Miscut.

    With all the talk about scissors and cutting your own cards, what happens when the professionals go wrong?  I think when we open a pack of cards, we all have the expectation of perfection or, at the very least, competency.  I think we have all run into a miscut card at one point or another.  Lucky for you, I collect these kinds of cards (so you don't have to).  As I have said many many times before, I love oddball cards, and not just the kind put out by Mr. Turkey or Kahn's Franks.  I also really love the one-of-a-kind gems that can only be created by a great lapse in quality control.

Here are some recent examples:

Pity, that was the first card I saw of Junior in a White Sox uniform.  I'm not sure if that 2007 Kotchman is miscut or just misprint, but if you look, you'll notice how terribly askew the foil is applied on that card.  I bought a whole box of those 2005 Playoff Prestige cards, imagine my joy and horror that for six straight packs, I got a wonderfully miscut card amongst my normal cards.  I especially like the color chart on the side of the Furcal in the upper right.  Let's look at the backs too...

The test pattern is also on the back.  You can see much better how terribly miscut those Playoff cards are, if you just saw the fronts, if you didn't know any better, you might think that askew look was part of the set.

There's more...oh boy is there more...

Once again, Rafael Furcal is prominently featured.  It is quite disappointing, at least to most people, to get a miscut card in a high end product like Gold Label.  Not for me.  I am pretty sure that card was the highlight of that box for me.  Those Bowman Chrome cards on top came in the same pack; considering there were only three cards per pack, that is quite the quality control issue.  Somehow some misprint cards wandered into my miscut pages.  OK, lets look at those real quick.  Those 2005 Bowman gold parallels might, at quick glance, seem fine.  Then, on second glance, you see Bartolo Colon's signature coming out of Shannon Stewart's head - a little creepy.  Also on there is a Hideki Irabu rookie and a Nefti Perez sans foil on the front.  You would think there would be more missing foil cards with the proliferation its use in the last decade or so, but I haven't seen as many in my day as I would imagine I should.

We might as well look at the backs of all these...

You can plainly see that it is Preston Wilson that is the conjoined twin of that Rafael Furcal.  Outstanding.

Some miscuts are more extreme than others...

That Shea Hillenbrand is barely miscut.  It is almost just really really off-center.  But, I determined it to be just miscut enough to join the pages.  Luckily, a few much better examples are prevalent on this page.  Those Gooden and Ripken cards have been part of this collection since I pulled them back in the 80's and they are wonderful.  That Dave Cochrane is also a favorite.  The "No Ink Additives Allowed!!!" is pure gold.  The odd warning and extra exclamation points make it almost surreal.  I pulled that card from a 1993 Ultra pack.  Also shown are some 1993 Ultra misprinted foil cards. 

On the back...

...you can see even more warnings on that Cochrane card (I wonder how many more there were on those Ultra cards?) and you can also see that it is Dave Schmidt that is the partner of that Dwight Gooden card.  Or is it Dwight Gooden who is the partner of the Dave Schmidt card?

We have a few more minor modern misprints and miscuts on this page.  My favorite is the early Upper Deck cards with extra and misplaced holograms.  Perhaps someone was trying to counterfeit those Paul Gibson and Torey Lovullo cards? Oh the humanity...

But wait?  What else is on this page?  Could it be miscut 1975 minis?  Indeed it is.  I have seen many of these over the years, I guess quality control was not high on the list of priorities for a test issue, and I kept a few for my collection.  The Al Oliver is cut almost so you can see how the set would have looked had the team name been on the bottom rather than the top. 

The backs...

...show more of the same.  That Higginson card is a separate card from the Sandberg card.  The Sandberg back is normal and the Higginson front is normal, so I display them back to back.  Same with the misprinted and miscut Zane Smith up there, it is a matching pair with the Dunston on the front.

Let's dive into some vintage miscuts...

...the 1975 Topps are probably my favorite for miscuts.  All the colors make for some very interesting pieces of modern card art.  Here you have a fine mishmash of horizontal and vertical; some extreme and some subtle. 

The backs of these...

...aren't quite as interesting as the fronts, to say the least.

Here are some more old school Topps miscuts:

That 1979 Garvey is a double print.  I wonder if the card next to it is also Garvey...alas, it is not quite over far enough to see.  I love the little stars on the borders of the miscut Grimsley Traded card there.  You see these on full sheets and I guess they were part of either the guide for the cutting machine or perhaps part of the printing process.  Alas, I don't know enough about the industry to know for sure.  I wonder why they never put rows of stars on the actual cards, they look kinda boss...

Backs...

...meh. Moving on.

You want 1973's?  We got 1973's.  I am not sure where I got so many miscut 1973 Topps cards, but I have a ton of them.  I have seen a ton of them.  I know 1973 was the first year they did a majority of the set in one series, I wonder if one has anything to do with the other?

Quick aside:  I once convinced a bunch of kids that Johnny Jeter was Derek Jeter's dad.  This was 1997 or 1998, before the internet was ubiquitous and could diffuse such a ruse.  I imagine there was a rush on his cards at local card shops for a week or so before the truth was revealed.  I don't know if I like messing with kids or Yankees fans more.

Backs...

...the backs show that the dotted lines are the edges of the sheet.  I prefer the stars.

1972 was not much better that 1973.  I have seen all form of miscut and misprinted 1972 cards. 

Hmmmm...wait, I think it is dotted lines on the bottom, stars on the sides.  Perhaps that is how the printer knew which end of the sheet was up?  I just noticed that for the first time...it all makes sense now. I am both supremely observant and an idiot.  A Cincinnati Reds fan once offered me $20 for that Bench miscut.  How do you price something that is unique, especially...

...since the back reveals it is attached to the boyhood photo of Bud Harrelson.  No way that card is ever leaving my collection.

Wow, and now some 1970 and 1971 Topps.  The early 70's were pretty terrible for quality control.

Nothing extreme in these cards, just some generally off center cards, all about the same amount.  I guess you can deduce that every once in a while, the sheets missed the cutter by about half an inch.

Wow, those 1970 cards sure look 100x brighter next to those 1971 backs.

Here is another favorite.  That 1968 Bernie Allen might be the worst diamond cut card I have ever seen.  Right behind it is that 1968 Steve Blass.  That Ken Berry is miscut and woefully out of register.  I have seen a bunch of 1968 Topps cards that are out of register (blurry to the layman).  I wonder if that was because of the burlap design. 

I have two of those 1967 Jack Baldschun cards, they are identically off center.  If anyone wants one, drop me a line, I will gladly send it to anyone who is as obsessed with miscut cards as I am...

Those diamond cut 68's are making me seasick.

I told you I have a lot of 1973 miscuts, here are some more.  Wait, that 1965 checklist looks fine...

...until you see the back...

...I like how some kid used it anyway.  I have seen a lot of 1962 Topps really off center, but not quite miscut.  That Wes Covington barely qualified, but the Mike Higgins shows that the wood border didn't go to the edges of the sheet.  I guess you gotta save on ink somehow.

Yup, I have some vintage Topps football miscuts too...

...tough being a Chiefs fan, huh?  That diamond cut Jim Marshall is oddly fitting, given his infamous claim to fame. 

Backs:

Here are some more modern football misprints and miscuts.  That quarter of a Giant was one of the cards as listed when I opened a pack of Pro Set back in the day.  I found that quite amusing and it has been amongst my error and miscut cards ever since. 

I have two of those Barry Sanders cards, once again, identical in off centered-ness, if anyone wants one.  As you can see, those two 1992 Topps cards aren't miscut...

They have blank backs.  And you may wonder why I have a completely blank card on this page.  Who cares about blank cards?  They use them as spacers all the time.  Well, that blank card came out of the same pack of 1992 Topps football cards as those blank back cards.  It is a completely blank card, not a spacer.  In my world, there is a difference.  I am not sure how that first series Star Wars miscut got in my collection (probably from my childhood), though I do have a bunch of diamond cut series four Star Wars cards.

OK, since I am just rambling here and showing everything in the damn binder, here are some more misprints:

Some more blank backs (the Franco, LaCock, Mills, and Curtis).  A few miscut backs only from 1975 and 1987.  The Rusty Kuntz does not have a 1979 Carew back, it is just a doubled up card.  The 1990 Leaf checklist with the inverted Sid Fernandez back is pretty cool, and if I had needed that checklist back in the day, it would have been pretty damn frustrating.

The backs...

...show the blank backs and a diamond cut Pudge that got thrown in there for some reason.  I should probably put that closer to the front where it belongs.

Since I have no finish, I'll try and bring it all the way back to the beginning with a few more cut cards I found but did not cut myself...

...those last three cards have all been trimmed to some extent or another.  The 1956 Smokey Burgess had its entire border excised so it would fit in a 9 pocket page I assume...where as the 1962 Gene Woodling was cut smaller for some odd reason I cannot quite figure out.  That last card is a 1955 Topps Double Header.  Well, it had its head cut off, so it is a single header, and really, since it has no head at all, I guess it is a no header.

Parallels.

       I'm not entirely sure when the card companies lost their mind.  It might have been in the late 80's, when their printing presses got more work than Bill Cosby.  It was abundantly clear, however, that by the early 90's, they had gone insane and it was an absolutely collective disease.  That disease had a very simple yet haunting name: parallels.  And the road to that illness was paved with gold...gold foil to be specific.  In 1992, Topps did two things to their base set, one of them brilliant and one of them practically the downfall of all cardom.  The first was they printed their flagship set on bright white cardboard, an excellent move.  The second was they made parallel inserts of the entire base set with gold foil on them and randomly inserted them into packs.

They also had a contest that you could enter to win more gold foiled parallels.  Trouble was, the contest was easy to win because of a printing flaw in the contest cards so Topps had to print more gold cards to meet demand.  This made a parallel set to their parallel set, and, oh, it was a winner:


Then to perpetuate the madness, Topps took things one step further in 1993 and started to insert the gold foil parallels one per pack:

I never caught parallel fever bad enough to try and build an entire set, but for some reason, I have the first and second series of 1993 represented with pages, maybe it was because two different series were new at the time, I have no idea:

1994 brought more of the same from Topps and their flagship brand:

They added the concept of Black Gold at this point, which I do not have a page of and they weren't parallels but inserts, so let's just look at some more 1994 Gold cards since I once again have a series one page and series two page:

Exhausting?  We haven't even started...

Upper Deck, feeling left out, looked at Topps' madness and said "me too!" Their 1993 was almost perfect in every way, including the fact that it did not have parallels.  Then in 1994 Upper Deck came up with their Electric Diamond parallels.  They weren't gold, they were electric, whatever that is supposed to mean:

That page is ugly in its attempt to be all inclusive.  Looking at the aesthetics of that page, I should be ashamed of myself.  Upper Deck repeated the Electric Diamond idea in 1995, but the difference was so slight, I have never bothered with a page of them.

One place Upper Deck did get all crazy with the rare metals was with their Collector's Choice set.  Starting in 1994, they started with Silver and Gold signature parallels:
The Gold is much more rare than the silver, which I suppose is fitting:

Collector's Choice set had special editions and all sorts of nonsense, keeping it all straight makes my head hurt:




Donruss would eventually take the notion of the parallel farther than anyone, but they started out pretty nice.  The 1992 Leaf base set had silver borders, but the parallels were black with gold foil and they look sharp:

The 1994 Donruss base set had a rainbow parallel, which takes shiny to a whole new level:

By the late 90's, the Donruss sets were a horrifying menagerie of parallels, numbered parallels, proofs, artist proofs, die cuts, and the like:




And don't get me started with what they did to the Leaf set.  A person could go mad just trying to look up one parallel card from the 1998 Leaf set alone.  I have none of those cards represented just to avoid the temptation.

Fleer kept up with the Joneses with their Tiffany parallels:

Their '96 & '97 sets were already a little different in that the base cards were matte finished and the inserts were shiny.  In the end, though, their heart just wasn't in it...

But Fleer Ultra had Gold Medallion...and boy, is there gold in them thar cards.  Gold medallion over the years varied in it's presentation from full gold:


To hard to tell it's a parallel:

To die cut:

To die cut and golden:

Still with me?  Are you paying attention?  There will be a written quiz...

Topps eventually branched out from the base set and took parallelitis to its premium set Stadium Club.  In 1993, the shiny "1st day issue" block first appeared:

They continued in 1994:

Plus, 1994 also brought some golden rainbow shiny of their own:

1995's Stadium Club parallels combined the then-already worn out phrase "Virtual Reality" and the idea of continuing the 1994 baseball season from where it ended on August 12:

The cards in question featured stats on the back as run through a computer simulation.  The 1995 Topps set also had a parallel that hinged on this concept, but you will have to come back on Sunday to see all about that one.


Post script. I just didn't have the energy to do all of Score and Pinnacle and Pacific and go into the late 90's and the numbered parallels of the 2000's....heck, it looks like this will have to become an ongoing series.  But believe me, Score was also on the gold bandwagon:

As I have shown with this post, parallels can be quite frustrating, but sometimes, they can almost induce seizure...take these 1997 Score Artist Proofs:

Wow.  Just, wow.