On looking through my 1987s I found some that looked like contenders too. The gold bordered cards featuring nice plays (like the one pictured at the top of this post) seem to have a lot of them. This regular card of Nippon Ham`s Tsuno also seems a bit fishy (its pretty blurry)
I find this laziness a bit of an odd anomily in Calbee history. Even the early sets from the 1970s generally had great in action photography that put most contemporary American cards from the Topps sets to shame. Even the 1987 and 1988 sets have a lot of great photography, like my favorite ever Warren Cromartie card (from the 87 set), and yet somehow these horrible looking pictures managed to find their way in. Go figure. At least it makes for an interesting piece of card history!
There's a bit of hiragana(?) text in the lower right corner of each of the gold bordered cards with the "TV screen shot" photos. The other gold bordered cards I have from 1987 both don't have this text (they have a little trophy instead I think) and have "normal" photos on them. Is it possible this is some sort of odd subset?
ReplyDeleteOh, thats a good point. They all say something like `fine play` or `rare play` on them (it is different on each card, but the katakana on all of the ones with the fishy photos says `play`). They must have been images of famous plays during the season which they couldn`t get photos of other than by taking screenshots of video of the play. Interesting.
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