Random Ray - 1993 Topps Black Gold

The first series of 2022 Topps cards will soon be released and many people will open their packs of cards and find copies of Topps Gold parallels. The modern version of the Topps parallel set has been around since 2001. I liked the cards when they brought them back, but they have been lost in the shuffle amongst the vast sea of all the other camo and colored parallels Topps stuffs into their packs. The serial numbers on the back of the cards scream "half-assed" as well.  

I still like their appearance.  

Now, if you want a good Topps Gold card, I suggest you go back and look at some of the early 1990s Topps sets. The Gold parallels started in 1992 with cards coming roughly one-per-box. By 1993, Topps was putting one Gold card in every pack, with a Black Gold card in every two boxes, or thereabouts. The name is a little suspect. Black Gold? That's oil, right? 

The Topps Gold cards are not serial number or super rare, but they were fun to collect and had a better appearance and design than their modern equivalent. I am going to go with the Black Gold Ray Lankford card this week, as the design was used this past year for the Topps Archives set. I hate how much Topps reuses designs, but I still enjoyed these cards.  

This was one of the Archives cards.  

Topps did a good job of recreating of these cards.  

On to the 1993 Topps Black Gold Ray Lankford card.  

I love the contrast on these card with the solid black background and the gold design around the top and bottom. High contrast is always a good design element in my opinion.  I wish that Topps had used a photograph with Ray in a home white uniform for more contrast, but it's also hard to go wrong with the 1990s Cardinals road uniforms. The Cardinals consistently wore the blue hats on the road at that time. The photos on the Black Gold cards were also different than the base cards. For the time, given that there were fewer card products, it was nice to get an extra picture of your favorite player.  

This picture is the same as his Topps base card with the exception of the gold foil at the bottom and around the Topps logo at the top of the card.  

Although, I am almost certain that the two photographs came from the same game, maybe even the same at-bat. The gray wristbands are sort of a giveaway here. Ray Lankford wore the same style wristbands throughout his career, but they were always red or blue. I almost wonder if this wasn't some sort of special event, like the current Mother's Day games where the players wear pink.  

Back to the Black Gold and the back of the card.  

The back of the card has no stats. Usually I am a big fan of numbers, but for insert cards I am willing to forgo the statistics. Topps can not get enough of mentioning the fact that Ray Lankford played football at a junior college and rushed for 1,000 yards in a season. I am certain that if you took every Ray Lankford card ever produced by Topps, you would run across that fact at least a dozen times.  

The highlight for me is the mention of Ray Lankford's cycle. Have I ever mentioned the fact that I got to see the Ray Lankford cycle game in-person?  

Probably the same number of times that Topps mentioned Ray Lankford ran for 1,000 yards playing football at a junior college.  

A Venerable Old Card Part 55

Back in 1993 Topps came up with the idea of inserting Black Gold cards into packs of cards.  There were also winner cards which could earn collectors a set of 11, 22, or 44 cards from the set.  The Black Gold set was a total of 44 cards, so that 44 card redemption card was really popular.  I never pulled a redemption card, but I did pick up several of the single cards.  Especially the single Cardinals cards in the set.

The best Cardinals card in the set, in my opinion, belongs to one of my 90s favorite players Ray Lankford.  It's a really great looking card at the time and I feel like the set has aged fairly well over the last twenty some years.

I am not sure that the scan really does the gold foil along the top and bottom of the card much justice, but it looks nice contrasted with the black background in the middle of the card behind the picture of Lankford.  The Topps Black Gold logo up at the top of the card looks nice too.  

Back of the card.....

and here is the real reason that I really like this card.  It's nice that Ray Lankford was a Topps Rookie All-Star and that he played college football a junior college in California.  The most important thing back here is mention of Lankford's 1991 cycle against the Mets.  If you are a long time reader you've probably seen a post mentioning this game before, but I attended the game.  It's probably one of the coolest things that I have seen in person at a baseball game.

I still have my scorecard and I also have the ticket stub from the game.  One thing that I have tried to do since I saw this game is to find baseball cards that mention the cycle game.  I have found several over the years including this 1993 Topps Gold card.