Quote:
Originally Posted by Yastrzemski Sports
With the Johnson and Ripken there are several distinct variations made where the original plate was altered. That is clear.
It is important to keep in mind that cards are printed on a printing press - and it is an imperfect process. Sometimes there is too much of one color ink and too little of another. Sometimes there is ink spray. Sometimes a plate moves and the colors are out of register. There may also be human error involved. There may be bleeding, smudging, etc, etc. If you look at 100 examples of the any one card, you can find lighter, darker, blurry, crisp, yellow tint, red tint, and so on.
Johnson had a few different versions - but those are limited to the actual alterations on the plate. The others have to be classified as print defects.
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While this is true for many scrutinized and popular variations, this is not so simple regarding the Randy Johnson changes. In fact, my blog noting 13 variations is just meant as a simplified guide to the amount of distinct “types” which there are definitely more than four of even when removing print flaw/plate shift type aberrations from the equation.
I have personally seen far more variations in these cards than I had at the point of publishing that article. If you take a decent size sampling of any one of the major “types” I.E. “red box” “green tint” etc etc, you’ll find that there are several variations within each. Real variations where alterations were made to the plate as efforts to obscure the sign. Shape of the bar over the word, box size, and saturation and density of coloring/masking over sign area and on and on. These are NOT the same as color tone differences due to different ink levels and plate alignment. After 16 years of studying thousands of copies of these cards, I am very confident that there exists at least a couple dozen unique versions of this card.
And finally, for the record, I am no longer confident that a clear version ever made its way into packs. The one and only image I’ve seen, also shown on my blog, no longer feels convincing to me that photoshop wasn’t involved. I’d like to be wrong and with this card, anything is possible but I remain skeptical.