1994 Topps

I like the '94 Topps set if for no other reason than it was the last one where gold foil stamping was not used as part of the base set design.  This was also the first year of the high glossy coating. You can tell this was likely the first year that The Topps Company started using a Mac for design and layout by the multiple vignette gradiations used in the home plate shaped border and the bottom crawl line. The "cursive" writing is a nice touch, ever though it is almost identical to '93 Upper Deck.

Topps also came up with a lot of clever designs for the subsets. The Future Star card with the computer chip background, the Draft Pick card with the scout's clipboard, and the Coming Attractions card with the movie screen motif were all well done and were far and away better than anything they had done with subsets in years past. The only drawback to these cards are the pathetic Tigers who graced them.

I don't think Fuduric ever sniffed the big leagues. JT was an injury bust whose biggest career highlight was striking out Ray Lankford in the 1997 All-Star game before being a part of the Juan Gonzalez trade. Bergman pretty much stunk it up everywhere he went, but Bautista had a nice little career as a 4th OF (batting .583 in the 2001 World Series for the D'Backs). Oh well, this would not be the first time that the future of the Tigers turned out to be lousy.....

The 1994 Topps Detroit Tigers:

19 Scott Livingstone

48 Tony Phillips

75 Alan Trammell

105 David Wells

133 Mark Leiter

162 Bob MacDonald

190 Cecil Fielder

228 Kirk Gibson

257 Chad Kreuter

285 Travis Fryman

313 Future Star: Justin Thompson

342 Danny Gladden

371 John Doherty

410 Lou Whitaker

438 Mike Henneman

448 1b Prospects: Shawn Wooten

467 Joe Boever

488 Eric Davis

495 Mickey Tettleton

523 Mike Moore

552 Bill Krueger

561 Skeeter Barnes

588 Rich Rowland

626 Chris Gomez

654 Bill Gullickson

682 Storm Davis

711 Greg Gohr

757 Draft Pick: Tony Fuduric

768 Coming Attractions: Danny Bautista and Sean Bergman

Topps made no changes to their approach to inserts in '94. The gold foil parallels and Black Gold inserts were the only ones issued. (Although they may have issued some in factory sets that year, but I don't know because I don't have any...)

Topps Black Gold

5 Cecil Fielder

6 Travis Fryman

The Traded set was short and sweet, which is surprising because Fleer's Update set had 8 players, with no Ingram card. 

30T Riccardo Ingram

32T Tim Belcher

89T Junior Felix