A Venerable Old Card Part 32

I have been eying a few of the new Gold Label cards that were released a few weeks back by Topps.  I am not going to buy a box of them, probably won't open a pack of them, but the single cards are rather nice in appearance.

This year's Gold Label is a rehash of a Topps product from the late 1990s and early 2000s.  The design is not quite 1998, but of designs of the original brand, that seems to be the closest to this year's cards.  All of the looking got me reminiscing about my old Gold Label cards which stashed deep in my closet of cards.

Shuffling through them I happened upon one of my greatest retail pulls of the late 1990s and this week's Venerable Old Card.  Let me first off say that I did not really like retail cards back in that era minus a few larger sets that I was trying to put together and needed to supplement from hobby boxes.  That being said, I bought two packs of Gold Label retail at the Cape Girardeau, Missouri Target store sometime during the fall of 1998.

The cards were card and this card was the best of the lot....

I am not sure that I noticed the card right away, but at some point on the third or fourth time flipping through the small stack of cards I noticed that the Gold Label logo in the top was red.  Gold Label has all sort of different variations with different background pictures and logo colors, etc.  So, the red logo?  Serial numbered out of 100...

I know some of you read that 100 number on the print run and are maybe somewhere between unimpressed to thinking about clicking over to another blog.  However, a print run of 100 was a big deal back in the late 1990s.  I am not sure what its modern equivalent would be, but these cards were tough.  Not only tough, but also really hard to pull out of retail packs.  I took a little bit of time to flip through some different websites to see if I could find the odds, but no luck.  

Besides being a cool card, I enjoyed watching Jeromy Burnitz play.  Sure, he was a Brewer and in the same division as the Cardinals.  He even burned the Cardinals a few times during his career, but he had one of the best swings from that era of baseball.  

His swing was really long, he struck out a lot, and hit a bunch of home runs.  The follow through was the best part of it.  I have a hard believing that MLB's YouTube channel has a limited selection of his videos.  I used this one, because the other is a walk off home run against Alan Benes (Cardinals Alan Benes).