1988 Donruss Baseball Forum

I can help get the image up for the factory sets but I need to know. How to spot a Factory set cards compared to a regular card. I have a few factory sets, but they are still sealed and I'm not opening them up to have a look to play spot the difference. 

I would hate to except image that are the wrong ones. I need info so I can make sure they're the right ones. 

I think the overwhelming opinion is to leave this project to somebody who is willing to open their factory set.  We have one such person who will be starting this chore tomorrow.   That is the only way we will definitively KNOW which is which.  There is no simple way to spot it.  It will take somebody opening a factory set.

As David has said, if you don't have the known card in hand, please just go on to another thing here. We appreciate your willingness to assist in the project, but it could wind up making double work for someone else if you do something without knowing.

Essentially, it boils down to this:

The only way to verify whether a card is the factory set version is have a known factory set version in hand and visually compare the images on here to the card in hand.

Once the Factory Set images are fully loaded, I will go through my set, card by card to verify they are correct.

OK, I will bow out and leave it to the people that know. No point in me making a mistake and messing things up. Good luck to you all. 

I have read the various forum entries and am still unclear on how to tell factory vs pack.

can someone summarize for me?

or is this set still a work in progress?

I am just trying to add my extras here in the appropriate set

thanks, mark

Bump

Mark, to my knowledge, the 2 versions differ by the placement of the black/red/black/blue/black portion of the border. One version has that in the top-right and bottom-left while the other has them in the top-left and bottom-right. I can't remember which is which right now, but I want to say that TR-BL is the retail version.

Whoa, almost didn't catch what I just typed. I guess it says that this set is just more TROUBLE for us collectors.

Mark, basically what Spaz said is correct. Here's a side-by-side view of a few from the gallery's perspective of each set. The Retail set is on the left.

(Edited to add this:) For someone like me, it's difficult to distinguish which is which when there is no design difference since every card I've come to own has come from a purchased lot. As with the '87 set, I'll assume retail, but with this one I'll be comparing the fronts. I have them mixed anyway and I'll just compare duplicates and separate the different ones, then compare to what is shown to identify them.

There is no real pattern to these. Some cards in packs had black in the upper right, some in the upper left - so that's not the way to tell.

SOME of the cards have the pattern on the front changed between the packed out and factory set versions. MOST of the cards have differences in the text on the backs of the cards. By time the text gets to the last line, the starting word is different due to a change in the typesetting. Again, it's not like one has "something" and the other doesn't.

Basically, other than checking the images posted here (or knowing exactly where your cards came from), there is no sure-fire way to look at a card on its own and be able to tell which version it is. Sorry for the bad news.