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....