Tuesday, May 06, 2008

1999 Fleer Brilliants

I found this in a repack box and had to have it. This was a hobby product that I never bought when it was out but it's shiny, shiny wrapper just sucked me in. Which is false advertising because as I recall this stuff wasn't holographic, just sort of chromey. Oh well, I bought it, I may as well open it!

15 Mike Mussina
80 Jay Buhner
153 Mark L. Johnson Rookie SP
83 Javy Lopez
Tony Gwynn miscut front, Troy Glaus back frankencard
23 Richie Sexson

I remember these cards now. The second I opened the pack I got a big 'ol thumbprint on Mike Mussina. These cards are nice and forgettable. A simple action photo on top of a mirror silver background with a sort of swirly time warp thing going on and the player name stamped in gold foil in a font that was used for this set and this set alone. The Javy card is nice (and wasn't in my collection already), but the rest of the cards were more exciting 9 years ago. I did manage to pull an SP rookie of Mark Johnson, a backup catcher for the Sox who last played in the majors for the Brew Crew in 2004. He's still plugging away in the minors for the Memphis Redbirds though, if Yadier Molina goes down he might be back in the show! The absolute jewel of the pack is this monstrosity:
A horribly miscut Tony Gwynn card with a Troy Glus back. I tried to tweak the scanner settings so you could see the printer crosshairs on the top right corner but these cards don't scan worth a dang. You don't often see printer errors this bad in recent premium products. The printers marks fascinate me, it's about as close as I'll get to seeing an uncut sheet of these things.

1 comment:

capewood said...

These cards came in 5-card packs. I've got 20 of them so I must have bought 4 packs (math was always my good subject). Anyway, these cards had a parallel set called Brilliants Blue. According to Beckett Blue cards are inserted at a rate of 1:3 packs. Somehow I got 17 blue cards and 3 regular. For a long time, I thought the regular cards were the parallel until I read the tiny print in the Beckett listing. This set is also another example of Fleer's prolific number of short lived sets in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I liked this set but it didn't come back in 2000.