C.A.: 1992 Diet Pepsi Gary Carter

(Good evening, it's National Brownie Day. I am a simple man, I prefer brownies without nuts, frosting or any other weird experiment bakers want to try. Naked brownies are perfect as they are, don't try to change them. Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 315th in a series):

 

I thought it would be nice if I could leave the 1992 Diet Pepsi set that Angus gave me in its packaging. I figured there were no Dodgers in the set that I needed, why not take a quick look through the 30 cards and then put them back in the package forever?

But of course I'm incapable of doing that.

I was shuffling through the cards quickly, taking note of who was in the set and how they looked without any licensing, when a card leapt out of my hands and punched me in the head:

There were two reasons for this. First, I realized that Brett Butler, as I had mentioned in my previous post, is NOT in the set, which meant there were no Dodgers in the set.

Second, there ARE Dodgers in this set because Gary Carter is a Dodgers card!

But it took me a little while to confirm it. There is absolutely no reference to a team on these cards. Nothing about a team name, nothing about a team city. If you turn over to the back ...

Zero team representation. How weird is it to see no city or nickname after the years in the individual stats? (This set was licensed by the Major League Players Association but not MLB).

So the traditional indication of what team employs the player is missing in this set.

But if you look at the photo on the front and have any kind of familiarity with baseball stadiums, Carter clearly is in Dodger Stadium. And that is clearly Dodger equipment Carter is wearing, the helmet, chest protector and shin guards are all Dodger blue. It's also a clean, white Dodger uniform.

So, there you go, there's a Dodger card in the '92 Diet Pepsi set.

But not everyone agrees.

Trading Card Database says he's a member of the Montreal Expos for this card, even though there's absolutely no indication of that on the card.

This is likely because Carter was acquired off of waivers by the Expos prior to the 1992 season for his final year. He played in exactly 92 games for the Expos in '92. The set was released in '92, with packages of Diet Pepsi (maybe in another way, I don't know, I don't live in Canada), so technically Carter was in an Expos uniform when people were buying their Diet Pepsi that year.

But it's not a consensus. If you do a COMC search for 1992 Gary Carter Expos cards, this card doesn't come up. If you do the same search for 1992 Carter Dodgers cards it doesn't come up either. But if you search for 1992 Gary Carter cards, it shows up.

Still, looking at the card, there's only one team I see and that's the Dodgers.

As for the rest of the set, it suffers a little bit from the lack of a license. It's not as exciting as other food issue cards from the '70-'90s and I think it's because the company logo is downplayed. Some of the cards are almost as off-putting to me as current Panini products.

Stuff like this.

But the set does a very good job of hiding team logos on a lot of its cards:

Some of the better ones.

And some kinda cool ones. The Ozzie Smith is the card of the set.

So, now that the set is opened and not going back into the wrapping, I'll be adding it to my food-issue oddball binder.

But since I've established there's a Dodgers card, I now need an extra Gary Carter to complete the set because this one is going in the Dodgers binder.