1995 Topps Stadium Club Series 1

At the card show last week, one of the vendors had a box of packs from the 1990's for 50¢ each. That's the kind of deal I like, even better than the Target $1.59 box. So I picked out ten packs of cards of different flavors.

I bought one pack each from the Series 1, Series 2 and Hi Numbers of 1995 Topps Stadium Club. 

  

I figure that $2.49, plus inflation, minus the 50¢, puts me ahead by over $3! That's three more dollars to spend on cards, according to my wife's shopping logic. (You know, it's not how much you spend, but how much you save!)

 

 

The base cards are the typical mid-90's TSC design, with the TSC logo and an embossed name with a "flair" to it, some sort of design element, whether it is the cursive writing or the accent line. This could be called the "arrow through the plum logo" design. Despite the funny looking oval with the team logo in it, I like the design, and the photography is typical TSC, meaning very good, except for the VERY strange photo of Rex "the Crime Dog" Hudler humping a post. 

The obverse side is actually even more colorful than the front, with a nice picture and mimic drawing, along with some interesting ways to present the stats. The orange bar graphs show how the player did versus his team average in eight different hitting categories, but the clue to the future of Topps (think "Attax") is the blue bar graphs that show the player's performance according to the "Topps Skills Rating System." Delgado, as we reasonably assume, is much better offensively, but Hudler is better at defense. Nice way of looking at it. 

  

  

The inserts include gold lettering cards (Clark), Virtual Reality cards (Sanchez) and League Leaders cards (Smith). The League Leader shows on the back that in one of the bar-graph categories, Smith led the league (duh!), in this case, Saves. Smith is still one of the all-time saves leaders, and probably should be in the Hall of Fame, but I think the fact that he played for so many different teams is hurting him. The Virtual Reality cards are a subset with its own numbering and VR checklist:

I don't know much about it, but I am interested in researching it, so in my copious spare time, I may find out something.

Two more insert sets were the Draft Picks and the Best Seat in the House. 

 

I love the photography in the Best Seat series. I think that, overall, it probably has better action shots than in the base set. The photo of Roberto Kelly trying to slide in under the tag of Eddie Taubensee is beautiful. The back is really interesting, too. It talks about the best seat in Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, the one that belongs Ted Turner, and explains that the photo on the front is from that vantage point. Pretty cool!

As far as the Draft Picks goes, well, for the hardcore baseball junkie, this is for him.