Brooks Robinson and the Baltimore Orioles

[BaltOrioles]

I'm sure all of us at some point have had our collections stall for one reason or another. Maybe it was a limited hobby budget, growing families, career or other priorities focused us in other areas. For me as my collection grew, I found myself only needing some items that were either very rare and/or out of my price range (it is still a hobby). In the case of my quest to find O's minor league affiliate programs, they just aren't out there to be found. Supply and demand. No supply and I'm the only demand.

This led me to some low cost, yet interesting to me, projects. The flood of cards into the market during the late 80's and early 90's created what are commonly known as "junk wax cards". Granted you are never going to send your kids to college with them, but the mass printings resulted in multiple print runs or printers be used during the period. This resulted in many sets having large numbers of variations.

What started out as something to keep me busy, has been a lot of fun also. If you have younger kids, they might enjoy helping out. Over the next few weeks, I'll try to post some of my findings. If anyone has questions, I'll be happy to share what I know so far.

I'm going to start out with some of the easier sets. If you're already bored, you will not enjoy the 1989 Donruss set (up to six different cards of each player). Disclaimer up front... Some sets have different backs that glow under a black light, etc. I'm not that crazy yet..


1987 Donruss

The fronts of the cards are the same, but the backs of the wax pack cards and factory sets have a different orientation on the back. The only difference I can see on the Diamond King cards is lighter or darker print.

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1990 Donruss

There are several different things to look at with the 1990 cards. The border pattern on the front of the cards are different between the wax pack cards and factory sets. The Ripken on the far right is from a factory set. The cards from wax packs can also be found with either Leaf, INC (no period) or Leaf, INC. (with period) on the back of the cards. All the factory sets have the INC. (with period) variation. This creates three different cards for each player.

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1991 Donruss

Same notes as the 1990 Donruss set.

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1992 Donruss

The 1992 Donruss cards have the same fronts, but do have the INC / INC. variation. Two different cards per player.

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1992 Leaf

The 1992 Leaf set has the same INC / INC. variations. However, in the Black Gold set, I have found the variations only in the second series (numbers 300 and up)

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