1989 Fleer Randy Johnson #381 Marlboro Errors - 30 Years Later

[Statfreak101]

Originally Posted by jakeinge

Awesome, awesome thread!

I'm not nearly as knowledgeable as many of you, but I've always had this thought in the back of my mind that in the case of the Ripken, the variation depended on who did the printing. I would assume (maybe wrongly) that due to the sheer volume of cards that needed to be produced, there were multiple printers doing the work for Fleer. So perhaps the clear Marlboro came from one printer and all of the printers were using the same print codes. So in theory you could have the same print codes and get different variations depending on which printer the case came from.

I'd love to hear thoughts on this.

Reasonable thought, but I am not sure.

You are more likely to find multiple variations of the Johnson card in the same case than you are the Ripken variations. Like, if you have a sealed case that you open and the first Ripken card is a black scribble, you are 99.9% going to find only that variation of Ripken throughout the remainder of the case.

However, in the case of the Johnson card...I have opened a sealed case before and gotten multiple variations out of the same case...SOMETIMES even the same box (although rare).