(It's been another weekend of traveling. This time I met up with good college friends I haven't seen in 25 years. Sometimes you actually find people you connect with and it has nothing to do with cards ... yeah, I'm as surprised about this as you are. Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 307th in a series):
I have long been fascinated with what you see above, and I've been posting about it for just about as long as I've been blogging.
The practice of featuring the same player on more than one card in a set interests me. I'm not referring to a player who shows up on his own card and then on some subset (think All-Star or record-breaker or league leader), or the intentional things that Topps does these days such as making four different cards of Cody Bellinger, just because he's a rookie, all in the same set.
I am more interested in the "mistakes" (Elizardo Ramirez having TWO of his own cards in the 2007 Topps set despite not switching teams).
Even that thing that Topps started doing in the '90s (I think), in which it featured a player with one team in Series 1 and then his new team in Series 2, is weird to me. There are so many other players who don't even get one card. How 'bout save that for the update set?
In 1995 Stadium Club, Whiten appeared in Series 2, at card No. 462, with the Cardinals.
Then he appeared on card No. 574 with the Red Sox, in something called "the high number series."
I suppose that was Stadium Club's "update set" in 1995. But if you ask me, 495 cards -- which is what Series 1 and Series 2 comes to in '95 Stadium Club -- is hardly a full set.
Ever since the '90s hit, the lines have been blurred about what you can and cannot do with a set, how many cards a player gets in a set and all that.
I suppose my main question here, and why I'm rambling about Hard Hittin' Mark Whiten, is: when was the first example of this -- a player getting two different cards in the base set, without one of them being a subset card of some sort?
The earliest I can think of is 1993 Upper Deck. But it's very possible UD did it before '93.
Oh, right, Topps had two different Ted Williams cards in 1954. I suppose it's been going on way earlier than the '90s.
Anyway, that's all for today. Leave your thoughts in the comments as usual.
Comments
I remember Steve Trachsel randomly had two cards in 2007 Topps for some reason - he didn't change teams or anything, and it's not like he did anything noteworthy that year. Weird.
#200 Mike Piazza (Dodgers)
#391 Mike Piazza (Marlins)
#503 Mike Piazza (Mets)
...kinda wish Topps would have given Dave Kingman this treatment in 1978...
Totally agree that all players should be represented before someone gets a second card. The undercoverage of player rosters in current sets is inexcusable.
I think that most of the early Upper Decks are actually the night-numeber "extended" set. They seem like all the same se now but the extended set functioned a little like a traded set in hat you could buy it by itself but also showed up in wax packs and factory sets by th end of the year.
And yeah as others have mentioned on here, multiple base cards per player has been going on since we've been making cards. If you limit things to the post-1948 era though it seems to be pretty rare aside from the 1954 Teddys (the print-run variants in the 1960 are a different beast)
Anyway, didn’t know about the two different Mark Whiten cards in Stadium Club. My only memory of him is the 4 HR game he had against the Reds when he was with the Cardinals.