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Originally Posted by Hatorade
I'm 99% sure is says Expos. You can see an E on the back of some other players in their Jacksonville team sets.
It sure does seem the cropping changes were done to obscure the Marlboro advertisement. I was unaware of these 1989 Topps variations. Thank you for pointing to a 2nd example and 2nd manufacturer that year that covered a tobacco ad by editing it out during production, which is another interesting clue.
We've discussed the Clear/Blue, Fish and Negative versions of these error variations a little. That leaves the Marlboro, Red, Greens and...what else??Steve posted a really cool picture of some of his Marlboro versions on another site and hopefully he'll share it here as well. Who else has some images of their other versions they would like to share?
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Sure, Hatorade. I've always been fascinated with this Marlboro version since I was a kid and my cousin pointed it out to me. Once I came back into the hobby I've focused on examples with the most clarity of the sign (i.e., being able to clearly see each letter in the word Marlboro and the cowboy). I've found clearness to be a continuous variable though (without completely defined levels). I've never tried to draw it out but this has sort of been my way of thinking about clarity and the tint versions. Of course it gets trickier when you have green tint over red scribbling, etc. I'm not claiming this rough sketch is entirely accurate but I hope to try to add to it.
My pipe dream would be to flesh this out to categorize all of the versions and then get population counts (at least for PSA graded cards) for all of the different versions. Assuming we put some numeric clarity scale on the Y-axis, it would be great to be able to note that a card was G1 (i.e., "clearest" green tint) or R3_4 (i.e., looks like it falls between clarity 3 and 4 for a red tint version) and others would know exactly which version you are talking about. Just a few random thoughts. Steve