I April Fools Pranked myself! (a rare baseball post)

I'm not a fan of pranks...or April Fool's Day. You won't find me pulling juvenile pranks or posting stupid fake stories on Facebook (or my blogs, for that matter). But this year, I fooled myself!

I worked a trade on the Trading Card Database with Bobzcards, and he needed something to fill up his end of the trade- I sent him more than 100 cards, and he only had 2 (or 8, depending on how you look at it) that I needed, which will be shown in the upcoming April trade recap later this month. So, I had this bright idea...or so I thought. The most derided Topps baseball design happens to be my favorite. I first saw it in the 1992-93 Topps Archives NBA set, in 1996, and I've thought it was a great design ever since.

That is the 1990 design. Of all the sets Topps has issued (of which I got to see them all thanks to Night Owl's countdown of last year) the 1990 set is hands down my favorite.

1990 Topps #544

I figured, this would be a great way for me to add some to my collection without having to actually pay for them. (yes, I realize that I did pay the shipping cost for my end of the trade, but let's not argue semantics). Bob has lots of baseball for trade, so this would work well. Or it would have...

But...when working out the details, I told Bob that he could fill out the rest of our trade with 1989 Topps.

When the package arrived I quickly realized my error when I looked into the package and saw the distinctive pink and black back design...not the all-yellow of 1990.

It seemed I had pranked myself!

The 1989 design is not bad, by any means- not the front, anyway- but it was not what I was expecting. It's my own dang fault! I was too confident in my (admittedly very little) knowledge of baseball cards to look up the set and make sure I had the right one I was typing out. All of the Topps flagships or very close to all of them are completely posted to the Database, so it's not like it would have been hard to figure out.

The good thing is, with my new(ish) outlook on collecting, that all the cards were new. (He sent me more than 75 of them). 24 of them were people not represented in my collection previously, getting me closer to the magic number of 10,000 different people in my collection. (Not that I'm going to stop there or anything) Surprisingly even with these cards baseball is only the 6th highest sport in my collection, and that's not counting non-sports.

I decided to scan 9 of the cards, which I will now show. No particular order, just the order they got scanned.

Now that's a mustache

I was quite surprised to see the high numbers, up to #792, which I now know is the last card in the set. (Santana, shown above). For you baseball collectors that's probably nothing too special but to me, that's novel. The largest NBA set is 659 cards, the largest NASCAR set only 340. Even the more wide-open world of Non-Sports, it's rare to see that high a number, with only one Star Wars set getting that high- and the numbering on that was continuous over 7 series from 1993-2010!

The back of the card is a rather unique design...I'm not sure I would have chosen pink and black together, but, I have to admit, it does work and is easy to read.

I may grow old, but someone named Rip Tutor...made me chuckle. (say it out loud)

And then...at the very end...a nasty kicker. My high powered fan blew one of the cards away. Things have a tendency of disappearing, when I drop them or whatever. I hope I can find it. There's no real place it could have gone where I won't, but that doesn't seem to mean anything. I've lost model parts and tools that were on my work area when I went down to eat lunch, come back and they are gone, and I have no pets or small children around that could have taken them. It's a mystery for sure, and I'm hoping the card didn't end up in that alternate dimension or wherever my missing model parts and tools are.

Overall, though, I am not unhappy that I now have these cards in my collection. I would probably have never gotten them otherwise, and once a card enters my collection, it stays there...even if it wasn't the cards I was expecting to find in my mailbox!

(If you're wondering what this has to do with April Fool's day, the cards arrived in the mail on 4/2. It was close enough for me to build a narrative around)