice the batting gloves stuffed into his back pocket. I'm glad the designer found space for that factoid next to the giant stats box. I didn't know that Tony had never finished lower than sixth in the batting table up to this point. Even his less productive seasons were top ten material. 

Card Number 998: Score Hall of Gold, 1995; #HG14

This insert series was really just an excuse for Score to produce really shiny cards! The photo is a almost Toppsian masterclass in showing a player without showing any of their identifying features!

27 years after this card was released, it annoys me that Score didn't choose to use a photo where Tony's face was visible. If they were going to bother including him in the insert set it seems sensible to actually use such a photo. We know they had those photos available - because they used one on the back of the card!

As insert cards go, I don't mind shiny. But there are several design mistakes here on the back. Firstly they dropped his name onto the photo with an odd placement. Tony's name isn't placed centrally, making the whole thing slightly off-kilter.  Then they put white text on over Tony's white uniform, making it unreadable. Even the drop shadows on the font (so nineties!) can't make the letters legible. The borders are unequal too, and the black line chops off Tony's body on either side. Overall it's a poorly executed mess.

Card Number 999: Score Dream Team Gold, 1995; #DG8

And just to round off the post, an almost-unscannable hologram card. 

Holograms aren't particularly interesting to me. And they are impossible to reproduce in blog-friendly form. Although this scan does show some of the detail hidden in the hologram.

The back has a pure nineties colour scheme with it's gradated hot pink, teal and orange. This card is so nineties, I feel like staring at it for any length of time might give me time travelling powers so I can go back 30 years!

It's not really possible to understand nineties baseball card design without understanding how computers revolutionised the way baseball cards were laid out. Why else would you have one green letter in Tony's name? Or different kerning for his first name and his surname? Even the stars have a 3D effect drop shadow going on.

Although it seems like I am mocking the way cards were designed in the nineties, these are actually beautiful mementos of a long-gone decade. It was a time of hope and optimism - a new century was only a few years away, and who knew what wonders lay just over that millennial horizon? It maybe hasn't turned out as planned, which makes me feel wistful for the short window of history encapsulated in cards released in the 1990s.

Total: 999 cards

Holograms before the holidays (and 900 cards!)

A new milestone and a couple of fun holograms to help us get there.

Card Number 899: Upper Deck SP Special FX, 1996; #40

Holograms are fun to scan. And by fun, I mean, they never look like they do in real life... anyway, here is the flatbed scan.

And here is the overhead scan that captures a bit more of the foil sheen of the card front. But captures less of the hologram. 

And here is the back. For some reason the way the card blurb starts "As usual..." made me chuckle. Like, it was just so boring talking about how Tony kept winning batting titles, man.

There are a couple of unusual stats in there - including the date of Tony's first career grand slam on 22nd August 1995. He scored that relatively late in his career and added two more to his career total before he retired. Data visualisation tends to earn cards bonus points and the two little baseball park diagrams there defnitely count on that score!

Card Number 900: Upper Deck SPx Gold, 1996; #49

Die-cut, gold parallel and a hologram? A worthy milestone card!

Again, we start with the flatbed. The hologram scanned an eerie blue colour.

The overhead scan worked much better - even picking up the colours in the hologram. The gold really stands out on this scan as well.

The back is quite nicely set out as well. Although I would ding it a point for hyphenating "batting". There's another injury to add to the 'cardback injuries' list as well - a "nagging foot injury".

The cardback mentions a game-winning homer on 5th June. It was against the Cardinals. The Padres won 6-4. They then lost the next 8 games straight. They only had 9 wins from 28 games the entire month of June that year. They still won the NL West that season, before losing in the first series of the post-season... to the Cardinals!

I feel like 900 cards is a really good place to pause the blog for just a short while. Christmas is coming up and I will be spending time with family, so I will bid you adieu until the New Year. Blogging will resume in January, all being well. Until then, I hope everyone stays safe and has a lovely festive season.

Total: 900 cards! 

One Card Only - Silver Spx

Today's card kicks off an entire week of Upper Deck cards with a die-cut shiny card from one of Upper Deck's spin-off ranges. SPx was a follow-on from Upper Deck's SP range. When I opened the big box of cards that Richard sent me, I saw this card and mentally filed it as a dupe. But then I realised, it looked a bit different to the one I had already.

Card Number 814: Upper Deck SPx Silver, 1997; #SPX42

These cards are a nightmare to scan, even with the overhead scanner.

I had a few goes at different exposures!

What marks this as a silver parallel is the use of silver foil on the X. The card I blogged previously was blue.

The back is also a shiny scanning nightmare. The back is all silver, even the photo has been colourised to match.

You may have noticed a slight ripple across the bottom of the hologram on the front of the card. This is actually a minor blip on the card. However, when I looked it up on Trading Card Database, I noticed the picture on there also has a ripple in the same place. The person who sent me this card - Richard - also submitted the scan to TCDb! So I think this could be the very same card, or this weird effect happened on more than one card. 

Richard's scans are better than mine. I need to get some scanning tips off him!

Total: 814 cards

Now & then & then & now

Two card companies. Same year. Pretty much the same name for an insert card series.

Card Number 810: Pinnacle, 1993; #289

This card marked Tony's tenth season in the Major Leagues. The photo from 1982 looks very familiar, but it obviously wouldn;t have appeared on a Pinnacle card. I think it might have been reused in a more recent release by a card company. I am absolutely certain the green background is a photoshop (or equivlent) job. The software debuted in 1990 and was adopted by the designers at card companies not long afterwards.

The back is relatively plain, just summing up Tony's career to date.

Did you notice the big trademark (TM) sign next to Now & Then? Having taken a project through the process to register tradmarks, I doubt that wording was ever a defendable trademark. Pinnacle's legal team could have tested it though, that very same year! Except Upper Deck switched the words around. 

Card Number 811: Upper Deck, 1993; #TN11

There were 18 cards in this insert series, which might have been the first time Upper Deck used holograms on their cards.

Trying to get a hologram to show on a scan is annoying. However, jiggle the card a bit and Tony appears!

Upper Deck were going through a phase of creating long blurbs to go on the backs of insert cards. There is another picture of Tony inserted as a watermark under the text. The write up includes how he just pipped Will Clark to a batting title - something I discussed when I blogged a card featuring both of them recently. 

Upper Deck didn't try to trademark the phrase 'Then & Now', even though they made much more of an effort with the logo for the insert series!

Total: 811 cards

One card only - A hologwynn from SPx

Card Number 664: SPx Bound for Glory, 1996; #9

This insert card ticks a lot of boxes. Die cut, shiny, hologram. Lovely.

The scanned version of the front has a grainy TV picture effect due to the hologram. 

The photo on the back is from the short period in the 90s when Tony sported a neatly groomed beard.

This is one of those rare cards that references the events of the year it was released in. This set was issued in 1996, sometime after Independence Day, and references Tony's performance in the early part of the season. The cardback is let down, though, by some terrible word-stretching due to using justified text, and odd hyphenation. 

Total: 664 cards

Die cut double down

For the second day in a row, I'm blogging about a die-cut card.

Card Number 639: Upper Deck SPx Die-Cut, 1997; #SPX42

This set was a premium product in 1997. These cards were sold in packs of 3. There were 50 cards in the set and parallel versions to collect.

And, yes, that's a hologram in the big cresecent bit.

On first glance I didn't see the SPx logo, and I thought it looked like the DonRuss logo from when DonRuss was issued by the Play Off company. I kind of see an S and a P and the X is obvious.

The big prominent 19 on the front is not the card number. (Boo!)

The write up on the back is about Tony's home run production. He was never a home run guy, but 1997 was about the start of the obsession with home runs and records and so on, which is probably why the card focuses on that side of his game.

Total: 639 cards

I don't usually comment on current events but huge congratulations to Joe Musgrove who pitched the first no-hitter in Padres franchise history last night. Well done, Joe!