1989 Fleer Randy Johnson #381 Marlboro Errors - 30 Years Later

[Hatorade]

Originally Posted by bnorth

The very slight differences will drive you crazy with these cards. I have started to catalog them several times and never get it done. It was many years ago so my # might be off a little, At one time I had around 18-20 different versions cataloged.

Considering the extremely short period of time they printed them compared to the Ripken. They had to be making changes to it every few days with some done daily.

Originally Posted by Yastrzemski Sports

With the Johnson and Ripken there are several distinct variations made where the original plate was altered. That is clear.
It is important to keep in mind that cards are printed on a printing press - and it is an imperfect process. Sometimes there is too much of one color ink and too little of another. Sometimes there is ink spray. Sometimes a plate moves and the colors are out of register. There may also be human error involved. There may be bleeding, smudging, etc, etc. If you look at 100 examples of the any one card, you can find lighter, darker, blurry, crisp, yellow tint, red tint, and so on.
Johnson had a few different versions - but those are limited to the actual alterations on the plate. The others have to be classified as print defects.

Originally Posted by jacksoncoupage

I have personally seen far more variations in these cards than I had at the point of publishing that article. If you take a decent size sampling of any one of the major “types” I.E. “red box” “green tint” etc etc, you’ll find that there are several variations within each. Real variations where alterations were made to the plate as efforts to obscure the sign. Shape of the bar over the word, box size, and saturation and density of coloring/masking over sign area and on and on. These are NOT the same as color tone differences due to different ink levels and plate alignment. After 16 years of studying thousands of copies of these cards, I am very confident that there exists at least a couple dozen unique versions of this card.

The atypical manner in which Fleer edited the Marlboro sign makes tracking/cataloging these cards a challenge. As Dylan mentioned, the differences in the cards are multi-faceted. Whereas, most errors are straight forward and appear in either of two forms, the error or the corrected version. This is not the case with the Johnson Marlboros. As Adam mentioned, the process used to print these cards will lead to print defects, printing discrepancies and other human errors. After acquiring several cards we discovered several specific items that occur with the cards. We created a database to track not only the differences in the sign area, but also these print features that are common denominators . The print features are not what make the specific cards different, but they are a way to go about highlighting the changes/differences that occurred in the variations.

“The Pube” - This tiny black hair like feature is on every error card I own and I’ve never seen it on any of the final corrected versions. PSA has mislabeled the error and common cards quite frequently and by just noting if this item is in the card they can prevent this from happening.

“The Rectangle” - I’ve discussed this some, but this feature shows up on Green tints, Box with Bubble and Box versions.

“The Squiggle” - This interesting feature looks like an upside down questions mark. Card #639 Davis/Puckett has a variation with three marks that look very similar to this.

“The Grey Stain” - This feature shows up on Green tints and Box with Bubble cards.

“Recurring Print Dots” - There are tons of these recurring print dots.

There are several others, but I’ll dig into all of these more as we go. Being a completist and collecting these cards isn’t a great combination.