1994 Collector's Choice Baseball Forum

Does anyone know if the 'grey letter' variations on cards 641-650 of this set are more rare than the 'white letter' versions?   I've been hunting card 641 for a while now to complete the Cardinals team base set, but all I can find online or from other collectors is the white letter version.   I'm starting to think it doesnt exist, except for the uploaded photo.  

I'm in the same boat for #648 - I keep trading for what should be a "grey letter" variation and keep getting "white letter" variations. I know the grey letters appear on some of the other parallels, but are there truely base versions with the grey letter out there? The problem is likely due to the white letter variations being added after people had already catalogued them as base and then not checking their inventory.

Also, that's the problem when people upload images for cards they don't actually have in hand - it creates misinformation and leads us to believe that a card exists when maybe it doesn't.

Is there anybody out there who actually has a base version of any one of these cards with the grey letter?

Someone did tell me they had a grey letter, so I believe they exist.  Just seems like they are rare and obscure enough that not many people realize the varation exists.  

http://baseballcardpedia.com/index.php/1994_Collector%27s_Choice#Future_Foundations_White_Letters

Thanks fro the link. I guess all we can do is keep looking and hope to find one one day.

From when I tried to put together all of the versions, I came up with this info. It may help but maybe not.

For each of these, they are supposed to be:

- white name front/back, white letter for base
- silver name front/back, silver letter for silver signature
- gold name front/back, gold letter for gold signature

Because the silver and gold cards have letters matching the color of the name on the back, I am contending that the white letter on base is the correct version and that the silver letters on the base are the errors.

And this doesn't count the situations where cards got the wrong fascimile signature stamp, prominantly seen with the Derrek Lee.

When I tried to complete them all, I was not able to get or find all versions for all of the cards.

That is pretty much what I was able to determine from some online investigation. I also think that the white letter on the base should be the base version and that the grey letter should be the variation. The grey is certainly much harder to come by.

Bumping a topic from last year because we received another IR asking about these. From what I can determine using COMC for guidance:

BASE

-- #641-650 seems like the "BASE" should be white letters on the front and back and a large white letter on back (where some of the cards like Damon and Wade appear to only have this version), but looking at COMC, I'm seeing a lot more large silver letter ones available on some of the cards. Do we know for sure which one is BASE and VAR? tpx proposed white/white, but is this correct?

-- It appears #652 James Baldwin is the only card in the #651-670 range that has a white-letter front VAR. They all appear to be gold only for everyone else in this range. Can anyone find proof these actually exist for anyone else? If not, I propose we delete all the white-letter VARs #651 and #653-670 from base (leaving #652 alone) and combine collection info back into the remaining gold-letter version.


SILVER SIGNATURE

-- #641-650 looks like the "BASE" should be silver letters on the front and back and a large silver letter on back, with a possible white-letter front/back VAR for each (basically a base card with a silver signature stamp). The current image uploads are a mess and some show a mix of silver letters front and white letters back, which aren't a valid combination, so I'm not sure what happened there. We'll need to do some image swapping and possibly IRs to clear out wrong uploads and get this corrected.

-- It appears #652 James Baldwin is the only card in the #651-670 range that has a white-letter front VAR. They all appear to be gold only for everyone else in this range. Can anyone find proof these actually exist for anyone else? If not, I propose we delete all the white-letter VARs #651 and #653-670 from Silver Signature (leaving #652 alone) and combine collection info back into the remaining gold-letter version.


GOLD SIGNATURE

-- It does not appear there are any parallels in the #641-650 range that have white letters on the front and a large white letter on the back (basically a base card with a gold signature stamp). We have one image upload in 12 years and it's from iffie, so the submission can't be trusted at all. Can anyone find proof these actually exist? If not, I propose we delete all the white-letter VARs #641-650 from Gold Signature and combine collection info back into the remaining gold-letter version.

-- It appears #652 James Baldwin is the only card in the #651-670 range that has a white-letter front VAR. They all appear to be gold only for everyone else in this range. Can anyone find proof these actually exist for anyone else? If not, I propose we delete all the white-letter VARs #651 and #653-670 from Gold Signature (leaving #652 alone) and combine collection info back into the remaining gold-letter version.

I actually did not know about the letter varitaions on the Rookie Class cards.

Base set:

631-640 - Each base card has either a white or black bar on the bottom of the card.  The white bar is rarer.

641-650 - I can confirm base set gray/white first letter variations for 643, 645, 646, 647 and 650.  I don't believe there is a variation of the Jeter card.  The gray letter variations are rarer.

651-660 - I can only confirm the base variation of the Baldwin card (gold vs. white lettering on front).  I am not aware of any other variations in this range.  The white lettered version is rarer.

Silver set:

For the silver signature set, the only variations I am aware of are for cards 631-640 (black bar vs. silver bar).

Yup the front stripes #631-640 on base, Silver and Gold should be OK other than a few missing entries for Silver that weren't seen on COMC. Can we confirm that the following Silver Signature w/ black stripe VARs exist?

#632 Bonds
#637 Piazza
#638 Puckett
#639 Salmon
#640 Thomas

I also don't see any black stripe VARs for Gold Signature ... just the expected gold stripe ... so it looks like our checklist is OK there.

Silver Signature also has a silver header / black header VAR on the #348 Clemens checklist card but it doesn't appear any other checklists were affected.

IRs are in to remove the wrong images from the Silver Signature #641-650 range, then I'll start working on clearing out all the white-letter VARs that don't exist in the #651-670 range on base, Silver and Gold.