Monday, March 22, 2010

Tournament of Gimmicks: Round One, Day Two


Game #5




2) Manufactured Letter Patches

I know this is a rhetorical question but, does anyone actually like these, things? And can they even be considered trading "cards?"

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15) 1994 Upper Deck Diamond Collection

In 1994 Upper Deck released three different Hobby versions of Upper Deck Series One Baseball, each with it's own insert: The Diamond Collection. Dealers on the East Coast, got packs that yielded Diamond Collections of Cliff Floyd, Lenny Dykstra, and Cecil Fielder. On the West Coast, collectors were able to pull DC's of Ken Griffey, Jr., Barry Bonds, and Mike Piazza. But if you were lucky and lived in Middle America, your local Hobby dealer got the "Central Region" packs that had some guy UD added at the last minute named Jordan.

Needless to say, this gimmick was never done again -- at least in baseball.

Game #6



7) 2008 Topps Heritage #201 Johan Santana "Mets"

Another Topps gimmick of another New York player. You're shocked, (shocked!) right?

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10) 1998 Pinnacle Multi-Stat-Backs

A gimmick so stupid, you've probably forgotten all about it. For '98 Pinnacle Baseball, all 153 non-subset base cards were printed with three back variations -- each in equal quantities. One variation had the player's full career stats on the back. The other two just had their home and away numbers. Really, they did this.

Is it any wonder why this company went bankrupt a few months later?

Game #7




6) 1997-98 Pinnacle Mint

It's cards! It's coins! It's..., it's..., it's totally stupid! Like I said, is it any wonder why this company went bankrupt a few months later?

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11) 2009 Topps Heritage #102 Adrian Gonzalez "Rangers"

To be fair to Topps, this stealth SP mimics the original 1960 Topps #102 variation of Kent Hadley. On this card Hadley, who had just been traded from Kansas City (along with teammate Roger Maris) to the Yankees, is still depicted in an A’s uniform with an A's team logo. While Topps was unable to airbrush a Yankee shirt on him, they did the replace the A's logo with a Yankee one very early in the production run -- however a limited number of Hadley "A's Logo" cards did make it into packs.

Many die-hard Vintage Topps collectors have only heard, but have never seen the Hadley "A's logo" card, and many die-hard Topps Heritage collectors will never see the Gonzalez "Rangers" card -- much less add it to their master set.

Game #8



3) 1989 Fleer #616 Billy Ripken "Fuck Face"

You don't actually believe that no one (no one!), not the photographer, not the designers, not the guy working the presses, not the executives, not the workers, no one noticed that four-letter bomb on the knob of Billy Ripken's bat?

Nah!


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14) 1995-98 Leaf Materials inserts

There was in time in the mid-90s when just about every Leaf-branded card set had at least one "material" insert. During this era, Leaf made cards out of: wood, leather, plastic, nylon, canvas, polyester, wool, and (in the example above) felt.

Then along came cards made of actual game-used material, and well....



You have until Thursday at Midnight (ET) to vote.

1 comment:

Offy said...

It may not have ever been done in baseball again, but Upper Deck has done regional inserts as recently as two to three years ago in basketball. There were Eastern and Western Conference boxes with multiple different insert sets in each.