Pujols Parade - 2002 Donruss Studio

Flags and baseball cards generally make a really good combination. For example, Topps used city flags on an insert set in 2022 Topps, which look really sharp.  This Arenado is easily one of my favorite Cardinals cards that I have picked up this year.  

Great looking card.  

My Pujols card for this week uses the American flag as part of its design.

You are probably expecting to see something classy, but think again. These cards were likely inspired by the pants of the Tae Kwon Do instructor from Napoleon Dynamite.  

It's not a very good card.  

Here is the front. 

Large American Flag. 

School film strip of the Gateway Arch, sorry no play-along cassette tape. 

Donruss Studio ended up using city skylines in 2004, but with no American flag.  

 

Back to the 2002.  

Where is the effort? 

Where is the love? 

The Blue Jays and Expos players also have American flags, so do non-American players.  

This is the type of set that would slap an American flag on a card of Joey Votto.  

Personally, if I was designing the 2002 Donruss Studio cards, I would have gone Jasper Johns American flag.  

Something a little classier.  

Back of the card. 

What is going on with the filmstrip?  

What an odd choice.  

The write-up about Pujols is decent.  

Flags and baseball cards are just generally a slam dunk. I feel let down, so I am going to share a few cards that did a better job with flags, outside of the one I did in 2 minutes.  

First, we have Trevor Rosenthal and Missouri.  

Trevor is from Lee's Summitt, so we are going to pronounce that "Missour-ee", not "uh". 

Next up is Ryan Zimmerman with a North Carolina flag.   

Ryan is from Washington, North Carolina.  

Last up, we've got Shelby Miller and a giant Texas flag.  

See, flags and baseball cards make a good combination, unless we are talking about the 2002 Donruss Studio set. I did not even post any 1997 Bowman cards. I should have just made a post about flags and baseball cards.  

Friday 5: Best 5 Sets from 1991

I love the 1991 baseball card sets and I had a hard time sitting on this post all week.  If you were not collecting that year and are looking for something fun and inexpensive to open any of these sets would be a great deal of fun to assemble.  Before I show off my Top 5 I am going to have to put up an Honorable Mention for this week for one of my most underrated sets of all time.  It's already had a post or two....

Honorable Mention- I have always loved the 1991 Bowman set.  I will go ahead and admit that I am slightly biased towards it, but it is a well deserved love.  The set has a lot of important rookie cards in it that are of no particular value, but they are a lot of fun to take out of the box and flip through.  Of course there is Jeromy Burnitz and his incredible follow through along with Jim Thome, Chipper, Jeff Bagwell, Mike Mussina, and Ivan Rodriguez.  Those guys are going to be prominent through out this post.

#5- Upper Deck Final Edition- This is a really tiny set that you can probably find for $1.00 on Ebay.  Sure there will be shipping, but they are seriously ridiculously cheap.  How many copies of this set did Upper Deck print?  I am going to guess many many thousands.  Anyway, it's Upper Deck's first stab at an "Update" set and it's not too good except two cards.  First, there is a Jim Thome rookie card in the set.  They also put in a Pedro Martinez rookie card.  Classic also had a Pedro rookie card in 1991, but the vast majority of the Pedro rookie cards appear in 1992 products.  Having a rookie card of one of the best pitchers from the era is a definite plus and makes this set worth owning.

#4- Fleer Ultra Update- The Ultra Update set is a lot like the Upper Deck Final Edition set, but with one huge difference.  It is actually a 1991 product with a somewhat limited print run.  Fleer distributed this product in set form and made it a Hobby only product.  I think it was a pretty crazy idea at the time, but it has seriously made this set more difficult to collect then others of this era.  While there are good rookie cards in the set of Ivan Rodriguez, Mike Mussina, and Jeff Bagwell there are also some other cards which have good value and collectability like the Juan Gonzalez card.  Second year card, but it's hot.  Why?  Not sure.

#3- Studio- This was a really unique set at the time of it's release.  While there were a lot of products that were trying to go high end with foil packaging and different card stocks Studio changed some of the basics of baseball cards.  Studio did that, but there were other changes too.  First, the pictures are black and white head shots.  Is there another set like this?  No.  Really unique.  Flip the card over and there are no stats.  Mark McGwire likes Whitney Houston.  Consider me shocked and disappointed at the same time.  Not the most expensive set, but a really fun product to open from packs.  Or just buy the set and enjoy the pictures.  Either way you're going to be happy.

#2- Topps- Always been a really underrated Topps set in my opinion.  There are not any really great cards in this set, nor Earth shattering design, but there is some really good photography here.  There are a lot of action shots and the staged shots are done really creatively.  Always loved that Benito Santiago card.  This is also the last Topps set before Topps started using thinner card stocks with progressively more and more gloss.  Kind of an end of era set and one that is fun to flip through and look at.  If you don't own this set it is cheap and fun to put together as boxes often sell for less than $10 on Ebay.

1991 Stadium Club- The Topps answer to Upper Deck and quite well done.  The photography was cool, the packs were foil, and the cards were glossy.  These cards also cost a dollar per pack pack in 1991, so they also match Upper Deck's SRP.  Lots of great cards in this set, so I went with the cool Nolan Ryan tuxedo card.  After it's 1991 debut Stadium Club was a staple of the Topps product line for more than a decade.  As a collector during the 1990s is was nearly impossible to not dabble in Stadium Club every year.  Like all of the rest of the products on this week's list you can find packs and boxes of Stadium Club for next to nothing on Ebay.  Fun boxes to open.

Minis? Who Remembers Jumbo Cards?

During the late 90s there was some odd rush on jumbo sized cards.  I am not sure quite why, but I ran into them yesterday afternoon sorting out cards and was really intrigued flipping through some of the cards.  Really, there seemed to be two main products which released gobs of jumbo cards: Studio and Zenith.  The cards, especially the Zenith, actually have some great photography.  If you are into lugging around 8 x 10 baseball cards then here's my take on the two sets.  If not all of these cards can be found on the standard sized baseball card too...

1997 Pinnacle Zenith Mark McGwire 8x10

I always thought the Zenith cards were the best of the jumbo cards.  If Studio was the base/standard for jumbo cards, then the Zenith cards were clearly a premium product.  The cards are made on a thicker stock and have great photograph with a high gloss finish.  At some point I had thought about making a point to get this set signed, but I am not really one to chase people down or do a lot of TTM autographs.

1997 Pinnacle Zenith Ken Griffey Jr.

This Griffey card from the set has always been amongst my favorite cards of him.  Just an incredible picture of the future Hall of Famer and his awesome follow through.  The Zenith's only downfall at the time seemed to be the fact that jumbo cards did not seem too popular and there was a serious lack of chase cards.  All 90s sets needed something good to chase down to be truly great, right?  Here's one insert from the set...

1997 Pinnacle Zenith V2 Alex Rodriguez

The V2 cards were pretty cool with the GIF like flip replay on the left side of the card.  I loved this card back in the late 90s.  Only card I have from this insert set.  Should probably find the rest?  Maybe not.  There were more jumbo cards still....

1997 Donruss Studio Masterstrokes Andy Pettitte

The Studio cards of the late 90s were kind of the staple jumbo cards.  Not as nice of a product as the Zeniths, in my opinion, but still a pretty nice set of cards.  Studio cards had inserts and serial number short-prints in addition to the regular cards.  They even threw in some autographs.  Donruss disappeared after 1998, but after it reemerged in 2001 the Studio cards reappeared with jumbos again.  They were all autographed. 

2001 Donruss Studio Private Signings Rick Ankiel Autograph

I actually really like the Studio autographs and own a handful of them.  That alone made discovering my stash of jumbo cards worthwhile.  Especially this Ankiel card.  There were other ventures made by card companies into the jumbo card market, but they all ended the same way: unsuccessful.  Probably because there really is not a market for jumbo cards.  Still doesn't mean they're not fun.  One last one for the road.  We all like cheap wax and cool looking cards.  What late 90s set had some cool photography?  The 1998 Topps set.  You want a copy of that set in jumbo form? 

1998 Topps SuperChrome Barry Bonds

Released during the 1998 and 1999 seasons, the SuperChrome sets picked out 36 of the best Topps cards, put them in Chrome form, and made them Jumbo sized.  Nobody collected them, but I do have the complete 1998 set.  Pretty cool set with cool pictures.  Better yet, the cards are still out and about and dirt cheap in wax form.  Go on Ebay and search Topps boxes.  Guaranteed to be one of the cheapest things out there is the 1998 SuperChrome boxes.  No problem finding them for less than $20.  It's worth it for the Vladimir Guerrero card alone.