1990 Topps Jeff King

[steve B]

Originally Posted by ALR-bishop

Steve---on the Campos, I have a black star and one of the missing front top left border versions. But I also have a partial black star, or at least one where there is only a small amount of black on the star. Not sure what that means.

Point being only that determining if a defect was intentionally corrected or just transitory is not always determinable.

I have never thought the King was intentional. Bob put it in the catalog at time before the internet and ebay demonstrated that there are thousands of print flaws like the Herrer and Bakep out there and that the definition of a variation needed to be narrowed for listing purposes.

PSA did not help the narrowing process when they recognized the 61 Fairly green smudge in the baseball on the back

If they are recurring I try to collect them whatever anyone else may call them . Always enjoy discussions like this

My feeling on Campos is that they used essentially the same mask for both red and black. and just blocked off what they didn't want. (Possibly duplicate negatives with a different sheet covering the unwanted areas. )

And here's where intent gets difficult.
Option 1, the 2 masks are perfect to start, but a bit gets torn off while instorage or making a plate, and part of the star is exposed. Or a tear gets folded over. Then the next bit of damage exposes the entire star.
Obviously no intent, and if it happened late the partial should be more common unless the defect was noticed and the plate replaced.
= No intent

Option 2, same as above, but the damage is noted, and the solution is to remove part of the mask blocking part of the star, after all, what kid will notice or care that on one card one star is black and red instead of just red?
=Intent ... sort of...

Option 3, The mask is defective right at the start. The same "fix" in option 2 is done, but isn't acceptable. The mask is repaired so it makes any further black plates properly.
=Intent.

Any of those could be what happened, or none of them.

For simplicity I'll leave the border gap out of it. There's just too many ways that can happen.

So I think we sort of agree.

Stuff like the Fairly have indeed made a mess of things.

The King is a strange one.
The common ways that happens
A sheet peels apart or misfeeds while the yellow is being done, wraps around the plate, and gets inked (Convoluted path where it peels, and wraps on the blanket then gets stuck to the plate. It seems unlikely but I've seen it happen.)

The plate either completely dries out or the water to wet it is never started. So the entire plate gets inked. (I haven't seen this, but the shop I was at was higher quality lower volume)

Both should affect more than just one card. And the wrapped paper doesn't print clearly, more of a mottled look.

What I think is a possibility is that it's a partial wrongback. Ther are some cards in the set that do not have any white area, like the turn back the clock and a couple others.
If the wrong yellow got put down, you'd get exactly what that card looks like.
And there's precedent, some 1991s the managers can be found with a 40th logo instead of the plain split background, and some player cards can be found with the split field red of a manager card.

This can happen if the back is laid out wrong, and that sort of thing did happen a few years later with one of the upper deck sets that had a group of wrong backs that were from the back and front plates not matching up.

I have a few of both of those somewhere, I just wish they were as expensive as the King.

[West]

This is a great discussion and I agree with the sentiment here regarding errors. I personally believe that errors/variations worthy of recognition from TPGs are ones that were clearly created from a distinct printing plate, and that also have hobby interest and recognition. Now I realize that this may be a sort of chicken and the egg scenario, as TPG recognition feeds hobby demand, but most of the more stark, recurring errors check both boxes (Thomas NNOF, Ripken FF, '87 Bonds Opening Day error etc)
Cards suffering from of solvent drops, fisheyes and other transient variations, though sometimes interesting, don't fit my definition of the type of thing you'd want to collect for a master set.

I have the Leyland on eBay with most of the team name in yellow. I'm sure I priced it too high but I think it's a cool card. I also have a few other player cards from 90 Topps with similar errors, but not quite as stark. Maybe I can dig some more up and scan them. I know one of them is also a manager card, and the Wathan manager card has shown that error as well. I wonder why the manager cards show up more frequently with this variation?



Interestingly enough, I pulled the Leyland out of a group of 3 boxes that also had a number of blackless cards on the green sheet.

When I get some time I'll have to go digging through my 90 Topps and get some of these scanned. I found some new errors last winter that I want to bug Steve B about for his take.