Score was my kind of card company.
Sure, I've always been a Topps fan, and Fleer is right up there, too. Score didn't do everything right (looking squarely at '92), but during that baseball card paradigm shift of the late 1980s, I was definitely part of Team Score.
Collectors aligned themselves into two camps at that time -- well, they would have if the internet was around in 1989 anyway. I'm told we're all so damn divided these days. But as we collectors went about our business by our lonesome back then, some of us gravitated to Upper Deck and some of us gravitated to Score.
I felt the pull of Score, although I admit I didn't even see Upper Deck for at least the entire 1989 collecting season if not longer. But Score appealed to me immediately. It was colorful, it was action-packed and it was informative. It produced the "thinking collector's" card. Turn over that card and Score could give you a thorough rundown of Thomas Howard's progress through the minor leagues. Upper Deck couldn't do that.
The first Score set I saw was from 1989, but my immediate favorite was its inaugural set from 1988. The early days of this blog are filled with my attempt to complete the '88 Score set and the ensuing odes. I'm sure I declared it my favorite Score set at that time and I'm sure it was.
I still like the brilliant border colors and the Reggie Jackson subset and the Action-Packed vibe you get from that set. It remains underrated.
But it's not my favorite Score set anymore.
The 1991 Score set has moved into the No. 1 spot.
That's interesting because just as I praised '88 Score in the early days, I shrugged off 1991 Score, too. Even though I bought a lot of it in '91 and it appealed to me, I found the very early '90s colors in the set -- TEAL? REALLY? -- a bit off-putting. A couple of the subsets are downright cheesy, and I actually have traded away lots of cards from this set over the years.
Big mistake.
Because now I'm trying to complete it.
Fortunately -- or unfortunately, depending on your view -- the set is 893 cards large. So even if I've traded away a lot of cards from the set, I still have plenty. And it's from the heart of the junk wax era so the cards are plenty plentiful.
In fact, I received a stack of more than 100 needs from '91 Score just last week from Marc at marcbrubaker.com (formerly "Remember the Astrodome"). I'll run through just a few of the basics because I think we all know about '91 Score by now.
The base cards -- it seems so weird talking about "base cards" when it's Score -- come in four different colors:
White
Teal
Black
And Blue.
(Yeah, yeah, I know, "white and black aren't colors." Shut up.)
I am interested in how these look in a binder because I've always found the teal cards jarring when compared with the others. The border colors come grouped together -- as Score was fond of doing during this time -- so I don't think it will be quite as upsetting to my eyes as if the colors were mish-mashed together.
Like most Score sets, the photos are all action-oriented. They are much clearer in the '91 set than they were in the '88 set, and they weren't all the same, which is one of the reasons why I'm starting to enjoy this one more.
But probably the biggest reason for my realization that I must complete this set is all of the subsets in '91 Score. The 1991 Score set is the King of Subsets, some of the best, and certainly it has to be the most to ever be committed to one set, right? (Don't confuse "subset" with "insert." I'm sure there is some set with 1,000 different insert sets).
I didn't receive all of the different Score subsets from Marc, but I did get a few notable ones:
Master Blaster (TM), which also arrived in the set with its companions, "Rifleman" and "K-Man".
Highlights, those very newsy cards that goes back to Topps sets in the '70s.
Draft picks, because we were all about the draft picks then. Still are, I guess.
This was one of my favorites. Score treated the all-star subset with caricatures, which was/is tremendous. Score continued this popular treatment through a few of the sets.
After this salvo from Marc, my '91 Score want list is much more manageable -- around 150 cards. Bo, from Baseball Cards Come to Life!, has gotten ahold of that want list now and I have a feeling there won't be much more to get once he's done.
That is pretty cool from a nearly 900-card set, that you can complete without too much of an effort. That's what makes '91 Score brilliant. It is giant, it is informative and it is accessible. Modern card sets have so much to learn.
Meanwhile, Marc added a few other cards from my collecting interests and he did quite well.
Four cards for my 2019 Archives, '75 set completion quest -- well, three anyway. Arcia turned out to be a dupe.
Four cards from 1980s Fleer wants. Yes, I still have '89 Fleer wants --- ssssssssh, don't tell anybody!
Four stickers/sticker backs from this year's Sticker set.
Four Dodger needs from last year's set. I've been so delinquent on 2018 sets.
As evidence, these are two parallels I received from Marc from last year, but I still need the base cards for both.
The Stat Kings card is the single most offensive "Dodger" card from 2018. Greg Holland is featured first and the whole back of the card is about Holland. Meanwhile, Kenley Jansen had the exact number of saves as Holland that year, yet he's "No. 2." Nice math, Topps.
Back to the present day. These are all 2019 Dodgers needs. It's a relief to get that flagship Hyun-Jin Ryu card. I can't stand putting base needs from the current year in my online cart. It feels so silly when I know that the same card is just sitting on a store shelf down the road or somebody I know has like seven duplicates of it.
Mini Kershaw needs from this year. This package was Kershaw heavy. I sent Marc an Astros coin from Archives earlier, it's reassuring to know everyone is pulling the exact opposite coin that they want to pull.
Now a couple of sets that I've neglected from this year. I haven't bought a package of Gypsy Queen since like 2013. Here are a couple of Dodger needs of the muddled-image set.
Don't worry, I'm not coming across an epidemic of modern diamond-cut cards. I scanned this Bellinger crooked.
Fiya! Fiya!
My Fire Dodger-pulling has been abysmal thus far -- worse than any set I've bought. So this is nice.
Here is one weird card. It's like '90s Metal except it scans decently.
Finally, Marc, added a figurine of Big D that he apparently found in a neglected dollar box.
He even looms over the other Starting Lineup figures in my collection.
Marc was happy to get all that surplus Score out of his house and I appreciate him going the extra mile to find some Dodgers I needed. Sometimes the giving -- i.e. the getting rid of -- is better than the getting. I do understand that.
But I must at least complete the best Score set ever.
Comments
There was also this really short lived 1990 Score bubble that year which I remember. I think there was a rumor that Score had printed the set in lower quantities and everyone started buying it like crazy, especially that Bo football/baseball card. Then in the middle of the summer they flooded the market with factory sets and the bubble, and collector interest in 1990 Score, immediately burst. For a few weeks that year though Score outdid both Upper Deck and Topps in the battle for attention though.
1. You make a great point that if you like lots of information on your card backs, you were going to like Score more in that era; if you preferred big photos, UD was more to your liking. I do tend to be more in the former category, and I do like that Score set a lot.
2. You're right (again) that there's a big difference between having a lot of subsets and having a lot of inserts. The set with the most inserts is clearly the current Chronicles, which by my estimates has 7 base cards and 38,037,924 different insert sets.
3. The facsimile signatures on the Mondesi and Arcia Archives cards are so thick and twirly that it looks as though they are marks left behind as the player swished his bat back and forth. I don't think this ever happened on the real 1975 Topps. They could have made the sigs smaller, but I guess there's nothing they can do about how the player signs.
I missed them all when they were new, but got an '88 set years later, but after that they didn't excite me much except for 1996.
Regarding modern players on the 1975 design, the sorry excuses they have for signatures are a definite turn off to me. The Koufax facsimile is hard to read, but look at it compared to the other three, especially the Arcia. They might as well leave them off for the modern players.
I just realized while reading this post that Ozzie Guillen has made a double play on a ghost.
Oh, and I only had 3 copies of the Ryu, but yes - always happy to pass dupes on to someone that will give them a loving home. Enjoy!