This is a great set. It's the last Topps baseball product produced in the classic Topps Cheapo Grey™ cardboard. It's a whopper of a Bowman set at 704 cards. Topps got fancy and included cards with a tiny foil stamp on them at one per pack. Foil? On Cards?? MADNESS!! It's also loaded with rookie cards including Ivan Rodriguez, Jeff Bagwell, Jim Thome, Mike Mussina, Kenny Lofton, Jeremy Burnitz, Tim Salmon, Carl Everett and the King of the Rookies in this set, Chipper Jones. There's even gum! I grabbed 10 packs of this last weekend and I wish I had bought the whole box now. Out of the 10, I immediately ripped 4 packs, dropped one under my car seat and can't find it and had five saved for later. Well, four now, 'cause this one's getting opened. If I pull the Chipper, I'll be so happy I'll chew the gum.
one piece of nervous gum120 Jody Reed
106 Jeff Tackett RC
283 Ruben Sierra
344 Melido Perez
15 Mike Timlin
615 Ronnie Walden
240 Brain Holman
592 Alfredo Griffin
379 Barry Larkin foil
122 Jack Clark
277 Jack Daugherty
333 Brian Harper
136 Cecil Fielder
231 Harold Baines
No Chipper, but still a nice pack. My SCD Price guide says this set imitates the 1953 Bowman set. I don't recall purple, blue and orange borders on any 1953 cards I've ever seen. They may be talking about the photography though which in most cases is pretty nice. Mike Timlin's badly lit mug shot is an exception, but most of the other portraits are all nicely done, usually with the player looking wistfully off in the distance while white, fluffy clouds float in the background. The action shots are even better. Flip Ruben Sierra's batting stance and you could turn the three cards into a SportFlics card with a perfect swing. If I could figure out how to make an animated gif in MSPaint, I'd show you. Melido Perez is wearing one of the many throwback White Sox uniforms that caused the Sox to be my favorite AL team in the early 90's. Cecil Fielder and Jack Clark are both chilling out and leaning on their bats. Jack is wearing a hefty bag for no apparent reason and I sincerely hope Cecil's bat was reinforced with steel rebar. Actually, that would make for a kick ass bat card... wood with a slice of rebar right in the middle, kinda like Manny's Pacific card. Harold Baines is shown in the batting cage, which is very appropriate since the man was a professional hitter. Hopefully the Hall of Fame voters realize that one day.
1 comment:
I love the 91 Bowman set and have busted a ton of it. My uncles and I used to scoop up boxes of this stuff for somewhere between $5 and $9 a box all of the time and then grading became the big thing and dealers busted cases of this stuff to get the rookies graded and the prices climbed a bit back to their full suggested retail price of $18 a box.
It was thanks to this set that I collected the 92 set and picked up plenty of it at normal prices before it shot through the roof, but that set seems to drop a little lower in price each year as Piazza gets older and older.
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