Return to 80s Week - DonRuss Tuesday Twins

The first card in today's 'twins' post is probably the least exciting twin featured on this blog. Apologies. 

Card Number 884: DonRuss (factory set), 1987; #64

This was in the recent bundle of cards that Richard sent me. It's the factory set version of Tony's 1987 base card. The way you can tell is by turning it over - the cardback is oriented the other way. Here is a comparison of the two cardbacks with the fronts facing up. 

Yes, I know it's a boring variation. But it's still a variation. And the card is a still a really solid, classic design from the 80s. Can you ever have enough of that tyre tread pattern?

Card Number 885: DonRuss Baseball's Best, 1989; #42

This was another 'factory set', with 336 cards in the DonRuss template for 1989. However, this is different to Tony's base card in the regular set.

You get more of Tony on this card. The photo on his regular base card is more closely cropped. The DonRuss card template in 1989 isn't one that anyone ever raves about. It's probably the least memorable card template ever released by the company. 

The back is totally different to the regular flagship product as well. 

Total: 885 cards

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

Tuesday Twins - Pinnacle's sneaky variations

In a follow-up email, Richard also gave me some notes on the cards he sent me. He pointed out that two of the cards he had included were variations that perhaps weren't obvious. He was right, because I had totally missed them when I looked through the cards!

The cards in question were the #1 card in the Pinnacle set from 1998. They look like this.

I already had this card in the Pinnacle folder, so put it to one side in the little pile of cards that I knew were duplicates. (There was some crossover between Richard selecting cards to send me and the parcel with over 100 cards in arriving from France, so there was a small overlap in contents.) 

If I had thought about it, though, I would have realised that I blogged this card along with Tony's other Pinnacle base cards back in July last year. Richard had checked my list on Trading Card Database, so he would have known I had this card already. I should have realised he would have sent me these for a reason. (Lesson - never doubt a supercollector!)

The differences are in the cardbacks!

Card Number 749: Pinnacle, 1998 (Home Stats parallel); #1

Card Number 750: Pinnacle, 1998 (Away Stats parallel); #1

One card has Tony's stats in the games  played in San Diego and the other has his stats when on the road with the Padres. Pinnacle produced these parallel variations for all the players in the set.

Overall it didn't make much difference to Tony whether he was batting at home in the Jack Murphy Stadium or in ballparks all over the country. His career batting average differential at the end of the 1997 season was .002, from about the same number of games. He travelled well and hit well anywhere he faced a pitcher.

Thanks Richard for pointing this out and reminding me to always check the back of the card!

Total:750 cards

Modern Monday - colourful "DonRuss"

I've put DonRuss in scare quotes in the title, because this is Panini zombie brand DonRuss not actual DonRuss from back in the day. 

These cards were in the box from YoRicha that arrived at the end of last week.

Card Number 747: DonRuss 2020 Holo Orange Parallel; #218

Panini are unmatched in their commitment to parallels, and this is one of the colour variations available for the retro-looking insert series in last years DonRuss set that revived the classic design from 1986. (Blogged in June 2020!)

It's shiny. I like the design. You can barely tell it's unlicensed. 

The back is the same as the regular release and also looks quite retro. 

Card Number 748: DonRuss 2020 Holo Pink Parallel Name Variation; #218

And Panini unleashed a new level of parallel hell, by also making colour parallels of their name variation parallels. So, this is a parallel of a parallel. In shiny pink.

He is Anthony, not Tony on this one.

The back is marked as a parallel by the black baseball with the number in. Personally, I prefer that look for a card number. Also, it helps to distinguish it as a parallel. 

I realised halfway through this post that I should have used card number 747 for a "jumbo" card. But that wouldn't have fitted in with the Modern Monday theme. There's only so much co-ordination I can do with the numbering!

Total: 748 cards

Short Print Legend

This was one of those late night 'see a card on eBay and make an offer which gets immediately accepted' purchases that arrived a couple of days ago. It's a short print from Topps flagship release last year when they subbed in "legends" to replace some other players.

Card Number 574: Topps (Short Print), 2020; #248

This is an unusual photo of Tony. I'm not sure what the booklet is that he's holding. It could be a game programme, with a loose piece of paper in. It's also unusual to have an advertising hoarding in the background. I'm a little surprised Topps didn't airbrush that out. At least it's for Coca Cola and Diet Coke rather than Marlboro!

Apparently if you look at the serial numbers in the legalese, that will tell you this is a short print. The regular card numbered 248 was Hunter Renfroe's card, which showed him as a Padre even though he had been traded to Tampa Bay. (He has recently been traded to the Red Sox so I wonder if Topps will show him a Red Sox uniform next year and his sojourn in Tampa will go unrecorded on Topps cards.)

Topps stuffed their Series 1 with short print and super short print variations, but I haven't found a figure for how short a short print was. I asked in the UK collectors group on Facebook and Andy M replied saying that short prints were available in fat packs in a 1:18 ratio and in retail packs in a 1:38 ratio.  Given that the "Advanced Stats" insert cards were serial numbered to 300 and their appearance ratios were about treble the short print ratios, Andy suggested that short prints probably mean a print run of about 1000.

However, Beckett has different ratio figures, which if true would make the short prints even smaller print runs. Beckett describes them as "pretty tough" to get. However this card had sat on eBay for a while, so much so my offer at just above half the asking price was accepted without quibble.

Total: 574 cards

A quick note: This is my 250th blog post, and I have run out of cards to blog. From now on I will blog as I add new cards to the collection, so this blog is going to be intermittent. (I took my first break last Sunday after 246 daily posts.) Of course if someone sends me a large number of cards I don't have, I will take up the daily schedule again!

Three cards to complete a Pacific quintet

Here are three more cards released by Pacific in 1999. 

Card Number 540: Pacific Invincible Sandlot Heroes insert, 1999; #17

I mentioned yesterday that Pacific had a penchant for photoshopping cards. Invincible was the product where they did it most often.

As with Tony's card in the regular Pacific release, this card was released with two different card fronts. There were 20 cards in the insert series, but all had two versions, meaning it was actually a 40-card set!

The alternative photo version of this card was of Tony at the plate. 

The posed photo on the back is a rare picture of Tony sans headgear. The cardback is bilingual with Spanish given priority.

I prefer "Heroes del Diamante" to "Sandlot Heroes". It definitely sounds better.

Card Number 541: Pacific Crown Collection, 1999; #242

Crown Collection was Pacific's main product aimed at Spanish speakers. The base card isn't particularly exciting.

The back picks an arbitrary batting average (.320) as a noteworthy data point, and also shows how close he was to his 500th double. (He ended up hitting 543 in his career.)

Card Number 542: Pacific Crown Royale Pillars of the Game insert, 1999; #20

Crown Royale cards were die-cut into a crown shape. I blogged about the 2000 version back in June. There were 25 cards in this insert series.

It's shiny and colourful, and, let's be honest, gaudy. 

There's a bit of history on the back. I've noticed how card companies often decided to summarise college careers and being drafted on cardbacks, instead of more contemporary achievements. This card was released 18 years after Tony was drafted, but that's what they chose to talk about.

Total: 542 cards 

Two cards to launch a Pacific quintet

I have five cards that Pacific released in 1999 left to blog, so I'm going to do two today and three tomorrow. Let's kick off with Tony's base card from Pacific's main release.

Card Number 538: Pacific, 1999; #368

A glorious posed photo on the front! There is another version of this card, with Tony swinging at the plate. Pacific often released two versions of cards in their sets.

The cardback mentions Tony reaching the 2,900 hit mark. I like to think Pacific were already gearing up to release their Hit Machine 3000 cards.

Card Number 539: Pacific (team checklists), 1999; #29

The team checklists were numbered from 1 to 30, separately from the main set. 

Because this is a team checklist, it shows that Pacific has adopted a Fleer-esque approach to numbering - all the Padres were sequential in the set.

The design of the checklists cards are classic late-90s photoshopping. It's a style Pacific really went in for across a lot of their sets. They also tried to use as many different fonts as possible, but didn't prioritise legibility.

I'll finish off the quintet tomorrow.

Total: 539 cards

Tuesday Twins - a corrected error

Way back in May when I did a post about the cards DonRuss released in 1990, I included Tony's All-Star card, which was the uncorrected error version. I didn't remark on that at the time, although I did notice that the stats box contained his stats from the All-Star game, even though the header said 'Recent Major League Performance', and noted the juxtaposition. What I didn't know then, but realised soon after, was that this was a known error and a corrected version was also released.

A few weeks back I took delivery of a joblot of 80s and 90s Tony Gwynn cards, which I knew contained a DonRuss 1990 All-Star card. It didn't have a photo of the cardback, so when it arrived, I crossed my fingers and flipped it over.

It was the corrected version!

Card Number 534: DonRuss (corrected version), 1990; #705

The front is exactly the same.

But on the back you can see that the stats box is headed 'All-Star Game Performance'.

It's not the most exciting variation in my collection, but...

a) I'm pleased to have both versions as it gives me a sense of completeness, 

b) it's a genuine error and correction unlike the silly fake 'errors' that are deliberately put into sets as parallels these days, and 

c) it gives me another card with a red border for when I put together my sub-theme collection of Tony Gwynn cards with red borders.

So, that's three reasons why it's a welcome addition to the collection.

Total: 534 cards

Modern Monday - Gold Label

Topps revived their premium card range called Gold Label in 2016. It's a strange set, with three different 'classes' of card released for each player, with a different photo on each one, which turns a 100-card set into a 300-card set straightaway.

I acquired these cards from Graham M in the UK collectors Facebook group.

Card Number 510: Topps Gold Label (class 3), 2019; #92

In 2019 the class 1 card showed Tony running, the class 2 card showed him batting in a 1984 uniform, and the class 3 card looked like this:

The second photo of Tony (behind the gold band) was the same on all three classes of cards. In addition to the three different classes of card, there were also coloured parallels released.

The backs were consistent for all the classes of card.

That is an incredible factoid on the back, about Tony's success rate in a 'two strikes' scneario, and something I wasn't aware of before reading this cardback. So that's a plus point for this set.

Card Number 511: Topps Gold Label (class 1), 2020; #81

I think all the class 1 cards in the set showed players fielding. This photo is from very early in Tony's career before he started wearing Oakley wraparound sunglasses in the outfield.

The comparisons on the back really show how Tony was in a complete class of his own in the second half of the twentieth century. There literally was nobody better at getting hits than him. 

The class 2 cards showed Tony in a batting stance. 

Card Number 512: Topps Gold Label (class 3), 2020; #81

And the class 3 cards show him on the move between bases.

Although the 'classes' is a bit gimmicky, I'm not going to complain if Topps are going to dig into their photo archive and use uncommon photos for these cards. There aren't many cards with Tony wearing the early 80s brown Padres uniform, so it's a welcome addition to the collection.

The cardback is exactly the same. I'm only showing it for the sake of completeness!

Sets like this are one of the reasons why the number of Tony Gwynn cards has proliferated over recent years. The multiple parallels of these cards are all counted as released cards on Trading Card Database, pushing the number of available cards ever-upwards. Add in some low numbered memorabilia cards as well and it's all more cards for collectors to collect!

Total: 512 cards

Earth-shaking cards

Today's post will see this blog reach 400 cards, which is a milestone I wasn't really expecting to get to when I  started out on this project. Especially as I was aiming for 394 cards. 

I've decided to celebrate with two cards produced by Pacific that really embody the weird collecting journey I have been on this year. These came out of an eBay lot and tick a lot of the boxes you'd expect from Pacific cards.

• Colourful - check
• Spanish - check
• Variation for no reason - check
• Strange choice for a set name - check

Card Number 399: Pacific Invincible Seismic Force, 1999; #16 (portrait photo)

I do wonder if there's a link between California, earthquakes and this set name.

I quite like the orange. It's a bit different.

"Despligues de Fuerza!" That's Spanish for "Seismic Force".

There are only 20 numbered cards in this set, but Pacific produced two versions of each card. With the same number. That means there are actually 40 cards in the insert series to collect. 

Pacific liked to do things like this to keep collectors on their toes!

Card Number 400: Pacific Invincible Seismic Force, 1999; #16 (running photo)

Basically, Pacific swapped the photo theme round to have an action photo on the front...

...and a portrait photo on the back.

The text is the same on both cards. It's just the photography that's different. 

And that takes the total up to 400 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

Tuesday Topps 2000 Twins

Cards that look the same at first glance, the Topps 2000 edition. This time it's not because of a reissue saying Topps 2000. These were all cards issued in 2000 as part of a 'Magic Moments' subset, with overprinting of Tony's achievements on the front.

As it's the anniversary of Tony's untimely passing today, it seems fitting to be recounting his achievements in this post.

Card Number 105: Topps, 2000; #240 (1984 Championship)
1984 was the first time the Padres were National League Champions.

The back records how it was Tony's double in the seventh inning of the deciding Championship game that took the Padres to the World Series.

Card Number 106: Topps, 2000; #240 (1998 Championship)
There's no obvious way of grouping these cards, so I'm going to put the 1998 Championship version of the card next.

Even though the back has the same number and design, the blurb is all about the 1998 Pennant, and how Tony hit a home run at Yankee Stadium during the World Series.

Card Number 107: Topps, 2000; #240 (3000th Hit)
Tony achieved his 3000th hit in August 1999, so it was almost inevitable it would be celebrated in the following year's Topps set.

The back names the pitcher who pitched the pitch that he hit for #3000 - Expos rookie Dan Smith. I'm going to have to try and find one of his cards now.

Trading Card Database logs five variations of this card, so there is another set of "twins" out there - those cards denote his 1984 batting title (his first) and his 1995 batting title, the season after he posted his average of .394. It seems odd not to have a card for the .394 season, but that was a foreshortened season because of the player's strike.

Eagle-eyed readers would have noticed there were three cards in this post about twins. Should I have called them triplets? Well, no, because I have a 4th card here to make a second set of twins and round out the post.

Card Number 108: Topps Opening Day, 2000; #109 (3000th Hit)
Same card front as the regular flagship release, except for an embossed "Opening Day" logo.

Same cardback as the regular flagship release, except for a different card number.

The "3000th Hit" overprint was the only "Magic Moments" card featuring Tony in the Opening Day release. So at least I don't have to go tracking any more down from this release. (I still have a gap in my collection for the Opening Day version of Tony's base card, though.)

Total: 108/394