I was really excited earlier this year when Topps announced that they were putting out a set that was created with the owner of the Super 70s Sports Twitter account. The Twitter account is sort of a cross between sports and pop culture with a heavy 1970s lean. Sure, there is a little bit of 1960s and 1980s cross over in there from time to time, but the account generally does a good job of staying in its lane.
For example........
Brilliant.
I was hoping the set would be the Topps equivalent of the 2001 Upper Deck 1970s set. If you collected cards at the time that set was released, you know that's a high bar to meet. There were some really strong inserts, great names from the decade, and a solid autograph checklist. I thought Topps was up for the challenge of matching cards like this one from the Upper Deck set.....
It took awhile for the box to show up, but last week it appeared in my mailbox. I was excited to open the pack of cards. It's one of the few current 2020 products that I have opened this year.
The packaging inside the box was pretty nice.
Now that I mentioned the Twitter account and the packaging, I am roughly 50% of the way through the highlights for this product. The set has one major flaw. Maybe I am being picky, but I am going to go ahead and borrow a meme from Mad Man and one of my current favorite sayings at work.
Works great in 2020, usually more than once in a week.
So, here is the problem. Ohtani has nothing to do with the 1970s. He wasn't even born in the 1970s. Sandy Koufax did not pitch in the 1970s. In fact, he retired in the middle of the 1960s. It's not even like he pitched in the late 1960s. I am not scanning on my cards from the box, they are on my Twitter if you really need to see them, but there were a lot of other non-1970s players.
Not to keep harkening back the Upper Deck 1970s set either, but that product only had players from the 1970s, which is what made it a really great product. I'd like to think there is still a market for that type of product 20 years later. Has Topps looked around at who collects baseball cards nowadays? There are a lot of people who would eat up a set filled with players from the 1970s.
Here is the sad part.
The 1970s cards that are in the set are really well done. It's not like I am expecting a set of Hall of Famers. J.R. Richard and Dave Kingman are definitely more in line with what I thought would be in pack of cards. These are great cards. The 1970s themed insert cards are even better. I pulled three insert cards, one of which was an autograph, out of my box of 1970s Topps.
This card is a gem with Rich "Goose" Gossage wearing shorts for the White Sox.
Lou Brock wearing sunglasses. Yes, absolutely great 1970s card.
This Gorman Thomas card is also awesome. The mustache is magnificent, as is the long hair cover up his ears and the long side burns.
I understand that I am being a little hard here. There are truly some really great 1970s cards in this product. If had to go back and keep my $20 and not order this box, I probably would have still picked up a few singles on Ebay or COMC at some point. It's not a total disappointment, I just feel slightly let down.
The local card shop scene in Raleigh is pretty weak. There is a card shop that is attached to a gas station in one of the far northern suburbs and there is also one that has been dying shopping mall, but actually just moved to within two miles of my house. Neither are great for different reasons. I am not going to hold my breath that it's going to be anything great in a new location.
About a year ago, I was in the dying mall to pick up a pair of extra slim pants for my son. I had been sorting out some cards at the time, needed a 5,000 count box for storage, so I stopped into the card shop while I was there. To my surprise, they had out this huge table of old boxes of cards. Not really their thing. As you can imagine, the mall card shop's biggest fault is their pricing, which has always been ridiculously high. The prices on the boxes weren't terrible all things considered, but the Emotion XL box was marked at $30. A quick search of Ebay listings told me that I had found the rare mall card shop bargain. Shocking.
I bought it.
These were really cool cards back in the day, so I was pretty excited to open this box of cards. I started opening up the packs and put a bunch of the cards up on my once award winning, now neglected, Instagram page.
I ended up with the complete set, but it was much more of a mixed bag than I remembered it to be. At some point, I stopped posting pictures of the cards. Yes, I finished up the set. I put the completed set in a box and shoved them into my card closet. I liken this set to an old record or CD that you bought at another point in your life. It was great music at the time, but you can't make it through the whole thing anymore.
Like the first half of Pearl Jam's Ten album, or almost every Nas album after Illmatic.
So, let's take a look at the set. Here is the base card.
Honestly, I love the full color picture and the last name and team name on the front. The odd frame corners are a little bit unnecessary, but it's not like they are ruining the card. The descriptive word is what has not aged well on these cards. Yes, it would have been awesome to see something like "'Roider" or "Juiced Up" on a Brady Anderson card, but Driving isn't actually all that bad.
You will see bad in a minute. Hold that thought.
Even the pictures on the back of the card are nice. The little sentence about the player at the top of the card is pretty fair. The stat line is small, but kudos for mixing in things like AB/HR and OBP% in the mid 1990s. The card stock is nice too for the mid 1990s.
THESE ARE TERRIBLE
Let's get these cards out of the way first. I went through all 200 cards in the set and picked out 4 that seemed really bad in retrospect. For more examples, some I disagree with, check out this SB Nation article which likens this set to "Gas Station Cologne".
"The Heat"??? What does this even mean? Bichette has a 130 point split difference between his home and road slugging percentage. He hit almost 300 career home runs, but less than 100 of them came on the road. I would have gone with something like "Altitude" or "Low Humidity" for his card.
Will Clark was a pretty intense guy, but this is just stupid. Couldn't we just get a card that says "Intense", or maybe someone could have used a thesaurus and found a synonym for the word intense. Personally, I would have done something to reference his tradition of drinking a post game beer.
Player nicknames aren't emotions. Dumb. This is post White Sox, so I would have gone with "Regressing" or maybe "Declining".
What's dumber than using a player nickname?
Using a state nickname. Luckily no Cardinals players have the phrase "ShowMe" stamped on the front of their cards.
THESE ARE NOT SO TERRIBLE
So, if you clicked on the link to the SB Nation article above, I am going to go against some of the cards that they ripped on in their write up of the Emotion set. I am not a SB Nation reader, so I was curious about the age of the author, considering he spent a large chunk of the article ripping the Cal Ripken card. We were born within a few years of each other, so I am going to dismiss age as a factor in his writing and just say it's ignorance in an otherwise humorous article.
I will give an equally long rant.
The word on the Cal Ripken word is "Class". I am not a Cal Ripken person and I rarely write anything about him on this blog. I agree with the SB Nation article's assertion that MLB went overboard with Cal Ripken during the mid 1990s. However, the obsession with Ripken was somewhat warranted and necessary.
Let's review:
1. Fans were irked with both the players and owners after the strike in 1994. Many of the angry fans had promised to stay away from the game. Baseball is the worst professional sport at selling its superstar players, but they went big on them when the games resumed in 1995 for once, Ripken was included for an important reason.
2. Ripken's run at Lou Gehrig's consecutive game streak was the first important event that came up after the strike ended. I am sure that if there was a player closing in on 3,000 hits, 500 home runs, or 300 wins, that would have been blown up too.
3. Playing more than 2,000 consecutive games is a legitimately impressive record. You have to be good enough to start. Good enough to maintain your starting job over other players. Healthy enough not to get injured over a 16 year period of time. It's part talent and part luck, but it's not a record anyone is going to touch anytime soon.
4. Tell me something bad that Cal Ripken did as a person while he was playing baseball? ((You can't))
With that being said, as a person who watched a lot of baseball in the 1990s, it's not a stretch to say that Ripken was an important part of bringing disgruntled fans back to the game. Yes, he was a good player. Yes he was classy. Ripken chasing Lou Gehrig during the 1995 season was an important hook that soothed a lot of bad feelings.
Some other good cards.
I am going to ignore the word "Precision", and instead focus on the fact that McGwire has a mullet in this picture. Any McGwire card from the mid 1990s where he has a mullet is an instant winner in my book. In fact, I am going to add that to my little note pad of future post ideas. McGwire mullet cards.
Manny Ramirez always had a great looking swing. I love the look on his face in this card along with the word "Punishing" that is attached to his card. I know he's a bit of a lightning rod, so I am not sure if/when he will get into the Hall. Still a great player though.
I saw this interview a few years back where someone was talking to Dennis Eckersley. They brought up blown saves and I instantly thought he was going to start talking about the Kirk Gibson home run in the World Series. Instead, he starts talking about this Manny Ramirez home run from 1995. Eckersley threw him a fastball on the inside corner, catcher is not moving his glove in the clip, and Manny hit the ball halfway up the bleachers in Jacobs Field.
Eckersley is smiling after the home run and says "Wow".
Last one for the not so terrible section of this post.
This card also gets torn apart on the SB Nation article, but considering Gwynn was one of the first players to use video to improve his hitting, I think it is a pretty fitting label. Gwynn is a Hall of Famer based on his statistics, but he's also a very important innovator. Where would baseball be today without him watching video? I am sure someone else would have done the same thing at some point, but Gwynn turned video into a popular practice.
The Best Cardinals Card
I will go with a former player instead. The Cardinals cards are decent, but none of them really stood out. However, you don't get many relief pitchers wearing batting helmets on baseball cards. Yet, here we are with 1986 National League Rookie of the Year Todd Worrell.
The Todd Worrell card is also ripped apart in the SB Nation article, but I actually like this card as a Cardinals fan who knows something about his background. He went to tiny little Biola College, which is apparently in the middle of Los Angeles and was founded by some Presbyterian pastor back in the early 1900s. It's not an athletic powerhouse, but a Cardinals scout went to one of their games while in town to watch another player. Worrell played outfield and catcher for the team, but occasionally pitched, mainly as a long reliever. He threw in the mid 90s as a college position player who didn't really work with a pitching coach.
Obviously, Worrell did not bat often as a back of the game reliever, but he did register a triple as one of his two Major League hits. I am sure that players like Worrell, who have experience as a position player, take batting practice every so often.
The back of the card has the more standard pitcher photos. I like the one in the background with him finishing his pitch. Worrell was really tall and had this great downward motion with a low finish at the end of his delivery.
It's not as cool as the Bob Gibson follow through, but I always thought Worrell looked different. Max Scherzer does something really similar to this too.
Best Durham Bulls Player
I am going to ignore the word "Cool" and just focus on the fact that this card has a sweet photo of Braves first baseman Fred McGriff. He had not actually been on the Durham Bulls at this point in his career. He did not appear on the Bulls until the end of his career while trying to work his way back up to the Majors with the Rays in 2004.
McGriff ended up making to Tampa.
That's cool.
His career was done by the middle of July in 2004.
That's not cool.
Best Non-Cardinal/Non-Durham Bull
in 1995, what was the best reason to buy some Emotion XL cards? Before Strasburg, Bryce Harper, Kris Bryant, Wander Franco, and whatever other uber prospects who were overvalued by baseball card collectors, there was Hideo Nomo. People were crazy for his cards. Non-mania might have been worse to some degree because he was actually pitching in the Majors at the same time people were going crazy over his cards. I didn't go out of my way to find them, but I still ended up with a few from random sets.
The "Twisting" tag seems a little weak, maybe "Effectively Wild" would have been better. I like the picture on the front. It gives you a little insight into Nomo's pitching motion, but the back is really good.
Love the picture on the left with Nomo's back. That's not a side view, that's likely from behind the plate.
I don't love the description of Nomo's throwing motion as herky jerky. He paused at two different spots during his delivery. Lots of pitchers have used a pause mid wind-up to throw off the timing of hitters. Currently, both Johnny Cueto and Marcus Stroman use a pause. I believe Marichal used one back in the day.
How Does It Compare?
I love the photos. I like Emotion brand concept on some of the cards, but others do not work for various reasons. Some of the cards did not age well, others were just not very well thought out, which goes with the gist of the SB Nation article, if you read it.
Good card stock and photos count for something, but not enough to crack the top half of the sets that I have featured on my Set Appreciation Posts.
This is going to be a pretty quick post. I am excited to be here for my third post of the month! I hope this isn't my last post of 2020, but it seems like a real possibility. My quest to find older Durham Bulls cards skewed off course a few weeks back when I found a few really nice Cardinals cards for sale on Facebook. All the cards are from 1964 Topps sets, some of the players are pictured as Cardinals, some are not.
Let's start out with the 1960s Cardinals players who are pictured on other teams. Both of these cards come from the 1964 Topps Pop-Ups.
First up is long time Reds outfielder Vada Pinson. He only played on the Cardinals in 1969 after being traded to the team for Bobby Tolan. Pinson filled the hole in right field for the Cardinals after Roger Maris retired from baseball at the end of the 1968 season. He was older at this point and had began to decline, so he was not the extra base machine he was for the Reds throughout the late 1950s and 1960s. Pinson finished in the top 10 in doubles and triples eight times during his first 10 years, while hitting more than 20 home runs 6 times.
Not a Hall of Famer, but a really good player from his era.
Speaking of Hall of Famers, I also picked up a Topps Stand-Up of Orlando Cepeda. He was a really good player while he was on the Cardinals, winning the National League MVP during the 1967 season. That was after spending a decade being paired with Willie Mays in the middle of the Giants line-up. I really like the picture on this card. It took me a few minutes to figure out what was happening here, but I believe he is throwing ground balls warming up the other infielders before an inning, or taking infield practice before a game. Not something you see very often on a baseball card.
One more Topps Stand-Up.
Former Duke basketball player Dick Groat.
This is one of the worst airbrushed card of all-time. The STL on the hat is something. Clearly an old Pirates picture that was taken while he was wearing one of the sleeveless vest style uniforms like this......
Love that they got the gold stripes on the socks red and blue, the sleeves on his shirt red, but then left the gold and black piping around the arm holes and neck line of the vest. Regardless, good player for the Cardinals and an important member of the 1964 World Series winning team.
Last card, the best one in this post. I don't need many words for this card.
This is a 1964 Topps Giants Bob Gibson. Great looking card of the Hall of Fame pitcher. Love that light shade of gray the 1960s Cardinals had on their road uniforms.
Hak Ju Lee was one of my favorite Durham Bulls players when I first started writing on this blog. He was a great defensive shortstop with some potential on offense. In 2013, he was the best player in the International League for the first half of April. Hak Ju Lee played his usual great defense while hitting .422 with a .600 slugging percentage. It was like a combination of Ted Williams and Ozzie Smith.
Then Travis Ishikawa slid into him at second base and tore up his knee.
It happens.
Former first overall draft pick Tim Beckham repleaced Hak Ju Lee while he was out with the knee injury. Beckham played well during his first year in Durham and helped spark the team to an International League Championship providing fans with one of the most memorable base running plays of the 2013 season.
Hak Ju Lee was never quite the same when he returned to the Bulls. He got some at-bats, but was never promoted to the Rays. Lee became a fan favorite of sorts around Durham when he returned. It's easy to love a scrappy middle infielder who is trying to overcome a major injury and make it to the Majors. I really enjoyed collecting his cards and picked up quite a few nice ones back in the day.
His time with the Rays ran out and Hak Ju Lee became a Minor League free agent. Lee signed with the Giants before 2016 season and managed to play part of the season for their Triple A team. Then, he just disappeared.
Seriously.
I was looking for him, but he was nowhere to be found.
Well, it turns out that Hak Ju Lee went home to Korea. He sat out a few years, but reappeared in 2019 with the Samsung Lions. He's pretty popular, appearing in a video on YouTube that refers to him as the religious sect leader of the team.
I love Hak Ju Lee too, but maybe something was lost in the translation there. Maybe there's not.
Anyway, way back at the start of the pandemic, I made a list of some Durham Bulls cards that I would like to track down for my collection. The list included a few Hak Ju Lee cards. I was able to find one of them a few weeks back.
This card is from the 2013 Topps Heritage Minors set.
Lee has several different cards in the 2013 Minor League set including a Bazooka insert and two relic cards. With the addition of this black parallel, I have the complete run of Hak Ju Lee cards outside of the printing plates. I don't always love the parallel cards in the early Heritage Minors set, but this is a good looking card.
Here is the back of the card.
The serial number is in the bottom left corner, only 96 copies of this card produced. The back of the card also mentions his .422 average for the first 15 games of the season in 2013 with the Bulls.
I have been working on a little project for the past two months trying to collect all of the former Durham Bulls players who appear in the 1975 Topps Mini Set. I know that I am no longer a regular poster, but I have gotten really close to the end of that set and will be posted an update soon.
In the meantime, I have started tracking down some other 1960s and 1970s Durham Bulls players. I was able to find a pretty nice lot of Mickey Lolich cards from the 1970s a few weeks back. The long-time Tigers pitcher actually started his professional career with the Bulls during the summer of 1959. He also played in Durham at different points of the 1960 and 1961 seasons.
A quick rundown on my newest cards.
First up is a 1972 Topps League Leaders card. Lolich had a lot of strikeouts during his career, but only managed to lead the league once. That was during the 1971 season when he fanned a total of 308 batters. Kind of an odd quirk for a pitcher who ended up with nearly 3,000 strikeouts during his career.
Here is the list of American League Strikeout Leaders. Some pretty good names on this list. A few Hall of Famers. Pat Dobson is another former Durham Bulls player on this list. I have posted a few of his cards from time to time. I will have a few more coming up at some point in the near future.
Next up is a 1973 Topps card. This is a really boring card. There isn't even anything interesting in the background of the card. Looks like a back field at Spring Training.
This is my second copy of this 1976 Topps Lolich card. Slight crease at the top and some soft corners, but it probably helped keep down the prices on this group of cards. I love the side view of Lolich pitching and how close his knee is to the mound in the photograph. Very unique, but not a one off thing that only happened when the photograph took the picture.
Just the way he threw the ball.
Second card Lolich card from the 1976 Topps set....
I have mentioned this on previous posts, but Lolich retired as the all-time strikeout leader for left-handed pitchers. Carlton passed him in the early 1980s, but he still held the American League record until 2017 when C.C. Sabathia passed him. Lolich is 20th all-time in Ks sandwiched in between Jim Bunning and Mike Mussina. When he retired, he was inside of the top 10.
Here is the list when Lolich passed Warren Spahn for the record in 1975. Lolich is currently fourth all-time behind Sabathia, Steve Carlton, and Randy Johnson. Clayton Kershaw is only 300 strikeouts behind Lolich, so he will be bumped down to fifth within the next two years.
Last card.
Also a 1976 Topps card, but this time from the Traded set. Topps has not improved their airbrushing much over the years. Maybe a little bit more pixelated nowadays, but just as bad. Hey, they did a pretty good job on the blue pinstripes. Lolich was traded to the Mets for Rusty Staub, another former Durham Bulls player. It was actually the second time that Rusty Staub was traded for another former Durham Bulls player, but more on that a different day.
More 1970s Bulls later this week, or next week. Let's just hope I make another post this year.
Well, there was a lot of really weird stuff going on with this set. Let's check out a base card, which kicks off the weirdness of this set. Right off the bat, the first card seems a little bit off, if you collected Pacific cards around this time.
Paramount Weird Fact #1- No Garrett Anderson? What about Darin Erstad?
Pacific sets were always set up with the teams arranged alphabetically by the city/state name of the team, with the players organized alphabetically by last name within the team set. The Anaheim Angels were always the first team. How many late 1990s or early 2000s Pacific sets had either Garrett Anderson or Darin Erstad as card #1?
The answer is almost all of them.
Pacific put out 12 different baseball card products in 2000. Nine of the sets had either Anderson or Erstad as card #1. Pacific Prism had Erstad, no Garrett Anderson card, but they included Jeff DeVanon (you may not know him for good reason) who had the first card. I rolled my eyes too. Vanguard had Troy Glaus as the first card, but only two Angels cards in the set.
Same with the 1998 and 1999 Pacific cards, only Jim Edmonds was still on the team, and before Erstad alphabetically.
Beyond Jeff DeVanon and Troy Glaus, there was also this Adam Kennedy card in the 2000 Pacific Paramount Update set, which was the first card in the Paramount Update set.
Weird Paramount Fact #2 - The set was sold through the J.C. Penny Christmas catalog and limited to a print run of just 12,500. I certainly did not get this set from the J.C. Penny Christmas catalog. Instead, I got it from a local card shop in St. Louis whose owner ordered the sets for his store out of the J.C. Penny Christmas catalog, because it was loaded with Cardinals players.
Here are a few.
Here are three of them. There is another Cardinals card later in the post.
Gene Stechschulte is actually a pretty interesting player. He did not have a very long career, playing three seasons all with the Cardinals in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a middle reliever. I believe he had some arm or shoulder injuries. What he is really famous for was hitting a home run in his first at-bat on the first pitch he saw.
The Diamondbacks were winning this game 15-1 when Stechschulte hit the home run. LaRussa put him into the game to pinch hit for the pitcher Mike James. Stechschulte never threw a pitch in this game, but the Cardinals did use Bobby Bonilla for the ninth.
Weird Paramount Fact #3 - I own two copies of this set. I bought one back in 2000, but also ended up with one a few years ago when a co-worker gave me some of his old baseball cards. Pacific was a solid card manufacturer. I cannot remember them ever have major issues with quality control. However, for some reason there are odd sticker pieces that are attached to random cards in both my copies of the set.
Again, weird for Pacific to have quality control issues.
What is even going on here?
The green striped piece on the Bret Boone card actually looks the same/similar to the bottom border of the card. Only it's clearly a sticker if you could be here to touch it yourself. Why is there a giant white sticker over Mike Lamb's head? We will never know.
If there were actually any rookie cards worth owning in this set, there were would likely be tons of annoying "Ebay 1/1" listing with random stickers all over the cards.
Weird Paramount Fact #4- There are 100 cards on the checklist, but I swear at least 50 of the players in this set were not traded or signed as free agents during the year. Lots of cards like......
.....Chipper Jones on the Braves.
There is also a Derek Jeter on the Yankees, Tony Gwynn on the Padres, Cal Ripken on the Orioles, Barry Bonds on the Giants (free agent signing in 1993), Scott Rolen on the Phillies (traded in the future), Mark McGwire on the Cardinals (traded 3 years earlier), and Mike Piazza on the Mets (traded two years earlier).
It feels like someone at Pacific said. "Lets make an Update set!". A bunch of people sat down and started making a checklist.
"Who got traded or signed as a free agent in 2000? Ken Griffey, Jim Edmonds, and Juan Gonzalez."
They probably wrote down a few players who were rookies, a few free agent signings, and they were still 70 cards short of a set.
"Meh, let's throw in an ARod card."
This has to be the all-time record holder for traded/update set with the most players who were never traded, nor signed as a free agent during the calendar year.
Weird, But It's Just The Uniform
One of the best parts of getting out an old update set is looking through the cards to find players you know, on teams you don't remember they were on. Like all old update sets, I found two players who were in unusual places in 2000.
Rickey Henderson started to
the 2000 season with the Mets, but was released and signed with the
Mariners in the middle of the season. He was 41, played 92 games, and
managed to steal 31 bases. Not bad. I actually kind of remember him being on the Mariners, but it's not like I stayed up and watched a lot of Mariners games. He was there, I did not watch very often.
Nomo on the Tigers looks a little strange too. I always think of him as a Dodger, but he played a lot of other places in between his two stints in LA. I remembered the Mets and Brewers, but I went and looked him up on Baseball Reference. The Dodgers traded him to the Mets in 1998, and he went back to the Dodgers in 2001. In between he appeared, or was on the roster of the Mets, Cubs, Brewers, Phillies, Tigers, and Red Sox.
Nomo threw a no-hitter on the Red Sox?
Best Cardinals Player Who Deserved To Be In A Traded Set
Jim Edmonds.
Edmonds was traded to the Cardinals during Spring Training of 2000. He was scheduled to be a free agent at the end of the season. The late 1990s/early 2000s Cardinals were good at trading for pending free agents and getting them to sign before they hit the market. They did this same thing with McGwire and Scott Rolen.
Best Durham Bulls Player Who Deserved To Be In A Traded Set
I am going to put two different Bulls players in this section. I will go with one Minor Leaguer who was promoted to the Majors, along with one Major League who changed teams. I will do the Major Leaguer first.
Klesko appeared for the 1990 Durham Bulls. After a long run with the Braves, Klesko was traded to the Padres for Reggie Sanders and Wally Joyner. Love the facial hair. I believe this was a homecoming of sorts for Klesko, who spent almost all of the second half of his career with the Padres. Not a Hall of Famer, but a very good hitter.
The former Durham Bulls player who appeared in the set as a Minor League call up was Jeff Sparks.
He did not have a really long Major League career. He only pitched in 23 games between the 1999 and 2000 seasons. According to his Wikipedia page, his career highlight was a save against the Yankees at the end of the 1999 season. His Wikipedia page says that he makes YouTube videos with former Dodgers reliever Mike Marshall.
It's true.
The Bulls get a mention on the back of the Jeff Sparks card.
Best Player(s) Who Deserved To Be In A Traded Set
I decided to balance this section with a traded/free agent player and a young player who got called up during the 2000 season. Veteran player first.
Seemed like an easy answer.
The rookie card. Perhaps the only decent rookie card in the entire set.
Two time Cy Young Award winner in the American League. His career was really shortened by injuries, but he was Hall of Fame quality when he wasn't hanging out on the disabled list. He almost had that no-hitter the one time.
How Does It Compare?
The design isn't great. I am not sure all of the weird and quirky aspects of the set are really all that positive. While I love many things about Pacific Baseball Cards from this era, this is not one of their better efforts. Where are the parallels? Where are the interesting die-cut cards? Paramount Update will occupy the 9th spot for the moment.
Better set next week. I will go with something a little older too.
