1980-present variations

[con40]

Ben, I truly admire your zeal to discover as many modern "variations" as possible, but none of these cards are true variations in any sense whatsoever. These cards are the results of print quality issues. Presses in the day ran tens of thousands of sheets an hour. At that speed, any dirt, debris, ink density, registration problem, blanket damage, etc., would yield issues on hundreds, if not thousands of sheets before the pressmen could catch it and clean/fix the press issue. The affected sheets would not be thrown away and would continue on into packs. This would occur constantly throughout the press run.

Printing is far from a precise process and all kinds of issues occur on a press run consisting of millions of sheets.

You will keep discovering these anomalies for the rest of your life.

However, your 1988 Wade Boggs All Star is a true variation! It's actually two different cards. I suspect it was placed on the sheet twice, or was printed in two runs of separate printing plates.

How can I tell?

Look at the space between the bottom of the yellow frame and his name in cyan ink. The space is different on each card. Since yellow and cyan are solid CMYK inks, this is not a registration issue (the photo is crisp and it has yellow and cyan ink in it). The only way this could happen is a change in the yellow and cyan plates... or it was two separately stripped cards on the sheet.