1989 Score Scoremasters Baseball Forum

Anyone have any background on why the cards show a 1990 copyright on the back despite being "1989" cards? Usually it's the opposite, with "this" year's cards showing "last" year as the copyright in this era.

Scoremasters was a stand-alone boxed set. It was produced in 1990 after the 1989 set and the before 1990 set.

There doesn't seem to be a good enough answer that explains this. Just curious here, the copyright states 1990. Beckett lists it as 1989 as does everyone else, but nowhere can I find any actual research that explains the 1990 copyright and that it was released in 1990. In no way shape or form should a card set produced and copyrighted for one year be listed anywhere as the previous years set, (Early 90's Donruss drove collector's nuts). This is like the 2021 Topps Big League mess. No one was happy about that. Absurd, and only can be rectified if enough people/collector's SCREAM about it. The data is the data and can not be argued with. My OCD is boiling right now. 

Don't recall the brand, but have run across Nascar cards where some cards had one year, others had the next.....

Might be when the contract with the Teams/Players/Drivers go into affect.....

NVM - too tired for a coherent response...

I know this isn't football, but there are MANY cases in football sets where the cards are printed/released in year XXXX but are made for the season XXXX-1. And I know at Star Co (where I used to work), we had a copyright on the backs of some cards for 4 or 5 years (1988 cards with a 1984 copyright).

In this case, it looks like the box has a 1989 copyright (hard to see clerarly). Not sure when exactly the cards were released, but they very well could have been printed - in 1989 - with 1990 dates on them - and then released in 1989 - before they intended to release them. Now that it's 32-33 years ago, hard to know. Unless someone has the packaging when they got it through the mail-order method, or a card shop owner at the time has receipt of a shipment of them, we may never truly know when they were first available in-hand.

This set always gave me the problem of what year it actually would be listed as no matter what hobby publication or site. It is the only set I know of that the copyright date (1990) is the year after the most commonly recognized set issue date (1989). I am sure others will give me examples of other sets that have this issue; for me this is the one that bothers me the most. Even many of the write-ups ont he backs refer to things that teh player did in 1989.

In NASCAR it was Collector's Choice and the Press Pass flagship set. Collector's Choice Series 1 was released right after the season at the end of the year (a 1998 set would have 1997 copyrights) and then Series 2 would come out in the year and have the correct year of the set for the copyright. Press Pass' flagship set was the same way for many years where Series 1 was released in November or December of the year before and Series 2 was released in the actual year of the set (usually February). Even when Press Pass changed to only one series of NASCAR cards, they still came out in November or December and carried the copyright of the year before they were considered to be. For example: The final Press Pass release was 2015 Press Pass Cup Chase (hobby version) and 2015 Press Pass (retail version). But the copyright date was 2014 since they were released in December and Press Pass closed their doors on 1/01/2015.

As for the Scoremasters set, it was released in 1990, so I don't know why anyone calls it 1989. I also don't know why the box has 1989 on it. Maybe the box was designed and printed in 1989 but there was a problem with printing the cards or something needed to be changed and that caused the cards to not be printed and released until 1990. Then Score decided not to print new boxes with 1990 on them since they spent so much on the cards. Just a guess though.

This is commonplace nowadays. Upper Deck routinely issues hockey sets which are nominally for the previous season. "2020-21 Upper Deck Stature" was just released in May 2022 - halfway through the following season's playoffs. And they aren't done yet: "2020-21 Upper Deck Clear Cut" is due in July 2022, which will be 23 (!) months after the first 2020-21 product (Upper Deck MVP) was released. And yet it will still have so-called "rookie cards" featuring the same player as that MVP set. 

But there is a very good reason for that. The pandemic shut down printing facilities for one thing and also the card companies were not considered essential business. So while the card designers could work from home to create designs, nothing could be printed and also there were not as many games to obtain photographs of the athletes to put on those cards. This is also why so many releases since 2020 have been way behind schedule in all sports. The downtime slowed everything down and the card companies are still trying to catch up. I still don't see why they didn't just drop some releases to get back on schedule with current products. Even if it was already designed, they could have just made some of the sets that were planned become the set for the next year instead. Just gotta get that money I guess! Even though NASCAR was only on a pause in 2020 for about a month before resuming racing, Panini is still a couple of months behind on getting out the 2022 products b/c of everything they are trying to do with the other sports. Donruss was almost 2 months late this year and Chronicles has already been pushed back a month when it was supposed to release on June 22nd.