The Baseball Card Blog

I give you 1968 Topps #38, Tony Pierce, with razor-sharp sides and corners, and I-swear-it's-original-gloss. It's well-centered on the front and the tid-bit of fantastical info on the back is incredible (Tony once struck out 5 batters in one inning at high school). But best of all, you'll go blind looking at it.

This particular piece of cardboard badly misaligned when it was time to hit the blue rollers in the printing process, resulting in an almost 3-D effect on the team name and missing ink in other areas. It all feels like a waste, too, since the photo is so boring (it looks like the photographer asked Tony to take his hat off and gaze stoically into the distance, like a tired farmer at the edge of a field). If only this had happened to a card featuring a more dynamically posed player... but this was 1968, so I guess that rules out Vicente Romo doing jazz hands (1970), or Dock Ellis thrusting the ball at the camera in an attempt to get the viewer as high as he was (1969).