89 Upper Deck Griffey " rare error " ?
 

Im not into 80s stuff, but trying to help a pal...he has 89 Upper Deck Griffey " purple hat " ?

Im sure its a print defect or something

The whole 89 Upper deck Griffey card is not scarce..yet somewhat valuable, anyone know scarceness on purple hat ?

It's probably the blue and red being shifted compared to each other just enough that the red shows a bit.

That can fool the eye to seeing purple.

Less likely
Overinked red
Red printed over blue instead of under.
Blue lighter or more transparent.

I personally don't consider ink level variations to be true variations. Every card has slight variations in color based on ink levels and application over the entire run of printing. While Upper Deck acknowledged some of the Mariners cards have a purple tone to them based on an issue with the ink at the printer, I don't personally put much stock in the variation. Others might. Heck, some of them might just have been left out in the light and faded. I don't think they are exceedingly rare either.

LOL, to go all conspiracy theory. The story back in the day is the purple hat cards came from when UD was printing sheets of just the Griffey card. Not sure how true it is but UD was famous for printing more cards than stated and being more than a little shady.

Timmothy---do not take this wrong, I am a set and variant collector and ask this a lot on the board. What would be your definition of a true variation ?

I'm not really a variation collector, so you have to take it with a grain of salt. But having colors various shades is a normal part of the printing process and happens to all cards to various degrees. So I don't really consider those types of things variations. If something unusual and out of the normal process happens, that can be a variation to me. But you can put two of the same card together and there will always be some variance in color/brightness, etc...

But again, people are free to collect anything they want and to look for variations of any type they want. Different shades of color is open to interpretation, and that's fine.

Print variation: low cyan levels.

Count me among those who believe Pete Williams' investigation findings. McWilliams, by all accounts, was not an ethical person. We have confirmation that they reprinted French Hockey, Griffey, Murphy, McDonald and Jordan reprints are not far fetched.

UD Griffey
 

Yea, I do recall reading about that.. the guy authorized printing full sheets of Griffey card..and sold them to dealers ( on the QT )

There's a book called Card Sharks by Pete Williams about the shady stuff that went on with Upper Deck baseball cards.

And that's the real shame...they had a superior product to all the other card manufacturers at the time, yet they screwed the pooch with their 'shady stuff'. Their photography, card stock, printing process, quality control, etc were all way beyond anything else being produced.

I highly recommend reading the book (its pretty cheap), it is a great read if you have fond memories of that period of collecting. All the shady stuff aside, a great documentation of the era.

And got caught counterfeiting their own product for a repacker. Yugio cards that were fake turned up in packages from Treat, who had paper work proving they were bought from UD directly