Throwback Month: Pacific Online

This set was the mother of all Pacific sets.  It was 800 cards, I know there are bigger, but by Pacific standards this was as big as it got.  The base Pacific set was usually a pretty decent size, 500 cards or so, but the majority of their sets in their late 90s heyday were smaller 100 and 200 card sets.  The set had a Pacific type of feel from the way the cards were ordered (Angels first) to the design, which looked like it could have been a Pacific base set with a few modifications.

Each card featured two URLs on the top of the card, hence the name Pacific Online, which linked the card to the players page with the MLB Players Association and also with the team page.  Had to put a Devil Ray in this post too.  There were variations within the set too which made it a little bit harder to put together.  There are gold cards, like Wade Boggs above, which were placed one per pack.  There were also silver cards, but those had variations too.

This card features Bagwell fielding, but his regular card in the set featured him batting.  There is no consistency to the variations.  Some are head shots, as was the case in the regular Pacific set, others were changes in jersey colors.  The variation in the variation makes this a tricky set to compile.  There are several different sites which offer checklists, but there is disagreement in some cases as to which card is the variation.  I just picked up both copies.  Problem solved.  

There are also team checklist cards which was a hallmark of almost all Pacific sets from that era.  While many of the checklists were seeded as short-prints, and could be difficult to run across, the Pacific Online checklists were just simply short-printed cards.