How to tell the difference between 1963 Post Cereal and 1963 Jello baseball cards

Issue Identification

For card collectors, identifying a card’s exact issue often becomes a problem when finding vintage cards either at flea markets, card shows or online.  To my knowledge, there is not an app yet whereby you can scan a card via your phone and have the issue identified.

The identification issue can become very confusing when several issues look almost exactly alike.  For example, Exhibit Supply Company cards of baseball, football and boxing greats had the same basic design over a half of a century with no statistics on the back until the 1960s issues.  Therefore, identifying an Exhibit Supply issue requires some knowledge of who was in the issue and sometimes minor differences across the issues in terms of color, printing and other smaller details.

1963 Post Cereal and 1963 Jello

The same problem applies to the 1963 Post Cereal and 1963 Jello baseball sets. Because these cards had the exact same visual design, players and numbers, they are often confused by sellers on eBay and even some experienced collectors who are not familiar with the two card issues.

The main reason for the confusion is that the issuer of the cards in 1963, General Foods, did not intend for the two issues to be seen as separate from each other.  In a clever marketing cross-promotion, both boxes of Jello and boxes of Post Cereal had one-sided baseball cards printed on the back of the box.  These cards could be pasted into a single album that General Foods gave away as a promotion in 1963 in which you could paste cards from either Jello or Post Cereal.  Hence, if a parent was buying either jello or cereal, you could get them to look for specific players.  Hence, it would be easier to fill your album with two product lines issuing the same cards.

Caption: Above is a picture of the 1963 album given away by General Foods.  Note that, on the bottom, it tells the collector to get cards from either Post cereal or Jello packages.   This was the across-brand promotion.

In general, it was easier to complete your collection through cereal boxes because the cards were issued in panels of multiple cards on the back of the boxes (complete 1963 box panels are collected today and sometimes sold on eBay).  Jello boxes were so small that only a single card could be placed on the back of the boxes.  However, because of the need to fit one card onto the back of a Jello box, the 1963 Jello cards were made just a bit smaller than the 1963 Post cards.  Also, a small design difference emerged in how the player’s STATS were line-ruled, likely as a result of having to shrink the design.

Caption: Above is a 1963 Jello box with Sandy Koufax.

These slight differences have caused hobbyists over the years to see these cards as two sets: 1963 Jello and 1963 Post Cereal.  This situation is not what the company likely intended (nor did General Foods managers likely care) when the cards were issued.  While some collectors do not care if a card is a Jello or Post card and will buy either issue interchangeably, the vast majority of today’s vintage collectors of these issues are particular about whether a card is Jello card or Post Cereal card.

Indeed, the value of certain cards or players is very dependent on which issue it comes from, either Jello or Post.  The scarcity of certain cards and thus their current prices is greatly influenced by their availability in 1963.  Players that were on unpopular cereals or jello flavors are scarce today and sell for a premium.  Therefore, if you do not identify a card’s issue correctly when selling on eBay or another venue, buyers may be upset.  For example, Frank Thomas #197 is a relatively common card in the 1963 Jello set.  However, Frank Thomas #197 is one of the hardest cards to find in the 1963 Post Cereal set.  Thus, if you list a 1963 Jello Frank Thomas #197 as a 1963 Post Frank Thomas #197, buyers will think you are either ill-informed or trying to scam them.  Even worse, you could buy a 1963 Jello Frank Thomas #197 card thinking it is the rare Post version.

Telling the Two Issues Apart

How do you tell the two issues apart?  It is easy once you know.  Below I have put a scan of both 1963 cards for Dick McAuliffe #48.  Jello is on the top.  Post is on the bottom.  When the cards are side-by-side, it is easy to see that Jello cards are smaller. However, buying online or at a show, one might not have a comparison card.  The best way to determine the issue is the red line in the middle of the STATS box.  In a 1963 Jello card, the red line stops shortly before and after the player’s STATS.  In the 1963 Post card, the red line will extend well beyond the beginning and end of the player’s STATS toward the border (compare McAuliffe cards below).

If one follows the red-line rule (Post = wide red line), you will never confuse cards from the two issues as this design is consistent across all cards.

Conclusion

In closing, please feel free to comment.  All comments are moderated to cut down on spam and to stay on the topic.

What is an error card? (or variation card)

What is an error card? (or variation card)

I recently listed some 1991 Fleer baseball error or variation cards on eBay, which got me thinking about what actually determines if a card is a “true” error card?  Ultimately, the market for sports cards determines if a card is an error or variation card worth collecting.   If enough people are willing to collect a variation card, it obviously exists as a variation (social scientists would call this the social construction of reality, but I won’t delve into academic theories here...). Obviously, there has to be another version of an error card to make both worth collecting for a set builder or somebody that collects error cards.  Indeed, the 1991 Fleer baseball set is riddled with uncorrected error cards (usually labeled “UER” in a Beckett Guide or the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards).  Uncorrected error cards usually have no extra value because there is no other corrected version to own.  While the errors might be funny or just plain innocuous on UER cards, they affect the value of the card very little in 99.99% of the cases where no corrected version exists.

So what is a true error card?

While this might seem like a silly discussion to people who do not collect sports cards, one just needs to go to eBay and search on the words ‘1990 Pro Set error’ (no apostrophes) to see a number of cards being sold as error cards that probably are not true error or variation cards.  The 1990 Pro Set Football set is so riddled with true error cards, which were later corrected by Pro Set, that thousands of collectors chase after the various versions of the cards. This situation has created an actual market for Pro Set error cards.  While I think this is a great and a fun collecting strategy for an otherwise hugely overprinted set, opportunists now often list 1990 Pro Set cards on eBay with simple printing errors that they try to claim are variation or error cards. To me, a print dot or slightly astray print line is not an error.

Indeed, I prefer the following definition for error cards:

“An error card is a sports card that contains some sort of mistake, such as a misspelling or a photo of someone other than the athlete named on the card.” (footnote 1).

I would further add the word ‘human’ before mistake to make the definition complete.  In other words, some person had to mess up or make an error in the process of taking a card from inception to printing it for consumers for it to be an error.  That error could be in proofreading the card for typos to having the wrong player on the card.

A perfect example is the 1989 Fleer Kevin Romine #98 card pictured below.  The error version on the left has the photo of Randy Kutcher – the wrong player.  Fleer, in later print runs, corrected the error with Kevin Romine’s actual photo in the card of the right.  It’s a pure human-error-caused variation.  Either the photographer messed up writing down whose picture was taken or somebody in the Fleer design studio chose the wrong picture in the first version.  Because Fleer also corrected the error, some collectors believe you need both cards to have the full set.  Again, uncorrected error cards, while interesting, do not create a possible second card to collect.

Caption: The card of the left is the 1989 Fleer Kevin Romine error card (#98a) that has a photo of Randy Kutcher instead of Romine.  After the error was discovered, it was corrected in later print runs with card #98b with a picture of Kevin Romine.  Both cards carry just #98 on the back of the card.

Because of the need for human error in the above definition, printing defects, mis-cut cards and other types of factory production mistakes would likely be ruled out as true error cards.  Such errors come from production presses, which while maybe caused by human errors such as poor printing press maintenance, are not systematic to the design of the card.  Being systematic to the design of the card is an important aspect of the error card because all copies of the same sports card are ultimately printed and centered uniquely when put under enough magnification such as a microscope.

So what is a true variation card?

A variation card (where no error occurred) would have a similar definition:

A sports card can have legitimate variations if the systematic design of the card varies due to human intervention in the process that changes the design, picture or wording.

A classic example of such variations would be Fleer 1991 Team Logo Stickers that were packaged with baseball cards in wax packs.  Each 1991 MLB team has two sticker variations.  While this difference was never acknowledged by Fleer, it has been speculated that Fleer used two different companies to print sticker inserts for 1991 and that each was sent slightly different designs by Fleer or allowed to adapt their own designs (footnote 2).  This explanation makes sense as it has been established that Fleer used two printing firms to make the actual baseball player cards in 1991 in order to maximize the amount of cards that would be printed (footnote 3) and thus flood the market during the junk era mania.

Caption: Above are Atlanta Braves 1991 Fleer Logo Stickers that are visibly different in design and thus are variations.  They have been given the designations NNO1a and NNO1b by the Trading Card Database.

Again, human intervention or error is central to creating variation cards.  Even if the card has no errors, the human decision or confusion that leads to two designs creates the legitimate variation.

As should be pointed out, arbiters play a key role in determining errors and variations for collectors.  For example, Beckett Price Guide recognition of an error or variation card gives it legitimacy for many collectors.  It suddenly becomes part of the set as listed in Beckett.  Some web sites also play influential roles.  The Trading Card Database tries to log all the error and variation cards in a set as reported by its crowd-sourcing users.  However, in either case, a collector must convince the editors or web site masters that a card is a legitimate error or variation card.

Caption: Above are two variations of Nolan Ryan's card #302 in the 1991 Fleer set.  The variation is subtle (e.g., where the lines are ruled through the years of stats on the back side of the card).  I would consider this card to be a legitimate variation because human intervention created the line ruling differences.  Note: Beckett does not recognize this variation in their set list for 1991 Fleer baseball.  It has been recognized the the Trading Card Database.

Returning to the original paragraph of this post, I would like to point out that the market of collectors usually determines if a variation/error card exists.  If enough collectors are willing to chase and acquire a card that is a different version of the same card, that card will be considered a variation by those collectors.  The purpose of this post was to try to encourage some collectors to think about what makes a variation card worth collecting versus a printing defect or some other non-human-based variation.

End Note

Like all other posts, please feel free to make comments.  I review all comments before they are posted in order to reduce spam and keep things on topic.

Footnotes:

1. Definition from: http://sportscards.about.com/od/sportscardglossary/g/error_card.htm

2. http://fleersticker.blogspot.com/2009/07/1991-fleer-baseball-stickers.html

3. http://keymancollectibles.com/baseballcards/fleer/1991fleerbaseballcards.htm

Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, But Phil Esposito did Wear Plaid in his early 1970’s Hockey Cards

Occasionally, some sports cards are memorable because of their oddball nature or when something just seems out of place.  Ask any person who was an avid hockey card collector in the early 1970s like me if there was anything strange about Phil Esposito’s cards.  They will say: “the plaid pants”.  It’s funny, but a lot of my friends who collected remember the ridiculous plaid pants that were visible for three years of Esposito’s cards in 1970-71, 1971-72 and 1972-73.

Caption: Above is Phil Esposito's 1970-71 Topps card.  That must have been a sweet leisure suit he was wearing before the photo shoot.

It all started with the 1970 hockey set for which Topps, and their affiliated O-Pee-Chee Canadian partner, decided to get new photos of virtually all players for the 1970 card hockey issue.  The photos were likely done in a studio or conference room because the players’ silhouettes appear in front of the solid backgrounds that in the 1970-71 set also had what seem to be added ‘spotlights’ around the player’s body.   The studio nature of these shots can also be testified to by the fact that most players, other than goalies, are not wearing shoulder pads under their jerseys with a few exceptions.  Most goalies did seem to bring all their equipment with Ken Dryden notably wearing his mask unlike the other goalies in these cards (maybe his shot wasn’t a studio shot).

Caption: Above is Phil Esposito's 1972-73 Topps card.  This was the last year that his plaid pants were visible.

Apparently, when some of Boston Bruins showed up, it must have been a totally half-baked affair (or maybe the players were half-baked).  Either somebody forgot black hockey pants for part of the shoot or Esposito refused to wear them.  It was more likely the former case, because Ken Hodge was shot in his street pants also with that photo only appearing in the 1971-72 set with different, closer-up shots of Hodge used in the other years where his pants did not show.  Maybe Hodge refused to wear them too.  Who knows?

However, this biggest piece of evidence of systematic disarray at the photo shoot theory is that at least five different Bruins appear in the 1970-71 set in wearing Fred Stanfield’s hockey gloves.  The Bruins team put their player’s numbers on their gloves, and Fred Stanfield’s #17 gloves are worn in the photos of Stanfield, Ken Hodge, Phil Esposito, Wayne Cashman, Garnet Bailey and Ed Westfall.  All other Bruins players, like Bobby Orr, are photographed wearing their own gloves if the numbers are visible on the cards.

Caption: Above is Ken Hodge's 1971-72 Topps card.  Ken also joined the no-hockey-pants brigade for one year.  Note that he is also wearing Fred Stanfield's #17 gloves like Phil Esposito.

The fact that Esposito was a great player and future Hall of Famer made the plaid pants all the more noticeable.  When you were a kid in the 1970s, Espo’s card was one of the ones you read, looked over and maybe taped on your wall.  Those plaid pants were just weird.

By the way, if you do not remember, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid was a swing-and-a-miss old detective movie spoof comedy that was a collaboration between Carl Reiner and Steve Martin in 1982.

 End Note

Like all other posts, please feel free to make comments.  I review all comments before they are posted in order to reduce spam and keep things on topic.  Also, it may take me a few days to review comments.

1970s Topps Football Cards – Sweaty Guys and Airbrushed Pictures

Topps baseball sets in the early 1970s showed many design innovations like (1) the beautiful black bordered 1971 set, (2) the groovy, hip 1972 card designs, and (3) the 1975 bold color and mini-test-market designs.  These sets were eye-pleasing with mostly good, clean staged photos of players with occasional in-action shots.  As a result, many 1970s Topps baseball sets are still sought after by set builders today.  Thus, despite Topps being a monopoly in baseball cards, product designs were generally fresh in the early 1970s.

In football, Topps went in the opposite direction.  The football card sets basically were pretty awful with the exception of the 1972 design, which built on the bold block lettering and bright colors similar to many late 1960s and early 1970s consumer products.  However, in my opinion, Topps football cards of this era were really just below par because the pictures were not very good.  There was a reason that the pictures on football cards were bad throughout most of the 1970s.  As a cost savings measure, Topps only licensed from the National Football League Players’ Association (NFLPA) and dropped licensing from the NFL from 1970 through 1981 (footnote 1).  As a result, football cards could not show any team logos or other NFL copyrighted images (see my earlier posting here on how licensing works: http://junkwaxandobservations.blogspot.com/2012/08/how-sports-card-royalties-work.html ).  Football cards would have to be produced without using any NFL licensed material.

Why would the Topps Company go without an NFL license?  Obviously, it saved them money, but the main reason Topps could undertake such a money-saving move was their monopoly position in sports cards in the USA in the 1970s.  While Topps had only the MLB players locked up by contracts and thus entry was possible in other sports, very few other companies seemed to want to enter the sports card business, possibly because they could not enter the baseball market, which was the major market by size at the time.  There are likely economies of scale to producing cards for a number of sports rather than just one sport.  You can allocate the capital cost of printing presses, salaries of card designers and general overhead across print runs for multiple sports year round.  For a market as small as sports cards, not being able to market baseball cards to anchor your cost structure was a fairly significant problem (footnote 2).

Anyway, the lack of an NFL license in the 1970s meant that pictures of many players would have to be close up still photos, posed shots or airbrushed action photos.  The photos would need to be airbrushed to clean off all the NFL trademarked team logos to avoid infringing upon NFL-owned properties.  While airbrushing and working around logos is common in the sports card trade, Topps position as a monopolist seemed to make them lazy in the production qualities of the 1970s cards with the pictures on the front especially suffering.  The quality of the airbrushing work was not very strong with colors often not quite matching team colors.  Also, by the late 1970s, a large number of football card pictures seemed to be close up shots of players on the sidelines staring off into space.  These were easy photos to take and did not require much airbrushing to clean up if taken at an angle where no copyrighted logos could be seen.  However, as a result, we have lots of pictures of sweaty players doing nothing.

Caption: Nick Mike-Mayer gets the almost neon green airbrush job of his Eagles helmet in his 1978 Topps card attempting to join Marvin the Martian.  “That makes me very angry.” says Marvin.

When firms are monopolists, they can provide a fairly lousy product or service and charge a high price for it without worrying about competition.  In terms of quality, the monopolist has to produce a product at a quality level that is just high enough to keep customers buying the product since sports cards are not a necessity.  Topps also expanded the size of their football sets in the 1970s, thus making any set builders buy more of their poorly designed cards.

Caption: 1978 Topps Football Cards. Stu Voigt in a posed photo still has a monstrous cowlick.  Give the guy a comb.  On the right, Joe Lavender apparently was reading a good novel on the sidelines.

The 1978 Topps football set represents the low point in picture quality in my opinion.  Now, it did not help the situation that the hair styles of the time were long hair or big afros.  This made football players all the more sweaty or unkempt.  However, we often see in Topps baseball cards from the same era, very nice posed shots of players who have big clean afros or washed hair.  Also, the baseball cards had much better use of lighting without players’ faces being in shadows.

Caption: 1978 Topps Football Cards. Ron Saul and Oliver Davis stare aimlessly off into space.  For some reason, the top of Davis' head has been cropped off.  Apparently, he has too much hair.  Love those sideburns!

Why Topps 1970s baseball cards were so much better than football cards in production values is possibly puzzling since Topps was a monopolist in both products.  One explanation might be that because Topps had a license that paid MLB with royalties that the baseball league gave Topps greater access to players or possibly even demanded better quality.  The NFL had no direct financial stake in Topps' 1970s products, so football teams may have been less accommodating.  Another possible explanation might be that Topps didn’t spend much on the photos because of the size of the market for football cards did not make it cost effective.  A third possible explanation would be that in the late 1970s that Topps card designs deteriorated in general across all sports and that football deteriorated more quickly because of lesser attention by Topps.

In the early 1980s, Topps’ design and photo quality in football cards became much better.  In 1981, Topps introduced a subset of cards in their football set called Super Action cards that had very nice photos of game action.  In 1982, they signed a license with NFL properties and could shows players in their uniforms without airbrushing out team logos.  This made both action and sideline photos easier because the photographer did not have to worry about capturing “too much logo” in any shot that would have to be subsequently airbrushed out.

 End Note

Like all other posts, please feel free to make comments.  I review all comments before they are posted in order to reduce spam and keep things on topic.  Also, it may take me a few days to review comments.

Footnotes

1. http://www.cardboardconnection.com/1970-topps-football-cards

2. Additional evidence of the economies of scale theory would be the short-lived tenures of both Fleer and the Philadelphia Gum Company in the football card market in the 1960s.  Fleer produced cards from 1960 to 1963 for the upstart American Football League (AFL) with Topps having the NFL contract.  When Fleer was sued by Topps in 1963 for beginning MLB baseball card production (and had to stop producing cards after printing their first 66 card series), they did not seem to pursue aggressive renewal of their AFL rights.  I suspect that being denied entry into baseball card market limited the attractiveness of making football cards.  Surprisingly, Philadelphia Gum Company backroom-dealed Topps to get sole NFLPA rights in 1964, which sent Topps scrambling for the AFL players’ rights, which had previously belonged to Fleer.  Philadelphia Gum Company exited with sort of a whimper after the AFL and NFL merged and the NFLPA awarded Topps sole rights to NFL players’ images in starting in 1968.  There is no evidence that Philadelphia aggressively tried to outbid Topps, so I suspect that producing football cards alone was marginal economically (see: http://www.psacard.com/Articles/ArticleView/5019/collecting-the-1966-philadelphia-football-card-set for more on Philadelphia cards from the 1960s and discussion of these contract issues.)

1991 Pro Line Football Portraits: The Worst Junk Wax Set Ever

Prologue

Sorry about the long delay between postings.  Work has been busy.

A Really Bad Set of over 300 Cards

In previous posts, I have talked about the Junk Wax or Junk Era for sports cards that ran from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s.  During this era, the sports card companies went crazy producing virtually any kind of set that was eaten up by the customer, which had changed from kids to collectors.  A lot of really bad sets were produced in this era, because mostly anything that was printed basically ended up selling OK with hoarding collectors.

The 1991 Pro Line football set is the worst-of-the-worst in my opinion because it took sports cards farthest away from anything that a kid or even a sports fan would want to own.  In the 1991 Pro Line football set of 300 cards plus some inserts, there are:

1. No action pictures.  Most of the poses were sort of ridiculous vanity shots that kids sometimes now get for their high school yearbooks.  The pictures seem to have little connection to the players, their personalities or their positions.

2. Almost no player information on the backs of cards.  Instead, there are inane paragraph-long observations by the player profiled about what it’s like to be a rookie or star or whatever.  The cards had no stats, no schools, no player measurements, and no player trivia.   They were worthless for player information.

3. Most of the cards shamelessly display players wearing official NFL-licensed merchandise.  This set was more of a catalog for officially licensed NFL merchandise than a football card set.

4. A special subset had player’s wives showing off the officially licensed NFL women’s wear.  Player’s wives?!?!?

Caption: On the left, Erik Howard of the Giants displays his officially licensed NFL T-shirt and shorts while seemingly trying to hold in a massive dump.  On the right, Eric Allen shows off his flat-top haircut, officially licensed NFL Eagles warm up jacket, and officially licensed NFL Zuba Pants while sitting in front of what looks like the entrance to a Men's Room at Veteran's Stadium.  I own and keep these several cards only for their schlock value.

Why?

This set was the brainchild of a person at NFL Properties, which was the producer of the Pro Line set and not a sports card company.  Printing and distribution had to have been outsourced to other parties.

I can just see the conversation at NFL properties that got this set going:

Executive #1:  We should go directly into the sports card business.  Those things are selling like hotcakes.

Executive #2:  Yeah.  People will buy anything.  Donruss put out this crappy baseball set called ‘Studio’ this summer with pictures of players that looked vanity shots from a high school year book.  People bought’em. (footnote 1)

Executive #1: Really? No way.

Executive #2:  Yep.  And the best part is you don’t have to spend money on game photographers or even going to games.  You just take artsy looking still shots of players.

Executive #1: What if we put the players in NFL merchandise?  The commissioner says we need to sell more of that stuff.

Executive 2: What about the women’s merchandise?

Executive 1: The players have wives don’t they?

Executive 2: Awesome.  You’re a genius.

And so this atrocious set was born.

Caption: On the right, Jennifer Montana’s rear end is used on this insert card to hawk the NFL’s ‘Spirit Collectible’ line of women’s clothing.  On the left, Babette Kosar models a ‘Spirit Collectible’ team jacket while contemplating how she will have to divorce her husband Bernie when he burns through all his money.   I own and keep these cards only for their schlock value.

In Reality...

In terms of history, the 1991 Pro Line set did create some friction between the NFL and the Player’s Association (i.e., the NFLPA or player’s union).  The sports card companies had been getting legal permission to use the players’ images through the NFLPA and were paying royalties to the union.  NFL Properties went directly to the individual players in the 1991 Pro Line set and each was paid $5000 for participating and signing off on their image rights for this set (footnote 2).  The relationship between the NFL and the NFLPA was already icy in 1991, so NFL Properties probably saw no need give the union more money, because such money was often used to file lawsuits against the NFL.  No independent card company would have likely risked the wrath of the NFLPA in signing so many players directly and not going through the union.  Such a company would have risked not getting a license from the union in future years if the direct-to-players move did not work out.

In defense of the 1991 Pro Line set, it did have one innovation, which was putting autographed versions of the cards (about one-per-wax box) in the product.  Also, the autograph cards contained stickers or stamps to verify that they were genuine, which was ahead of its time in 1991.  That being said, NFL properties sort of blew the autograph inserts by having players sign the cards on the back. (footnote 3)  This makes the cards less presentable for the collector.

There still is a very active secondary market for these 1991 Pro Line autographs on eBay, and several collectors are passionate about trying to put together autographed sets (footnote 4).

Caption: Nick Lowery, in a very flattering pose, shows off his officially licensed NFL shorts and shirt.  For some reason, three pairs of shoes and a Chiefs helmet are placed randomly around Nick for ambiance.  I am throwing this card out after this post.

Market reception of the set seemed to be poor by 1991 standards (footnote 2).  My guess is that the autographs became a part of the set after focus groups “threw up” on the cards for being so bad.  Despite the modest reception, the NFL continued to produce two more Pro Line sets in 1992 and 1993.  NFL Properties seemed to have learned a little bit of a lesson by 1992, as the 1992 set had more action shots of players in real games interspersed with vanity photos.  Also, the hawking of NFL clothes was more subtle.  By 1995, NFL Properties had sold the ‘Pro Line' name to Classic Games and was out of the card business.

There are still plenty of factory sealed Pro Line 1991 football boxes around and they sell on eBay for around $12-15 when shipping is included (footnote 5).  This is less than they cost collectors when they originally came out.  Without the possibility of an autograph in each box, I suspect they would sell for much less.

In closing, what made the 1991 Pro Line set so truly awful is how far it strayed from what many sports card enthusiasts, myself included, feel is great about sports cards, kids and collecting.  Putting aside the obvious and ridiculous amount of product placement for NFL licensed clothing, the set seemed to have everything a kid would not want from a set.  Imagine that your parents gave you a box of this set by accident back in 1991.  You and friends could trade a Phylicia Rashad for a Stacey O'Brien while developing a craving for Zuba Pants.

In conclusion, there is no market for non-autographed cards from this set and such cards are truly junk.  Please throw all cards from this set in the recycle bin, so as to save some trees from being cut down and to save the the world from the embarrassment of this set.

End Note

Like all other posts, please feel free to make comments.  I review all comments before they are posted in order to reduce spam and keep things on topic.  Also, it may take me a few days to review comments.

Footnotes

1. The whole vanity shot of players idea was first fully implemented in Donruss' Studio brand of cards starting in summer of 1991.  While cards with vanity pictures (and players performing their hobbies and such) had appeared in cards sets before, the Studio brand centered an entire set around "studio" portraits of players.  Donruss Studio sets rank high on my list of worthless junk sets.

2. http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19911020&slug=1312041

3. Another interesting post on this set can be found here: http://sanjosefuji.blogspot.com/2011/03/good-bad-ugly-3-1991-pro-line-portraits.html .  That blog is where I became aware of the autograph location issue, which I have found mentioned in other descriptions of the set.

4. An interesting site that shows one person's passion for these autographs can be found here: http://bcn33rs.wordpress.com/about/ .  My perception of the market for Pro Line autograph cards is from examining all finished auctions on eBay on 11-11-2012.

5. The prices for wax boxes of Pro Line cards is from examining all finished auctions on eBay on 11-11-2012.