Just What I Need - Rare 90's Cards

I don't think I made it official on the blog yet, but I decided a few weeks back to start working on the 1998 Donruss Signature autograph set.  I put together a photoshop template for the set, and really gained a new appreciation for the series.  More on that another day.  But in looking for Signature Series cards, I stumbled across a couple rare Pirates parallels that were on ebay with reasonable, if a tag high BIN's.  I thought they might be a nifty "To: Me, From: Me" Christmas gift, when I noticed one of them had ended.

Worried somebody had snagged a deal out from under me, I was relieved to see the cards had gone up auction style.  Checking the seller's other items, I discovered what must have once been an insane Jose Guillen super collection, full of rare cards from the 90's through the end of Guillen's career.  All of the Pirates cards went into my watch list, but with the auctions ending two days before Thanksgiving, the timing wasn't ideal.  I had already earmarked a budget for Black Friday shopping on COMC, and wasn't about to change my plans too drastically.

When the dust settled and after some last second snipes pulled cards just out of my clutches, I ended up with 4 cards headed my way.  Better yet, all four were pretty tough 90's parallels.

The real gems were the two Donruss Signature Millenium parallels.  At only 100 copies, they have to be some of the rarer autographed cards to come out of the 90's.  Better yet, I was able to win each of them for less than the $13 BIN's they had been listed at.  The '98 is a thing of pure beauty (and will be joined by another Pirate from the set that I found on COMC later in the week)

 The '97 copy is a little marred by the fact that Guillen signed up the side of the card.  The autograph actually pops rather well in the scan - in person the blue on blue almost gets lost.  Still, it's a tough card from one of the landmark sets in the hobby, even if the set perhaps doesn't get quite as much love today.

 And finally, I landed a Skybox Ruby and '98 Bowman Chrome Gold, both /50.  Had they come up at a different time of year, I probably would have chased a few others more aggressively, but I'm still thrilled with these pickups.  It's not very common to come across some of the rare 90's inserts for the Pirates, so the idea of basically having an entire run of 90's parallels laid out before me had my mouth watering.

And believe it or not, but there was actually a time when Jose Guillen was a hot player to collect.  But like Jose Tabata a decade later, Pirate fans really need to stay away from right fielders named Jose...  I shudder to think how much cash the original owner must have tied up in these cards.

The Flea Market That Smells Like a Sewer

Flea markets aren't typically known to attract the classiest folks.  Heck, in our flea market travels Kate and I have found that a grungy tshirt and yesterday's jeans are the best way to go.  Dress too well and prices on the everyday variety of junk, sports memorabilia, and nicknacks suddenly seem to jump by 50%.

But our flea market trip to Ohio had a certain stench of post-industrial waste attached to it.  I guess it wasn't surprising, since the only employment in most of the small towns we drove through seemed to be McDonald's and factories spewing some ill-colored plumes of smoke.

The day was slow, and the typical flea market array of rusty tools, cans of spraypaint, and random useless glassware was dominating the day.  But luckily the same dealer who had the cards I posted earlier today had a few plastic bins of random sports stuff that he was selling at 3/$10.

 At first it didn't seem like a great deal.  But the Tom Barrasso Starting Lineup caught my eye.  I already have a copy of the figure opened - my dad picked it up for me at the Civic Arena after my first Penguins game.  I'd probably rather not think how much of a markup we paid inside the stadium!  So adding a copy of the figure still in the packaging was enough to bait me in.  The Hills price tag - a regional department store chain - was an added big of nostalgia.

And to round out the deal, I picked up a set of oversized team-issued postcards from 1995.  I was stuck on what to pick for my third item when the dealer mentioned he had some autographed baseballs, and I could take a look at those if it would close the deal.

There was a pretty wide selection of lesser names from the mid 90's, but all were players who I have plenty of signatures from already and most of the balls were low quality.  But one ball caught my eye.

 A 1995 All-Star ball?  Even if it was signed by somebody who faded into oblivion after one all-star year, this ball was coming home with me.  ...and then I rolled it over.

 Huh?

Daniel Moskos?  As in the Pirates 2007 draft pick?  The guy who pitched a handful of games in the majors, and was in little league when the 1995 All-Star game took place?

I'd rather not know what the thought process behind getting that ball signed was.  But hey, even with a worthless and wholly irrelevant signature, it's still a cool baseball and well worth the $3.  It'll just be displayed with the side panel facing out.

I also decided to pick up the Charlie Hayes/Mike Kingery and Jose Guillen signed balls on what ended up being a complete, and slightly regretted, impulse deal.  They were cheap, and with the lack of worthwhile buys for the day I had money burning a hole in my pocket.  I guess a decent baseball display will be just one more project to add to the to-do list whenever I finally buy a house and have my man cave.

I don't always do group breaks, but when I do...

I pull big hits!

It seems like group breaks are all the rage these days (group breaks are the new midnight blaster run?). I've been hesitant to jump in on most.  After all, I can just pick up singles for far less than the average buy in for a case break, and be guaranteed to get cards I want and don't have.  With a group break, the high end potential is there, but the chance of tossing money down the drain is pretty high as well.

But some deals are just too good to pass up.  As anyone who has read a single post here probably knows, I love the 90's.  So when a massive 30+ box 90's break was proposed on a forum, I was all ears.  I had done a similar break a few months back (which I still need to post...doh), and hit the motherload.  When the break was expanded to 70 boxes for a little more than the cost of blaster, I couldn't get that paypal screen up fast enough.

The break was a perfect fit for me.  I pretty much stopped collecting in 1998 and 1999. Even though I have filled some holes from those years, my commons needs alone made the break a worthwhile investment for me.  Anything beyond that was just icing on the cake.

And this cake ended up well iced.

The break had a pretty broad range of boxes, including a few top end boxes.  Nearly twenty years later, it's no small task to come across unopened wax from some of these products.  Some products that were widespread and had investor appeal, like Bowman, seem to be easy to come by.  But 1998 Leaf Fractal Foundations?  Not so much.  The product was pretty limited (for the time) to begin with.  And the cards are big holes in my collection these days.  Same goes for 1998 Donruss Collections, from which the Jose Guillen above hails, which were basically chrome and refractor versions of the primary Donruss sets released that year.  Donruss would be out of baseball later that year, but they put out some interesting products on the way out.

If you're not familiar with the products, I suggest a google search and preparing a flow chart.  They're some doozies.

But of course not all the products can be those upper tier boxes.  The price and rarity makes it tough enough, so many of the boxes were lower end product.  But that's fine by me, since the 90's were great for 1 per pack parallels that leave big, gaping holes in my binder pages.

Like these great '63 Throwback designs from the 1998 Fleer Tradition set.  Fleer would later use the design for their base Tradition set in 2003, but I'm preferential to the parallel version.

There was enough 1998 Bowman (I believe 7 boxes between Series 1, 2, and Chrome) that I hope I don't see any more in my lifetime - though I stilllll have some holes in the International parallel set.  But 2000 Bowman and Chrome were welcomed sights.  The Bucs slot largely struck out on the Bowman boxes, but I did come away with a beauty from 2000 BC's Retro/Future parallel.  It's still one of my favorite parallel sets.

One of my favorite aspects about a break this size is that there is something for everybody.  Some of the more expensive slots may have been disappointed.  But on the whole the break hit some bigtime cards.

But of course one of the biggest perks of participating in a group break is the break itself.  The break was streamed live across two nights, and was a great learning experience.  For example, I now know that telling Kate I'm too busy to do thing X because I'm watching a man open boxes of baseball cards on the computer is probably not a good choice.  It's also about as interesting as watching paint dry when the boxes are from the 90's, where a card numbered out of 3000 may be the hit of the box.

Speaking of hits, they come in all forms during a break.  Sure, there were some big hits.  And a few big dollar cards came out (though never in black and gold).  But as I said, it was the smaller joys, like half a dozen of 90's Pacific product that is nearly nonexistent in my collection, that made the break for me.

The flat rate box that came in yesterday had nearly 400 cards.  Sorting through all of them was a relatively painless process, since I knew which products in the break were my biggest needs and which I probably already had a good deal of the cards.  Some of the boxes were also repeats from the previous 90's break, so I knew those sets were probably already completed.  All told, I added about 160 new cards to the collection.  Not much more than a dime a card.  And considering that many of those were inserts or parallels, not bad at all.

The break yielded some fun cards that I just wouldn't be able to come by with ease otherwise.

It didn't scan well, but this 1999 Bowman Chrome International parallel of Jason Kendall features an awesome California seascape in the background.  And while not a super rare hit, it's also the kind of card that isn't quite rare or valuable enough to make it into a show box or ebay.  Yet hard enough to find that it's not just sitting on sportlots.

Oh, I had been promising hits, hadn't I?

Again the scan leave something to be desired, but this Paramount Platinum Blue parallel falls 1:67 packs.  Not a bad pull, if I do say so myself.

But the monsters of the break...

For the uninitiated, these beauties are 1998 Topps Tek Diffractors.  If that means nothing to you, these are basically the old school Atomic Refractor design on acetate cards.  But there's a catch.  Each player has 90 different patterns.  And the cards came in packs of 4 that carried an astonishingly high price tag of $4 or $5 a pack, which was insane for the time.

The Tek base set alone is an almost insurmountable task.  I think I have 3 or 4 patterns of each player.  But the Diffractors?  They fall about 2 per box on average.  Completing all 90 patterns for one player would be a jawdropping accomplishment.

These cards both came out of the box that was the highlight of the break.  A Diffractor hot box that yielded I believe 8 or 9 Diffractors in the box.  Talk about killing the odds.  If I wanted to sell them, these two would probably just about pay for my slot.  But I couldn't dare let such amazing cards leave my collection.

But the breakin' fun isn't over yet.  I went with the hot hand and bought into another, much smaller, break that just came in the mail today.  And the results were even better!

Baseball Cards (In Motion!)

I came across a news story talking about a new site that posts animated gif's of baseball cards in motion sequences. Any time cards make the mainstream media it's at least worth a read.  Cool concept, though it seems pretty clear the author may be a little overly impressed.  You can check the site out at http://inskidaoustandslow.com, which promises a new gif each day.  It's not the first time I've seen it done, and when I read the initial story I was expecting something unique - perhaps sequences of the same player, or cards from the same set. 

Not so much.  Instead they seem to just take a pile of junk wax in similar poses, and gif them together.  Still interesting, but surely anything with a decent sized stack of cards could replicate, right?

Well, I put that theory to the test.

I pulled out a box of commons that has slowly been migrating to binders.  The box had cards from 1996-2006, but had mostly been pillaged of everything except for doubles.  Flipping through the cards, I quickly decided I would try to do one of poses: either a player running, or a right handed batter being photographed from the left side of the plate.

This was actually a lot easier than I had suspected.  By the time I hit my 2001 cards, I had put together enough cards to roughly make both poses work.  If I expanded my search to include more years, I'm sure I could have made the transitions a little smoother.

Scan, crop, and put together with a free online gif maker, and the entire process took about 10 minutes.  Given the number of Jason Kendall cards in this sequence, I could probably make an entire gif just of Kendall.

It's a fun novelty trick, and something that I think anyone in the blogosphere could easily replicate.  If I get really motivated, I may try to fine tune this one a bit - I know there are some early 90's cards that are in similar poses, as well as some early 80's Topps sets that seem to photograph every batter from the exact same angle.  

I Love the 90's, An Addendum

I don't always post regularly, but when I do, I prefer the 90's.

My I Love the 90's posts have become a semi-regular feature here, mostly because a large portion of my additions have been 90's cards.  But it's great to see some other blog-love for the decade that gave us Pogs and Furby.  Nick and his wonderful Dimebox wrote up a great post on some of the great cardboard that came out of the 90's.

Aside from my love of all things autographed our collecting tastes are pretty much in sync, so it didn't surprise me to see him write the post.  But I thought I'd delve a little deeper into why many collectors view it as a lost decade, and include some additional points illustrating (pun intended) why they're dead wrong.

One major trend I've noticed among the 90's Deniers is that most of them either fall into one of two camps: either they didn't collect during that time, or they collected heavily and got burned.

The hobby, and baseball as a whole, were in a major transitional phase.  Insert sets blew up in the early 90's, while simultaneously the burst of the investment bubble that had fueled the 80's collecting (read: prospecting) market and baseball's strike drove collectors out of the hobby in droves.  The result is that the hobby quite literally shifted over night, moving from a relatively passive collecting landscape with limited numbers of sets and inserts in '93 and '94 to a boom in both inserts and numbered cards in '95 and '96.  Hot base cards, which had once driven products, were now largely secondary to the insert craze and rare serial numbered cards.


Add in autographs and later in the decade the white hot game used cards, and the hobby landscape had changed rapidly in just a couple short years.  And simply put, some people don't like change.

The business model as a whole changed, with companies moving from producing just a handful of sets in insanely large quantities to the model we see today, where there are more releases printed in much smaller quantities.  Again, some people loved the added competition and added variety, where companies tried to offer something for every type of collector, while others preferred the old "3 sets a year" days.

Some releases, like Metal Universe, were unique approaches to expand the market.

But there were also a lot of one-and-done sets.

Though they gave us some quirky releases, like 1998's New Pinnacle.  Not to be confused with the regular release of Pinnacle the same year.

But we can't avoid addressing the elephant in the room any longer.

Why do a lot of people think 90's cards are junk?  Because they got burned.  Bad.

The mid to late 90's were still largely operating on the shop/card show model, where you could really only find a card if it somehow magically found its way right in front of your face, or if you pulled it from a pack.  While there were collectors, traders, and sellers online, the online card community was very small.

And the cards that were coming out were very rare.  This wasn't an 84 Topps Mattingly, where if you passed on one there would undoubtedly be three dealers with the same card at the next show.  These cards were tough pulls, and they were numbered to tell you just how few of them were out there.

It's hard to fathom, in these days where numbered cards fall out of boxes by the stack.  But you could bust boxes of a product and not even hit a single card numbered to a few thousand.

People paid hundreds or in some cases thousands of dollars for rare cards.  Those cards are still rare.  And they're still valuable.  But those rare cards that sold for $800 at a show in '98?  It might sell for $95 on ebay now.  The growth of the online sales market opened tons of doors for collectors and radically reshaped the way we value (and the values of) cards.  If a card was numbered /150, seeing it at a show was no longer a once in a lifetime buy or pass situation.  Odds were that someone, somewhere would be selling that same card.  And at some point that card would make its way online.

And of course there was a trickle down effect.  It wasn't just the deep pocketed collectors that got burned. 

There were the guys who were able to sell common inserts of star players for $3, or parallels for $1 who just can't seem to admit that those same cards probably belong in the $.25 box now.  You know the type.  There's at least one at every show or flea market, trying to peddle their 1992 Frank Thomas Score cards, Don West style, telling you what a great buy it is for just $2.

To top things off, the entire rookie crop for the decade absolutely imploded.  Maybe that 89 UD Griffey you spent $50 on stings a little, but it's still.  But it's still an iconic card or one of baseball's greatest players.  And you can laugh at that stack of Danny Tartabull rookies you paid $1 each for. 

But that Kerry Wood Bowman Chrome you spent $45 on?  That still burns.  Ben Greive, Karim Garcia, Kris Benson, anyone that came out of '99 Bowman.  The mid-late 90's rookie crops are a virtual prospect grave yard.  And it's not just the prospects that flamed out in AA.  ROY winners.  Guys that spent a couple years fast tracked for stardom and then...poof.  The cards built, and built, and built.  The hype pushed prices up and up for year after year.  And now the cards are worth pennies on the dollar.  It's not that collectors had never been burned on bad investments before.  It's that the 90's burned collectors in ways that I don't think any group of rookies ever had or has since.

And I can't totally blame them (laughing, meanwhile, is a different story. That I can do with ease).  A lot of people spent a lot of money on cards that just weren't nearly as rare or special as they wanted to believe.  Some people just got left in the dust of the changing hobby landscape.  And some collectors, as always seems to happen, just continue to move on to the newest, shiniest trend, considering anything that isn't that "thing" to be worthless simply because it isn't what they want.

So feel free to continue to ignore cards from the 90's.  My collection sincerely appreciates it if you do.  But as they say, don't knock it til you tried it.

Where Do I Find the Application for Hoarders?

I think I'm officially on card overload.  With three major shows in the past 5 weeks, a couple of bigger online purchases, and a few cards here and there off COMC, I've been dealing with cards even more than usual lately.

All the new additions are stacked in precariously teetering piles on my desk and file cabinet, and have completely overwhelmed the already cluttered space.  Not to mention the piles that have migrated out to the living room coffee table, a fact that the little lady is none too pleased about.

I tried to sit down and make a dent in the 500+ cards I need to scan and 300 or so I need to enter in my respective spreadsheets, but the interest just isn't there right now. 

And it doesn't help that my one big planned purchase for the show this past weekend was supposed to be a few boxes of 9 pocket pages, the most critical step in getting my collection organized and filed away.  The only problem is that the two dealers selling supplies were asking $18/box, while I found pages from an online retailer that would come out around $12/box after shipping.  I hate spending money on supplies as it is, so I decided to save a few bucks and wait a few more days for my pages to arrive.  But in the mean time, these piles of cards are in cardboard limbo, awaiting their new homes.

Getting organized has been a long and tedious process.  I'm hoping the full-out move to binders can finally put an end to all that.  I can't tell you how many times I've organized and re-organized my monster boxes, only to have to completely re-do my filing when I find a 1000 count box I had overlooked, and when I frenziedly dig for cards for a last minute autograph signing, throwing entire years out of order.  Once the cards are in the binders, they can stay there.  It will allow me to take a thorough inventory of my doubles (and triples, octuples, etc), and sell, donate, or trade the extras that I don't have a use for.

The light at the end of the tunnel is near.  But it's this (hopefully) last, pronounced wait that is the most frustrating.  Hopefully a few weeks (months?) from now, I will have a glorious bookcase of binders neatly chronicling my collections.  Cause these piles sure are irritating.

COMC Haul: Part 1

Last week I spend a few posts showing off the non-Pirate additions from my COMC's Spring Cleaning sale.  It took a little longer to get the larger, and frankly more important, parts of the shipment scanned.  In total I added 40 cards, all of which were of the shiny/signed/cloth variety.  I'm very happy with the prices I paid, and since I was able to spread the damage out over a few months, it made the financial blow feel a little less significant (though the grand haul didn't cost me much more than a trip to the card show would, or in blog-terms the price of a few blasters).

This Jason Bay patch card is probably my favorite addition of the entire order.  I've largely stayed away from relic cards unless they're dirt cheap in recent years.  But I'm a sucker for a nice patch card, and the black Pirate jersey with red trim is my second favorite Pirate jersey.  For $4.25, this card was a no brainer, even though it was the second most expensive of the bunch.

 So many things about this card feel so wrong: the excessively busy border, trapped horizontal mini card, sticker auto, tiny player photo.  But it's a card I've been wanting since the set came out, and though it seemed way cooler then than now, it's not something I come across very often.

 Matt Curry is probably in danger of losing his prospect status if he doesn't come up with a big 2013.  But just in case he does, I have a nice die cut rookie.  If he doesn't, I have a nice die cut rookie.

 This was the most expensive card of the order, and also the last purchased.  I've always thought the red ink autos were cool, but they're also a set that has attracted a few set builders.  It's the latter fact that largely caused this to come into my collection.  At $4.50, the card was a bit higher than what I consider it worth, but I had a few dollars left in my account, and I noticed that recent auctions for the Red Ink's were going for over $10 with shipping for common players.  With quite a few set collectors after this release, I figured this was probably my only shot to get this card at such a low price, so I bit.  It's actually the second '52 Red Ink Pirate auto I've picked up off COMC.

 Ugly sticker?  Check.  But for a little over a dollar,this one falls into the "well, I don't have it yet" category.

 I remember reading an article about the 98 Signature Series in an issue of Beckett from the late fall of that year that had an accompanying visual checklist of the released and unreleased cards in the set, and being in awe of the autographed awesomeness.  The idea of ever owning a certified autograph card was lightyears out of reach for me then.  This is a beautifully designed set, and Jose Guillen was nice enough to sign the card in the provided window in '98, unlike his '97 card that he signed along the side of the card.  For $2, this was a nostalgic no-brainer.

 A little less nostalgia on this one, but same idea.  These cards were going for around $10 at the time of release, and Walker is one of the more limited autos from Marquee.  For under $3, it felt great to cross this one off the want list.

 I had no idea these Sweet Spot wood parallels even existed.  The card looks amazing, and the wood grain is even more visible in person.  Way cooler than just a simple color change.

 Again, this is a card that had been on my want list for quite some time.  The 2006 All Star game was an amazing weekend, and I love the jersey/logo designs that were used for the game.  I've been wanting to build the set of these jersey cards for years, but this is actually the first of its kind I have acquired.

 Not much to see here, but for $.50 you can't go wrong with a numbered card of a HoF'er.

Topps apparently got confused what "gold" refractor meant for a few years.  These cards would have looked great if the Pirates were still wearing their early 70's mustard jerseys.  In a Spring Training jersey?  This card just looks hideous.

Inserts? Who needs 'em!?!?!

Thanks to a moderate snowfall, I had some extra time on my hands today.  I took advantage of the time catalog some new arrivals, listen to Van Morrison, and work on converting all my of my non-Pittsburgh PC cards to team-organized binder pages while watching Buffy.

As I paged through the various "stuff" I've accumulated over the years, I'm always struck by all the great looking insert sets the Bucs were left out of.  I can't argue against excluding the likes of Al Martin or Jason Kendall from many of the great looking late 90's insert sets.  But you'd think they might have made it into a couple here and there, just for some diversity.

Maybe that's why the parallel craze never bothered me all that much.  Excluded from insert sets, parallel sets were the one place you could be guaranteed to find some fun looking Pirate cards.  Do all the foil color variations get irritating?  Yes, though I was never as frustrated as I am with Topps' baker's dozen versions of the same card.

Still, the world of parallels have their pros and cons.

On the positive side:
-base cards often offer the most unique photography, and can often be enhanced by foil/refractor/border color changes
-it's always fun to complete the "rainbow" of a card, no matter how easy or difficult that task may be
-parallels can often be more price-friendly than insert sets, game used, and autos
-parallels allow for more expansive collections of those middling players who would never, ever make it into an insert set


And the cons:
-you see the same card design over.  And over.  And over. And over.
-parallels, particularly ones that aren't numbered, tend to dry up quickly on the secondary market because many dealers view them as not being worth their time
-while there are some great looking parallels, insert sets are far more likely to feature die cuts, more intricate designs, etc
-Did I mention the redundancy?                                                                                                                  

Still, parallels are some of my favorite cards to collect, particularly since the start of the Topps monopoly.  They add a lot of color and variety to my collection, and nothing looks better than a complete team set of a flashy parallel.

Don't get me wrong - I like inserts.  A lot.  But for the better part of the last two decades Pirate collectors have had to make due with what has been given to us.  Hopefully the emergence of Andrew McCutchen and wave of high end pitchers in the high minors may mean some more Pirates make their way into future insert sets.

But that won't change all the great looking card sets that will never occupy a space in my Pirate collection.  Unfortunately the time has come and gone for those cards to exist in black and gold, and the card companies certainly aren't the only ones to blame. 

But I suppose that's the nice part of having two far more (recently) successful teams in town.  As much as I may lament the exclusion of Al Martin from some '99 Fleer Mystique inserts, I can undoubtedly find Jerome Bettis or Kordell Stewart in their football counterpart.  A small consolation prize, perhaps.  But I'll take it.

The Good, the Bad, and the Incredibly Uncreative: A retrospective of Topps Photography

The Topps brand is inexorably linked to the public conception of baseball cards.  To anyone from the most die hard collector to the most casual fan, Topps is an unmovable force in the baseball card industry.  Childhood memories are bound to the card designs of a certain year, the minute details of our most cherished cards branded into memory.

But cardboard nostalgia aside, Topps cards are as reliant aesthetically on their photography as they are on their card design.  And unlike the polarizing debates over card design, whether you love the wood grain '62 and '87 sets (I do), or think the '75 and '60 sets veered too far from the traditional formula (I don't), Topps photograph is a far more nuanced debate that seems to come up far less often.

The first twenty five years of Topps cards offered little excitement or innovation for collectors in the on card photography.  The cards followed a fairly predictable formula: posed photographs, typically in the team's home jersey, taken at the spring training complex.  It was a logical plan: spring training would most likely have every player who would suit up for a given team during the season, barring trades, and in the pre-merchandise savvy era, there was no concern about teams wearing eighteen different versions of their jersey, with 4 alternate batting practice uniforms.  Throughout the '60's, various season highlight cards would integrate full action shots, and the early '70's introduced the In Action cards, featuring large action photos. 

But the overall visual approach was fairly simple: if we have a photograph of that player in a vaguely current uniform, print it.  If not, pay an intern to do a half-assed job airbrushing out the old logo.  The result was a sequence of years using photos clearly from the same photo session of a player.  Or better yet, players who appear in a string of airbrushed photos.  For example, Hall of Famer Jim Bunning spent 1968 and most of 1969 playing for the Pirates.  Despite appearing in two Topps sets, his only card in an actual Pirate uniform wouldn't come until the 1990 Pacific Legends set.  Nice work, Topps.

But even as Topps integrated more action shots into the base set by the late 1970's, the basic philosophy of getting as many photos as possible from one session still appeared to hold true.  The Pirates 1979 team set holds a special place in my heart for many reasons.  While it marks the last Pirates World Series victory, and a magical We Are Fam-a-lee club, it also marks an impressive feat in Topps photography.  I'll let the photos below speak for themselves.

Seeing a pattern here?

The late 70's Pirates were known for their mix and match jersey combinations that included white pinstriped, black, and yellow pants and pullover jerseys.  Instead, it would appear that almost half of the team set was photographed on the same day, in almost the exact same position in the batters box or on deck circle.  Talk about variety.

But it wasn't all bad.  Though the posed or pseudo action shots dominated much of the '80's, Topps included some great photography in the 1990's, perhaps not coincidentally coinciding with the development of the Stadium Club brand.  The 1993 set featured Zane Smith and Barry Bonds in 1938 throwback jerseys which the team only wore for one game. The jerseys are a unique nod to an 86-64 team that finished in second place, behind HoF'ers the Waner brothers and Arky Vaughn.  The '92 season marks the only time to date that the Pirates have worn the red/white/blue colored jerseys in a throwback game.

The photography in the 1998 set is perhaps my favorite of any Topps set, featuring an array of creative posted shots, horizontal photos, and unique action shots.  The Pirates team set also features two of my favorite Pirate base cards, #146 Jose Guillen and #365 Jermaine Allensworth.  At the time, Allensworth and Guillen appeared to be part of a young core of the Pirates (first) 5 year rebuilding plan.  Guillen's, a 21 year old Dominican right fielder with a rocket arm when he reached the majors in 1997 put up strong numbers for his age in his rookie season.  His 1998 card features him alongside the statue of Roberto Clemente outside Three Rivers Stadium, a parallel perhaps a bit ambitious for the promising Guillen, but one with unavoidable similarities nonetheless.  

Allensworth's, a first round pick in 1993 using the compensation pick gained from the departure of aforementioned Barry Lamar Bonds.  Drafted out of Purdue, Allensworth moved quickly through the Pirates system, reaching AAA by 1995 and featuring a high contact/speed combination that would become the hallmark for a revolving door of almost identical players for the following decade until the arrival of Andrew McCutchen.  Allensworth was one of my favorite players from 1997's Freak Show team that made an improbable run at the NL Central pennant.  Despite his pedigree and minor league success, Allensworth saw dips in his stolen base total and average which, coupled with his below average power, drove his OPS+ numbers into 80-90's.  He was traded to frequent trading partner Kansas City midway through the 98 season, and would see his last major league action with the Mets in 1999. 
Allensworth's 1998 Topps card features a great play at the plate at home against the Reds.  I love the way the elevated camera angle captures the play, and it's a bonus that the card features the Pirates black home alternates that were worn from 1997-2005.

Check back tomorrow for the second part of this series.  Tomorrow will take a look at the 2000's, as Topps reverts back to some of their old tricks, and the eventual discovery of licensed photography.