Card Identification Forum

Hello everyone,

I'm kinda going crazy over here.

I recently got a few rookie cards from the 2000-01 Be A Player Signature Series set, which can be found here.

You'll see that rookies in the base set are listed as being numbered from between 500 to 1000. All the photos I can find for these cards online all have them with a stamped number on their back. Even in hobby boxes description, they're listed as such.

But the four rookies I've got (Buzek, Havlat, Ouellet and Gaborik) aren't numbered. Anywhere on the card.

Anyone knows if there was, in fact, base non-numbered rookies and serial numbered ones?

Thanks a lot!

Now that we know the non-numbered ones exist, should the ones SN to 500+ be moved to a Parallel set of some sort, maybe?

No.

Just because you have a couple examples of cards that either missed the SN process or were extras and got backdoored does not constitute a parallel set.

These are either misprints or backdoored items. Both of which do not get catalogued here.

You can log these into your collection by selecting "Detailed Add" and putting "No SN" or something similar in the comment field.

Alright, thanks. My bad if it came out this way, I wasn't implying that misprints deserved a parallel set, just that maybe, since this is an older product, both numbered and standard ones were issued, but that this info got lost over time.

But I actually just found one on eBay. Says it's fresh out of the pack, and that it isn't numbered, and identified as an error.

So you're probably right, seems like Quality Control most probably did a poor job on these rookies (I've since seen a couple more of these non-numbered rookies in real life. They're usually found in re-packaged dollar store packs).

Thanks again.

Companies that do repacks sometimes get "close outs" from companies - i.e., the left overs. These cards that do not have serial numbers were never meant to see the light of day, and if they were, they were to be replacements for damaged SNed ones. (Many times the companies would send out hand-numbered replacements.)

That actually makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the extra info, that's appreciated.

Ive contacted 3 different card shops with this exact issue as i have around 80 be a player cards from 3 different years that are ruby, saphire, emerald all unstamped/unnumbered and nobody seemed to know anything about them so im really glad to finally get an answer, thanks alot :)

I know there were several card issues from that era where there were variations between hobby release and retail release. This could be another reason for the variation.

If I were to make a guess, these un-numbered parallels are just the cards that did not get the show-stamping done to them. As you may know, the show-stamped parallels do not have the original number on them. So any parallel that should be numbered but isn't, may just be a show-stamped card that was never stamped. Or they are extras or what have you. Until there is provenance, I would consider these to be the same as the un-numbered Pacific cards and other similar proofs that were back-doored or made it onto the secondary market in other ways.

Regarding the "never meant to see the light of day" part, I was recently told in the forums that it's not our place to guess the intent of the card companies.