Tuesday Twins - Pacific variations from 1999

Here are some cards that have already been on the blog. Sort of.

Card Number 775: Pacific, 1999 (batting photo); #368

In 1999, Pacific messed with the heads of collectors by having cards with the same number and different photos in their flagship set. I've previously blogged the portrait version of this card. 

Last time I blogged about this I noted the quirkiness of the factoid on the back - about Tony hitting his 2,900th hit in the preceding season. That would be eclipsed in 1999 by his 3000th hit!

I really like the shade of blue on that cardback.

Card Number 776: Pacific Aurora, 1999; #SAMPLE

This is a sample card given away to promote the Aurora range. The front looks like the regular card... at first glance.

But when they are next to each other in the binder they look quite different.

It's a bit like a spot the difference picture. The background colour has changed. Background Tony is bigger. Foreground Tony has moved further away. 

And in case of any doubt, the cardback has SAMPLE written across it.

And, now a bonus third Pacific card from 1999!

Card Number 777: Pacific Private Stock, 1999; #7

Different card companies have different 'giveaway' design tics. One of Pacific's giveaways was outlining players with a glowing aura. It's really evident on this card.

The free-floating logo behind Tony's knees feels like an on-screen graphic from a highlights show.

The cardback is committed to presenting all the detail of a particular game - Tony's eighth game where he recorded five hits.

In addition to the box score from the game in question, there is a well-arranged stats column that puts Tony's figures for 1998 into context against his career figures. I would award an extra bonus point for that if I was scoring this card. 

1999 was a busy year for Pacific. I have 21 Tony Gwynn cards issued by Pacific in 1999 and there are even more yet to be added to the collection!

Total: 777 cards

Examples of samples

It was Fuji who first alerted me to how much promotional work Tony Gwynn did with the Pacific Card Company, and how he was the subject of sample cards distributed to card shops. 

You can read Fuji's entertaining post here, and see his 10 Tony Gwynn sample cards. I didn't think I would ever get to own any myself. But then Gawain sourced me a mammoth stack of cards and there were two sample cards in there. One of them is even one that isn't in Fuji's blog post. Does that mean I have one that he doesn't have?

This is one I know he has:

Card Number 441: Pacific, 2000; #SAMPLE

See if you can spot how to tell it's a sample card.

As is ever the case with Pacific, nothing is simple. This is a sample of one version of Tony's base card. I blogged about the different version of this card on the anniversary of Tony's first hit in the big leagues, although I didn't note at the time that it was a variant version. 

Sadly, I don't have the regular numbered version of this version of this card, so that's one to try and add to the collection at some point.

Card Number 442: Pacific Omega, 1999; #SAMPLE
I didn't see this on Fuji's blog, although there were 4 other sample cards from 1999 in his post.

The silver foil panel has a sort of outline of Tony in as well.

Omega was one of Pacific's posher lines, although the cards look a lot like other Pacific cards. It has a very simple 'totals' stats box, and earns a bonus point for having the year in the set logo. That's always useful.

I also don't have the regular version of this card, so it's another one I will be keeping an eye out for.

Total: 442 cards

Back when the web was young... (Online adventures with Pacific)

I have a fairly keen memory of my first experience of the Internet, and coincidentally it was trading card related.

I was at university. We were all issued with email addresses, which we were told was going to be the new way the university would be communicating with us. We were also directed to computers with Internet access in a new computer room.

I was skeptical. The only people I knew with email addresses were my fellow students, who I saw all the time anyway, and I didn't know what I would want to look up online.

But I had started collecting a new Star Wars collectible card game made by Decipher. The cards were full of nerdy facts and character names for those background glimpse-and-they're-gone aliens.

The cards were separated into common, uncommon and rare cards. I was swimming in commons and had no idea how many rare ones were still out there. Then I noticed on the pack there was a website address for Decipher Inc.

I went to the new 'online' room, full of grey-towered Windows '95 PCs, and typed in the web address very carefully. The website opened, and I found I could click and move between pages. There was even a checklist! And I could print it!

I held that printed checklist with all the card names and the little boxes to tick, and felt excited that I had been able to get this information from a computer in a totally different part of the world and print it off right there.

If I told this to anyone under the age of 25 they would probably look at me the way I did when my Dad told me how he used to travel on trains pulled by steam engines when he was a boy. But I vividly recall that first experience of the Internet, and that feeling of being on the brink of something new.

And it all came flooding back to me the other day, when I saw this card:

Card Number 145: Pacific Online (Web version), 1998; #637

Nothing says "early days of the Internet" more than publishing a really long URL, expecting people to type it in.

This "Online" set is absurdly complicated. There were 780 cards in the set (with 20 variations) and two entire parallel sets, of which this is the 'Web' version.

Web cards are distinguishable from the main set by having gold foil instead of silver and an 8 digit alphanumeric code printed down the right hand side of the cardback (which really went for the online vibe with its Lawnmower Man VR colour scheme).

The gold foil versions were one per pack and the code could be used to win "instant and sweepstakes prizes". The packs also said there were 750 players featured, but there were also 30 Team Checklists which also featured a player.

Naturally, Tony was the player on the Padres team checklist. There were two different Tony Gwynn base cards, both numbered 637, in the original set. 20 players had two cards, with different photos on, which was replicated across the two parallel sets.

Pacific also produced a bonus "Sample" card which was a version of the base set with the word "Sample" plastered across the back. That card was yet another different version of card number 637. To confirm this was a Tony Gwynn heavy set, Tony's card was also used as the feature card on the top of the hobby box.

By my reckoning that makes 10 different Tony Gwynn cards related to this set. (And a box!)

I have one of the other cards, from the 'Red' parallel set.

Card Number 146: Pacific Online (Red version), 1998; #637

It's hard to tell from the scan, but the Pacific logo and Tony's name are red foil on this card. This card has the same photo of Tony as the other one. The alternative photo has Tony running in a blue uniform.

The back is identical to the other card apart from the printed web code on the right hand edge. Both are below for comparison.

The big thing about this surprisingly complex card set was its online element. The web exploded in the mid-90s. By 1998 we were surrounded by gimmicks trying to get us to go online. It must have felt like the most natural progression in the world to print really long, ugly, URLs on baseball cards to get kids to read all about their favourite players.

Of course, that website no longer exists. But versions of it do linger on in the Wayback Machine. Tony's page has gone and is just a wireframe with a menu down the side, but some of those links still work. Through that I found out that BigLeaguers.com was operated by the Major League Baseball Players Association.

The website included a "chatter" section where fans could pose questions to players in some kind of forum environment. Intriguingly one of the last "chats" on there, in 2000, was with Tony. None of the chat content seems to have been scraped by the Wayback Machine's web crawlers. The last archiving took place on 4 June 2000, after which the website either moved elsewhere or was switched off.

The Padres dot-org address has been lost to posterity as well. All MLB teams now have official sites as part of the MLB.com site.

This has been a long blog-post digging up a fairly recent past that actually feels very distant now. The ubiquity of the web in all that we do has transformed us socially. We are in a completely different online world from 1998, and in their own way, the Pacific card company's decision to print web addresses on baseball cards was just one of millions of small little pushes that got us to this place.

 Total:146/394