Silly cereal set

 

A number of years ago I received some cards cut off a cereal box from a set that I had never heard of prior to seeing the cards.

 

I showed off the cards and said they were from the 1997 Wheaties set. That's about all I knew about them, but noted the Topps logo on the front and figured that it was one of those Topps-food issue partnerships that I knew so well growing up in the '70s and '80s.

 

Well, this is a '90s set, so it's got to be more complicated than that.

 

A week or two ago I claimed some more '97 Wheaties cards from the operator of the Baseball Cards Fan blog, who was offering them up through the great trading card giveaway thread on Bluesky. I figured I had 12 of the 30 cards in the set, I should do something already about the rest of them.

 

I didn't notice right away a difference between these cards and the ones I had already. I'm often not very observant.

 

But once I started entering these cards into TCDB, I figured it out. A couple of players in the set have two different cards and that caused me to realize that the cards I had just received featured Upper Deck logos, not Topps logos.

 

Then -- OK, this is the frustrating part for an OCD collector -- I realized that the Upper Deck cards are smaller than the Topps cards.

  

 Both in terms of height ...

 

 

And in terms of width.

 

OCD bells going off everywhere.

 

That led me to discover this was actually a 30-card cross-brand set featuring Topps, Upper Deck and Pinnacle. Each company's cards appeared on Wheaties boxes but on different kinds of Wheaties boxes.

 

The TCDB blurb on the set. Cards definitely vary in size! This is not the first time I've felt sorry for kids who grew up in the '90s. I guess this is what happens when competitors join together on a set.

 

So the Upper Deck cards I received came off boxes of Crispy Wheaties n' Raisins. Pinnacle seems like the odd brand out as I never heard of Honey Frosted Wheaties -- not that I was eating cereal in 1997.

 

Aside from the size of the cards, the Upper Deck cards differ slightly from Topps in that all the UD cards have orange borders, while the Topps cards vary with orange, blue and green borders.

 

But the sticking point now is storing this "set" in pages. The Topps Wheaties cards are an odd width that doesn't fit in a standard nine-pocket page. But they do fit neatly in an eight-pocket page with only a little extra space and that's where I've stored them for nine years.

 

The Upper Deck Wheaties cards are the same depth as a standard baseball card but much skinnier. So putting them in the same eight-pocket as the others isn't going to work. I'll have to mix-and-match pages, which is another OCD no-no.

 

I don't know the size of the Pinnacle Wheaties cards but I'm assuming they're like the Upper Deck cards. I bet if the cards weren't trimmed close to the borders with a wider cut then the UD cards could match up with the Topps cards, but I don't know what the box configurations looked like and whether that was even possible.

 

This set was Wheaties' first baseball card set in 45 years and while it's cool there were cards to cut off of cereal boxes again, the variations in shape does not inspire me to try to finish the set.

 

I guess this really is an oddball set.