Night Owl Cards

I've mentioned a time or two that back when we received free samples in the mail at the newspaper, I would periodically land a card or two from baseball or football sets. This was the late 1990s, and the cards were always Pacific or Pinnacle (brands I knew nothing about, by the way). So the designs were wild and strange to me. And, weirdly, most of the cards featured the word SAMPLE in giant letters traveling across the card. I was familiar with sample cards and knew they could be "exclusive," but thought it bizarre that they would effectively ruin the picture by stamping SAMPLE across it. Whatever, it was the '90s, I'm not going to pretend I understand much about cards then. I was just reminded of this by yet another mailing from Stephan of Vintage Twins . In the envelope contained a sealed pack of 1995 Pinnacle Zenith sample cards. There they are, eight players all trying to do their work with giant letters floating in front of them. This set of ...

Something has puzzled me ever since I took this card home. It's a 1999 Omega card, one of the many, many sets that Pacific issued in the late 1990s. But I didn't buy it at store or at a card show. This card was part of a free sample mailing that Pacific apparently distributed to newspaper publications at the time. We would receive a large envelope once or twice a year as Pacific announced yet another set in a fancy PR release. I didn't pay much attention to the cards at the time because I wasn't collecting then, and I found the cards particularly gaudy. For some reason, the cards Pacific sent in the mailings were always of Tony Gwynn. I would end up taking the cards home because no one else at the office wanted them, and I didn't have the heart to throw them in the trash (I don't think I've ever thrown away a single baseball card ever since my first horrid mistake back in 1974). But here's the thing; they were free samples, and it's obvious Pacific ...