Minor Leagues: Early 90s Classic

1991 Classic Best #410 Chris Durkin (UER, unlisted). Pictured on the right, the major clue besides him being left-handed in real life is the star on the left side of the jersey, which should be on the right. The correct version, on the lef, is from the team set issue and is included for contrast.

1991 Classic Best Gastonia Rangers #5 Scott Erickson (UER, unlisted). Backwards 7, backwards picture of Texas on the sleeve.

1991 Classic Best Osceola Astros #8 Montie Phillips (UER, unlisted). Reversed "Astros" on the front of the jersey is the main clue, though the Rawlings logo on the glove and the words on the scoreboard are also subtle clues.

1991 Classic Four Sport #58 Shawn Estes (UER). One of the very few minor league cards that is recognized as a reverse negative in checklists and price guides.

1992 Classic Best Kane County Cougars #21 Derek Adams (UER, unlisted). Reversed 2 on the shirt back and reversed Franklin on the batting glove.

1992 Classic Best Rockford Expos #11 Gabe White (UER, unlisted). Expos uniforms look so cool as reverse negatives...

1992 Classic Best Vero Beach Dodgers #17 Ed Stryker (UER, unlisted)

1992 Classic Best Lakeland Tigers #4 Dan Ruff and #22 Jim Givens (both UERs and unlisted). Something about Tigers uniforms led to them being easily reversed, I guess. Same thing happened with three in the 1990 ProCards set.

1993 Classic Four Sport #301 John Wasdin (back only, UER, unlisted). The front is correct, but on the back he is pitching lefty and the FSU on the hat is backwards.

1994 Classic Best Gold #36 Wayne Gomes (back only, UER, unlisted). The front is correct but he has a flipped 35 on his sleeve on the back pic.

1994 Classic West Palm Beach Expos #1 Isreal Alcantara (UER, unlisted). Backwards E on the cap is the main clue. 

1992 Classic Four Sport Basketball #75 Predrag Danilovic (UER, unlisted). Obviously the back pic is the reversed version of the front pic. Kind of curious that they would think to airbrush the jersey number and shirt sponsor but not notice the rev neg.

1993 Classic #150A Manon Rheaume. Who knows which one is the reverse, but clearly one of them is. Guess the only way you could tell is if you knew which way she tended to part her hair. Also, wow Manon Rheaume, what a blast from the past...

1993-94 Classic Images Four Sport #38 Ted Drury (UER, unlisted). Only the back pic is reversed. His jersey number says 81 but he wore 18. Also, Drury is backwards on the back of the shirt and so is the CCM on the glove.

That's it for Classic. Next post will cover all other minor league cards that I have found in random sets (such as TCMA, CMC, etc.).

Minor Leagues: 80s-90s Star Co.

Star Company had a lot of reverse negative errors in both major and minor league baseball cards (though none in their basketball cards, strangely) but this post will only cover the minor league ones. The majors rev negs will be in a later post.

I admittedly have not seen every single card produced by Star Co. so there may be many more out there than the ones I know about, but that's part of the fun of digging for error cards!

1989 Star Knoxville Blue Jays #8 Shawn Jeter (UER, unlisted). Probably not your favorite Jeter card, but it is mine!

1989 Star New Britain Red Sox #8 Josias Manzanillo (UER, unlisted). Logo on wrong side of shirt with socks facing wrong way, NB on the hat is backwards.

1990 Star Gastonia Rangers #24 Joey Wardlow (UER, unlisted). Couldn't find a scan online, so I took a pic of my own copy. The Rangers is backwards on the jersey and, you can't tell from this pic but there's a backwards "EK" written on the knob of the bat. Would have been funnier if there was a backwards "fuck face" like the Billy Ripken card.

1990 Star Lakeland Tigers #21 Robert Reimink (UER, unlisted). Backwards L on wrong side of the jersey.

1990 Star Miami Miracle I #12 Dennis Kidd (UER, unlisted). For some reason, Miami Miracle had two star sets in this year, and each one had a rev neg. Kidd is a right hander and the Miller Beer sign in the background is reversed.

1990 Star Miami Miracle II #11 Anthony Kelley (card on left, the one on the right is the correct version from the I set) (UER, unlisted).

There are more major league rev negs that I have found, but I will get to those once I'm done with the minor league posts. Next up is early 90s Classic.....

Minor Leagues: 90s ProCards

Here's part 2 of the ProCards reverse negative extravaganza. This one features errors from the 1990s...

1990 CMC/ProCards #767 Michael Wilkins, #768 John Kiely, and  #837A Mike Lumley (all unlisted). Somehow they got three of the London Tigers players in this unwieldy set reversed, which you can tell by the reversed L's on the hats and the rest of the backwards lettering on the Lumley. The Lumley also features a corrected version, but with a completely different photo. I'm not sure if the other ones have corrected photos.

The other reverse in the '90 set is Willie Ansley, card #810 (UER, unlisted). I initially learned about this on another baseball card blog a couple of years ago but I don't remember which one.

1991 ProCards Minor League #2060 Glenn Murray (UER, unlisted). The 1991 set, like the others by this manufacturer, is ridiculously large. I have only found one reverse in it, however, and it is this Glenn Murray featuring a backwards "Expos" on the back of his shirt, a reversed R on the hat, and a reversed "Franklin" on the batting glove.

1992 Fleer/ProCards #36 Greg Kobza (UER, unlisted). There are four in this 1992 set, which despite being co-manufactured by Fleer, not seem to improve too much more in the quality control department. I don't really blame them though--these sets are stupendously large and it must have been hard to keep tabs on all of these cards when most of the players are obscure and you don't really know what information to look for.

1992 Fleer/ProCards #1552 David Dark (UER, unlisted). One of my favorite types of images is reversed lettering on outfield warning track signs. The closeness to the signs in this pic really makes the error stand out, especially with the Pepsi sign.

1992 Fleer/Procards #3155 Richard Perez (UER, unlisted). Logo on wrong side of shirt, hat logo pointing the wrong way, and the hint of a backwards K-Mart logo on the sign above his shoulder.

1992 Fleer/ProCards #3228 Mike Jewell (UER, unlisted). Flipped Indians logo on the hat and backwards R on the glove.

1993 Fleer/ProCards #4079 Mathew Reese (UER, unlisted). The numbers and lettering on his uniform are noticeably reversed, but the obvious thing is the 384 sign in the background.

That's it for the ProCards (that I have found at least). There are many more minor league reverse negatives though, especially in Star Company and Classic sets, and I will cover them in the next couple of posts...

Minor Leagues: 80s ProCards

Some companies I have found are excellent with quality control. For instance, you can go back decades and look through every set and every sport and find virtually no reverse negatives from Panini. The farther you get away from the major leagues and major manufacturers however, the errors abound. Though cards from the last twenty years have improved, minor league cards from before 1995 were absolutely riddled with errors. Not only were the factual details of every player and presentation of every photo presumably deemed not as important as their big-league counterparts, the sheer size of many of these sets combined with lack of readily available information on the teams resulted in a dream for error hunters. On top of that, price guide companies and online checklist compilers seem to find searching for errors in these sets equally as unimportant as their card company counterparts. Hence, many of the errors in minor league cards are unlisted.

In later posts we will look at reverse negative errors from ProCards sets in the 90s, as well as rev negs by Classic, Star Company, CMC and others. But this post will focus on reverse errors in ProCards minor league sets from 1986-1989. A couple of notes before the pics: the 1988 set is easily the shoddiest looking of the bunch, but amazingly there are no rev negs in the unwieldy, 2,178 card set. At least none that I have found yet. Also, I have found no rev negs in any of the ProCards basketball sets.

1986 ProCards Iowa Cubs #24 Bobby Ramos (UER, unlisted). Not only can you see the reversed 5 on the shirt, but if you compare the card to other ones in the Iowa set, the stadium roof on the others is on the right hand side of the card, unlike this one on the left-hand side.

1986 ProCards Omaha Royals #26 Nick Swartz (UER, unlisted). Everything on the signs in the background is reversed.

1986 ProCards Phoenix Firebirds #17 Bob Moore (UER, unlisted). This one is difficult, but if you compare the logo on the hat with the one on the bottom of the card and with ones on the hats of the other players in this set, the bird's head is facing the wrong way. Also, he is listed as a righty (though that can also be tricky because batting positions are routinely wrong in minor league cards).

1986 ProCards Shreveport Captains #7 Angel Escobar (UER, unlisted). Everything on this card is obviously reversed. I like the backwards Burger King logo in the background.

1986 ProCards Sumter Braves #4 Johnny Cuevas (UER). This is the only one I saw listed as a reverse negative anywhere for 80's ProCards sets (tradingcarddatabase.com has it marked), though it is quite apparent by the inverted S on the hat.

1986 ProCards Vermont Reds #11 Ron Heinka (card on left, UER, unlisted). Other than him being listed as a lefty on the back, the way that you can tell this is reversed is because the background trees in all the other Vermont cards in the set are all faced exactly oppositely to the ones on this Henika card. For instance, compare it with the Denbo card on the right, which is correct.

1987 ProCards Salem Angels #23 Mikael Musolino (UER, unlisted). In the other Salem Angels cards, the floodlight pole in the background is on the right side, and the bleachers are facing to the right instead of the left.

1987 ProCards San Bernardino Spirits #3 Jeff Edwards (UER, unlisted). All the lettering in this card is reversed, and Edwards is right-handed in reality.

1987 ProCards San Bernardino Spirits #14 Leon Baham (UER, unlisted). Same case as the Edwards card above.

1987 ProCards Tidewater Tides #31 Dwight Gooden (UER, unlisted). Compare with the 1987 TCMA version on the left. Same pic, but photo is flipped on the ProCards version. You could say it's impossible to tell which one is the actual reverse, but like Panini, TCMA were another company that didn't reverse many cards so I'm willing to bet it was ProCards that made the error here.

1989 ProCards #164 Mike Dull (UER, unlisted). Dull was a lefty, the J on the hat is reversed, and the Coors logo in the background is reversed.

1989 ProCards #176 Rob Natal (UER, unlisted). Everything in this card is clearly inverted, but the appearance of a left-handed catcher should be enough of a clue.

1989 ProCards #609 Scott Cooper (UER, unlisted). The "NB" on the hat, the "Franklin" on the batting glove, the "Coke" on the advertising board: all reversed.

1989 ProCards #1833 Eric Gunderson (UER, unlisted). All the lettering is reversed, and Gunderson should be a lefty.

1989 ProCards #1857 Quinn's Cards (UER, unlisted). All the writing on their shirts is reversed.

1989 ProCards #1859 Grounds Crew Geneva Cubs (UER, unlisted). Once again, all the letters are reversed.

1988-89 Procards IHL #59 Dan Vincelette (UER, unlisted). One of two hockey reverses I found, the logo is flipped and the number on the sleeve is reversed on this one.

1989-90 Procards AHL #312 Gord Kruppke (UER, unlisted). The 4 on the sleeve, the CCM on the glove, and the Red Wings logo are all reversed.

Join me next time for ProCards reversed negatives from the 1990's, and afterwards minor league reverses from other sets. There's a lot of these babies, and it will take me a few posts to get though them....

Random Unlisted Reverses in Major Sets

Hi all, as I said last time this post will be a short one on unlisted reverse negatives in major manufacturer sets. For all I know, there are many more out there that nobody has found yet- maybe even a couple from the last twenty years, though finding reverse negatives after 1995 can start to feel like looking for a needle in a canyon full of needles. There's one from 2002 here, but the others are from the heyday of junk wax, like most trading card errors. And I'm not covering every single one I found, because the others will be listed under different post categories.

 After this, it's off to the minor leagues....

1976 Topps #468 Jesus Alou. Word is ol' Jesus posed lefty for this photograph, even though he is right-handed. There are plenty of cases of players posing the wrong way for their photos in card history (those wacky athletes), but for some reason someone at Topps in 1976 really didn't like Alou doing this and decided to show him what's what. So they flipped the image so he would be posing in his natural batting position, rendering his hat, shirt, and Shea Stadium in reverse. Never heard of another case like it. (Side note- the COMC logo is obviously not part of the actual card.)

1979 Topps #239 Willie Horton UER. That reversed Blue Jay logo again.

1991 Bowman #328 Junior Ortiz UER. Notice the backwards "S" on Ortiz's shirt, the fact that he is portrayed as a left-handed catcher, and Ripken sliding in from what appears to be first base.

2002 Upper Deck #582 Marty Cordova UER. The "Orioles" on the shirt is reversed, Cordova is a righty, and what is presumably the word "gallon" is reversed on the outfield fence in the background.

1991 Bowman #313 Kirk Lowdermilk. As mentioned in a previous post, this card is listed as a UER in price guides but not for the reason that it is a reverse negative.