Limited Leafs

A couple of mid-90s shiny cards to brighten up your Thursday!

Card Number 916: Leaf Limited, 1994; #152

You can tell this is a high end card because Tony's name is written in fancy cursive script!

This is so shiny is scans a different colour depending how much light is getting into the room. (I'm using the overhead scanner for this and, seriously, the cards change colour if the sun goes behind a cloud while I'm scanning!) So, sometimes the card looks like this. 

On the back we get a quote from Ozzie Smith, which is superb hyperbole. (Superbole?) 

"Tonys mechanicals are so good they enable him to get hits when he's not hitting. There's no stopping him, you just try to slow him down."

No, I don't know what 'getting hits when he's not hitting' means either. The cameo portrait has a classy surround with that feathered pattern. I'll award a bonus point for including the set name, although it is prominent on the front as well. The one year stats line includes the years he had been active up to this point. That feels like an unusual inclusion in a one-line stats box.

Card Number 917: Leaf Limited Gold, 1995; #20

There were 192 cards in this high end set, and 24 further cards in the 'Gold' insert series, which looked a lot like the regular cards (as can be seen here). They used different photos and the card had a gold back instead of the usual silver. The Gold cards were included at a rate of 1 per pack. 

This time it's the team name in the fancy cursive script.

For some reason they decided to crop off Tony's feet. The converging shiny lines combined with the Leaf Limited logo make it look like he is stading in front of a giant badminton shuttlecock. 

Here's the gold back - with the cursive script used for Tony's name. There's no quote this time, meaning there is space for a breakdown of Tony's monthly stats across his entire career. I was surprised to see July was the month Tony recorded his lowest batting averages. (At least, up to the end of the 1994 season!)

All the cards in Leaf Limited - base and inserts - were limited to a print run of 37,500 cards, apart from the 'Lumberjacks' insert series that were numbered in a print run of 5,000. Tony didn't have a Lumberjack card, but he did have a 'Bat Patrol' insert card (previously blogged here), giving him three cards in quite a small set.

Total: 917 cards 

The beginning of the new era of Diamond Kings

After writing yesterday about how Panini have sort of kept the DonRuss brand going, today's post features cards from the Diamond Kings range. Panini now issue this as a brand in its own right, but "Diamond Kings" started out in the DonRuss base sets of the 1980s. The first 26 cards in the DonRuss flagship sets were illustrated portraits of baseball stars - one from each team. I have previously blogged several of these that feature Tony.

When Panini were trying to find a winning formula for their unlicensed baseball cards, they gave the Pinnacle brand a go in 2013, but that seemed to fall a bit flat. Panini released cards under the DonRuss brand in 2014 and that must have worked well enough for Panini to continue releasing "DonRuss" cards. In 2015, they built on the cachet of DonRuss and launched Diamond Kings as a standalone set. It has been released every year since.

Card Number 646: Panini Diamond Kings, 2015; #133

This is from the first year of the Diamond Kings. There isn't an artist credited with this picture, so I imagine it's been done by a Panini staff designer using photoshop rather than creating art from scratch.

The back has a great entry for my collection of descriptions off cardbacks: "San Diego's beloved batting wizard."

The uncredited broadcaster quoted on the back as saying that Tony "could hit .320 with a broom" is Sean Salisbury, the former NFL quarterback turned journalist who was working for Yahoo Sports at the time of Tony's death. (He is quoted in this article on the NBC San Diego website.) It seems strange that the cardback compiler would use the quote with such a vague accreditation. 

Like Gwynn, Sean Salisbury was born in Long Beach, although he grew up in Escondido near San Diego. He is three years younger than Tony, having been born in 1963, and played for the San Diego Chargers among other teams. His career would have overlapped with Tony's quite a bit and he obviously knew Tony as in the rest of that quote he says Tony made an impact on his family. 

Another interesting fact about Sean Salisbury is that he was an advisor on Adam Sandler's remake of the movie Mean Machine, and taught Sandler what he needed to do to portray a quarterback. However, despite all that, Sean missed out his chance to have his name appear on the back of this baseball card, which would have added to the very small number of trading cards he appeared on during his career. Trading Card Database only lists 37 cards for him.

Card Number 647: Panini Diamond Kings DK Originals, 2017; #DO-24

What's more fun than an unlicensed base card? An unlicensed insert card.

The portrait photo on this has scary eyes!

There isn't really much to say about this card. It's one of those ones to have in the collection because it's a Tony Gwynn card, rather than because it had any particularly exciting features. 

Tony's scary eyes are on the back too, along with a quote from Tony where he credits Ted Williams with helping him improve his batting. The flowery description is reserved for Ted who is described as "another sweet-swinging Californian." 

Otherwise, this card is almost the pictorial definition of unremarkable. 

Total: 647 cards

Forgotten Fleer 2 - around about the mid-90s

Circa is an odd name for a card range. But for three years in the mid-90s, Fleer used the name for some reasonably large sets (200, 400 and 300 cards respectively). This was while Fleer was owned by the Marvel Entertainment Group, which was struggling to deal with a bankruptcy situation. Looking at the cards, they have a comic book vibe to them.

Card Number 179: Fleer Circa, 1996; #186
This card is one of the earliest to completely cut the player from the photo background.

One thing Circa cards have that's a bit different is a quote from the player quote on the front. Tony sounds blase about batting titles, but he had another two coming his way yet.

The designers do exactly the same thing with the photo on the back. The shadow underneath him is most likely photoshopped.

I've not seen a knee injury referred to as "bad wheels" before. Also, surely they knew how long he was out injured. But then I guess this is "circa" so it's natural for them to be imprecise and say "about a month".

Card Number 180: Fleer Circa, 1997; #150
The Circa range doubled in size in its second year from 200 to 400 cards. This is the design that made me think of a comic book cover.

For the second year they had a quote on the front from Tony. I admire their commitment to accuracy by putting brackets in the quote, although it feels unnecessary.

They mention Tony's seventh batting title on the back of the card. He would go on and add his eighth title this season. They've also added "Circa Stats" that contrast Tony's batting average per season with how old he was. It makes no sense to me because some of the bars on the graph are for higher figures than the career total at the bottom, yet are shorter. It also doesn't include his entire career because it only goes up to when he was 29 and he would have been 36 when this was printed.

That would be a niche baseball card blog - cardback stats that make no sense at all.

Card Number 181: Fleer Circa Thunder, 1998; #250
The range had a name change for its final year and the word "Thunder" was added giving the card a tacky logo.

The same design principle was at work: a cut out of Tony dropped onto vibrant colours. The scribble at the top of the card is part of the printed design. It's not that someone went mad with a pen.

The back has another photoshopped shadow.

The quote has moved to the back, and this time it's got a full citation to boot. It's been edited, hence the ellipses, and that has made it opaque. "If you don't win, I don't care what you individually do... Being in the hunt is what it's all about." He must have been talking about his own performances and achievements not mattering if the team weren't in contention for pennants. In which case, that is almost exactly the gist of his quote on the 1996 card.

The Circa Stats are more up to date this time, and they have done them by season. The bars all make sense as well.

Circa Thunder disappeared as ownership of Fleer transferred. The cards themselves stand out even in the bold design era of the mid-1990s. The quotes on the cards is a quirk, but a good one in my opinion. It feels like you get more from them than from the regurgitated factoids that appeared on many cards.

And yet again, that's an entire run of base cards in just the one post.

Total: 181/394