Front Design: Cards are designed to resemble hand-made photo plaques. The photo appears with a white border on a woodgrain background; a gold plate at the bottom contains the player's name, position, and team.
Back Design: The horizontal backs contain the player's vitals and minor league statistics on a peach background. The card number appears in the upper-left corner, and is numbered as part of a master set. Note: as Jason points out in the comments below, my card back is different from the team set by essentially two things: the additional card number in the lower right, and the black border.
Parallels and Similars: All 1990 ProCards team sets follow this design.
Distribution: Cards were distributed through dealers, the team, and the manufacturer.
Thoughts: I remember making photo plaques like that at camp or in boy scouts. You'd cut out a photograph, glue it on a piece of stained wood, and cover it with varnish. Maybe you'd use a drawing, make your own nameplate, put something like "Happy Mother's Day!" in cheap marker, and you'd have a gift ready to go! If the wood color didn't remind me of a 1970s station wagon, and the borders weren't white, I would enjoy this design a good bit. The backs are plain, though I always appreciate minor league statistics. There is plenty of room for a write-up, but I suppose when you're a company printing over 1300 different cards each for two different sets, with players moving up and down daily, a biography can be tough to write and out of date before it's even printed.
Additional Images: card back:
This is another case of the back of the card being from the 1990 CMC Pre-Rookie set, rather than the actual team set card. In 1990, CMC bought the rights to print ProCards from 1990 to cover the A & AA players in their 880 card set. While most of the cards feature the same photos on the front (the Frank Thomas being the notable exception), on the backs the main difference is the added card number inset on the lower right corner. CMC add those for it's 880-card set. Some had the CMC 1990, some only had the number, but the ProCards team set issues did not have that, and also lacked the super glossy finish on the fronts.
ReplyDeleteHere's a link to the back of Dann Howitt's card from the 1990 Tacoma Tigers team set:
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/VE2GYHaL1j3t9wG9VsUGuA
Thanks again, Jason!
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