There was recently some talk on Twitter of an eBay seller with a nice selection of 1992 Topps cards with no names on the front. I thought the cards looked great.. a fresh spin on an old classic. Just a simple, elegant frame around a photo. They were just a buck each plus flat $3 shipping, so I grabbed a few guys I collect. If you don't recognize him out of his Red Sox uni, that's Dwight Evans above.
Caminiti, Joyner, Templeton, and Maas here. What these cards are are Gold parallels missing the gold foil. Turns out this is the same seller from whom I bought a few proof cards back in 2017.. she must have either worked at Topps in the 90s (or perhaps at the print shop Topps used?) or have a close associate who did. She has thousands of backdoored stuff like this in her eBay store. (In fact, I just placed another order of stuff from her while working on this post!)
They have regular backs. You can tell they're Gold parallels by the logo in the background of the stats box.
While I'm talking about NNOF cards, I figured I'd include a couple others I've got, such as this 2014 Bowman Draft card of Gavin LaValley that's missing the foil, and therefore the name. Nice unofficial variation for that rainbow.
Of course the best known example of a no-name error is the 1990 Topps Frank Thomas. I'd love to pick one up someday when I've got 4-figures to burn on a baseball card, but for now I'm content with official reprints. These are both from 2010 Topps.
One is the standard Cards Your Mom Threw Out insert, and the other is the more scarce original back reprint. The latter is probably my favorite reprint in my collection... love it!
That's it for today. Thanks for swinging by.
Hahaha I think we all bought a couple of foil-less cards from her this week.
ReplyDeleteThose Frank Thomas reprints though are interesting in that they don't actually reproduce what happened on the card. Rather they're the regular 1990 Topps reprinted with the name erased. Tjhe actual story on the Thomas is that the black plate got some crud on it so a a bunch of cards didn't get black ink. The keyline around the name plate as well as the left border is also missing on the actual card and other collectors have figured out which other cards are also missing part of their black plate and represent the same error (actually a printing screwup) as the Thomas.
That NNOF Thomas is a white whale for a lot of his card collectors... including me. One day... when I win the lottery.
ReplyDeleteI hope to someday get a Thomas as well.
ReplyDeleteThat Caminiti tho!!!
ReplyDeleteGreat feed back thank you
ReplyDelete