Friday, October 10, 2008

1988 Score



I still remember the day I walked into Grand City and saw these cards. (Ok, maybe not the day, or even the month for that matter, but the year most defintely....) There was a new player in town and his name was Score! There was an end cap full of these rack packs. (Did Score ever release anything else?) I quickly shuffled through the packs to find as many as I could that had a Tiger on the top or bottom. (Yet somehow I am missing three cards, despite buying a factory set for $3 once upon a time.)

Anyway, Score was a welcome addition at first to the baseball card scene in 1988. All of the cards had action shots. The design was as elegant as it gets. But this set was not without its problems. (You didn't really think I wouldn't bring them up, did you?)


Problem #1. The Borders. There was no rhyme or reason to this madness. Purple, Green , Red, whatever. I could have lived with the multitude of colors, if they fit with a certain team's colors. But some of these are just an awful marriage (see Thurmond, Mark...)


Problem #2. The Cropping. Someone up there at Score decided that it was far more important to get the entire bat in the photo rather than the player. (No biggie, my Granny loved to take pictures of people's feet....)




Problem #3. The recycled card. Now I don't blame Score too much for this. But the same super star shortstops card, in the same year, was a little much. (But hey, who can bitch about too many Alan Trammell cards?)

The 1988 Score Detroit Tigers:
15 Matt Nokes
37 Alan Trammell
56 Lou Whitaker
75 Darrell Evans
119 Chet Lemon
138 Larry Herndon
156 Mike Heath
171 Pat Sheridan
199 John Grubb
217 Dave Bergman
233 Tom Brookens
272 Jim Morrison
382 Mark Thurmond
445 Bill Madlock
461 Dan Petry
471 Eric King
490 Frank Tanana
507 Willie Hernandez
520 Mike Henneman
525 Kirk Gibson
538 Walt Terrell
545 Jack Morris
549 Jeff Robinson
571 Jim Walewander
610 Doyle Alexander
648 Rookie Sluggers Matt Nokes
651 Super Shortstops Alan Trammell

There was nothing new in the 1988 Score Rookie and Traded set that you couldn't get elsewhere.
13T Luis Salazar
17T Ray Knight
38T Gary Pettis
79T Don Heinkel


All in all, this was a nice refreshing set in 1988. But before I go.....I just have one big issue with this set. If you think there were too many 1988 Donruss cards produced, I'm here to say that for every 1988 Donruss Mike Henneman, there are approximately 200,000,000 Score Hennemans. Should our sun ever start to go out, it would take nothing more than to box up all the 1988 Score cards in existence and rocket them into space to ignite that bad boy for another 6 billion years. Or 6,000 years, whatever you like....

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I like how the white border line goes right through Dave Bergman's crotch. It's like the white line is engaged in a struggle to remove Dave Bergman's crotch from the baseball card.

lookjona said...

There is nothing I can add here...mainly because Score didn't make any other cards in 1988.