As confused as Hershiser looks

I received a healthy stack of Orel Hershiser cards from Paul's Random Stuff recently. All of the cards were from one of those Star sets of the late '80s/early '90s.

I know nothing about these things except what I've barely absorbed reading blogs. Near as I can tell, some company called itself "Star" and decided to produce some cards out of someone's basement. The set features select stars of the day. Each star has about 10 cards in the set. A different photo of that player appears on each card.

If that's not confusing enough, there are gold and platinum versions of these cards. And there are promo cards, and rookie series, and the more I read through my Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards, the more perplexed I got (the opposite is supposed to happen).

So I thought I'd just stop talking about something I don't know and show the cards.

Gold:

Some of the photos, I guess, aren't too bad. I sort of like this one:

And here's the "platinum":

I've never known "platinum" to describe plain, white lettering before.

The backs to these cards are the same in the gold series as they are in the platinum series, except the platinum has a yellow back and the gold has a gray cardboard look.

But all of the photos are different in each series, except for two. The "scoreless record" card for both the platinum and gold sets features the same photo. The photo for the platinum "minor league stats" card is the same as ... no, not the gold "minor league stats" card ... it's the same as the gold "major league stats" card.

Confused? Irritated by the muddled randomness of this Star outfit? Or have you just stopped reading?

Yeah, I don't blame you.

The important part of this post is that these cards put me over 200 unique Hershiser cards in my collection. I'm sure the Star cards are slightly pushing the definition of "unique," but I'm counting them anyway.

It's a key collecting milestone for the guy who's been my second favorite player of all-time for more than two decades.

However, he may soon be surpassed by somebody.

No, not by this guy, who also arrived in the form of a card from Paul.

It's this guy, who arrived on Monday in my mailbox in the form of a magazine cover:

November 17th is the big day.

I'm ready for someone to make a set of just Clayton Kershaw cards.

Wonder what the Star folks are doing these days?