The bell rings. Excessive off the fun of escaping Miss O’Brien’s English class with out being referred to as on, I head to the basketball courtroom the place my buddy—we’ll name him “Rambis”—out-rebounds the playground 40-0, half on his personal missed layups, and I shoot one for six with double-digit turnovers. Because the event at all times does, this requires a Cactus Cooler from the varsity merchandising machine, a fast examine to see if both of us has quite a lot of bucks, and a visit to the native card store.
Usually there’s no resolution to be made. After all it’s Donruss all the best way. Nonetheless nice the Topps and Fleer playing cards had been in 1985, how may something prime the black-bordered magnificence that was Donruss Dwight Gooden?
Positive the packs value double the others, however that solely proved they had been the suitable selection. Till they weren’t. A compelling new product referred to as Leaf had arrived! J’étais amoureux.
However wasn’t Leaf simply Donruss for the Canadian market? If you need the brief reply, Sure, that’s precisely what it was. After all, no person who reads the SABR Baseball Playing cards weblog desires the brief reply, so right here’s the actually lengthy one.
1985 Donruss
The 1985 Donruss set consisted of 660 playing cards, distributed as a single collection, and comprised as follows:
- 26 Diamond Kings, numbered 1-26
- 20 Rated Rookies, numbered 27-46
- 1 Lou Gehrig puzzle card, numbered 635
- 1 additional Pete Rose card (Expos), along with his commonplace Reds card 641
- 1 multi-player card “Two for the Title,” numbered 651
- 6 Guidelines playing cards, numbered 1-6
- 1 Diamond Kings guidelines card, unnumbered
Filling out the rest of the set are 603 extra base playing cards (roughly 23 per workforce) operating the gamut from Corridor of Famers to bench gamers to one-and-done rookies.
1985 Leaf
Have been the Leaf set the identical dimension as Donruss, there can be little to jot down about right here. Nonetheless, at solely 264 playing cards, the Leaf set had nearly 400 fewer playing cards than its U.S. counterpart, that means there have been varied selections made relating to what to depart out and what to retain.
Diamond Kings
The Leaf set hung onto all 26 Diamond Kings from the Donruss set and even saved their authentic numbering.
Pretty much as good style precluded the smacking of the Leaf brand atop these Dick Perez masterpieces, the one option to distinguish Donruss from Leaf is to flip these playing cards over. The Leaf variations omit workforce logos in favor of a portion of the participant bio translated into French.
Rated Rookies
Whereas “Rated Rookies,” an idea devised by Invoice Madden, was a differentiator of the Donruss model, the Leaf set kind of chucked it to the facet of the highway. Of the 20 Rated Rookies from the U.S. set, just one made it to Canadian soil: Oakland A’s infielder Steve Kiefer.
Initially #35 within the Donruss set, Kiefer jumps to #27 in Leaf. Why him? I can’t provide an incredible reply right here. Although Steve would land in Vancouver the following 12 months, he had no Canadian connection as of 1985. However, neither did any of the opposite 19 U.S. Rated Rookies, so why not Steve?
Lou Gehrig puzzle
The Leaf set retained the Lou Gehrig puzzle card from the U.S. set, although with an surprising twist.
For no matter cause, the cardboard remained #635 because it was within the U.S. set, a wierd method provided that your complete Leaf set had solely 260 playing cards. Actually, there isn’t any easy option to distinguish the Canadian Lou Gehrig card from its U.S. counterpart. Plus les choses changent, plus elles restent les mêmes !
Pete Rose bonus card
Solely the usual Pete Rose card from the united statesset is retained, leaving his Montreal Expos bonus card on the chopping room flooring.
Whether or not Rose had fallen out of favor together with his former followers in Montreal or whether or not the abbreviated Leaf guidelines merely couldn’t help a double dose of Charlie Hustle, I’m undecided.
“Two for the Title”
With a necessity to chop 400 playing cards (in reality, 402 as we’ll quickly see), it will be straightforward to deem “Two for the Title” non-essential for the Leaf set. Nonetheless, no firm knew higher than Donruss simply how good Don Mattingly was for enterprise again then. The cardboard stayed, renumbered as 140.
Guidelines playing cards
Leaf retained guidelines playing cards as a part of its set. Nonetheless, for the reason that set was a lot smaller, solely three commonplace guidelines playing cards (plus one Diamond Kings guidelines) had been wanted. The usual guidelines playing cards are confusingly numbered 1-3, matching the playing cards numbers of the set’s first three Diamond Kings. In hindsight, CL1-CL3 would have made extra sense.
As within the U.S. set, the Diamond Kings guidelines is unnumbered. As with the Gehrig puzzle card, there doesn’t look like any straightforward option to distinguish the cardboard from its Donruss counterpart.
Canadian Greats
Whereas the trail from Donruss to Leaf was 99% one in all attrition, there have been two playing cards on the Leaf guidelines that had been Canadian exclusives. Occupying slot 251 on the guidelines was the primary of two “Canadian Nice” playing cards. It featured Dick Perez paintings of Blue Jays ace Dave Stieb on the entrance whereas promptly misspelling his identify on the again. As was the case with all errors in Leaf set, no correction was made.
The second “Canadian Nice” card adopted at #252 and belonged to Expos leadoff man Tim Raines.
Everybody else
This left 228 slots to fill on the Leaf guidelines, drawing from a pool of 603 gamers. Roughly talking, just a little over a 3rd of the gamers would make the reduce.
Canadian groups
As you may think, Donruss went out of its option to steer massive variety of Expos and Blue Jays onto the Leaf guidelines. Aside from the already counted Diamond Kings and Canadian Greats, there have been 16 Expos and 15 Blue Jays. As compared, different groups averaged 8 base playing cards apiece.
Rookies
Although we noticed no effort to retain Rated Rookies, what about common rookies? Not less than in my neck of the woods, the Pastime had already handed a tipping level the place playing cards of random rookies no person had heard of had been heading straight into penny sleeves whereas playing cards of on a regular basis gamers had been thought-about fluff to all however oldtimers and set builders.
Donruss acknowledged this, at the very least within the U.S. market, devoting 100 slots on its guidelines to rookie playing cards. Whilst you may anticipate the Leaf guidelines to have adopted go well with, it was simply the other. All the Leaf set had solely 11 rookie playing cards. Of the playing cards nonetheless prized at present, Gooden, Clemens, Puckett, and Hersisher made the reduce. Eric Davis didn’t.
Stars and Superstars
Not surprisingly, the Leaf guidelines confirmed a robust bias towards star gamers. You possibly can see this by glancing on the names checked off on Donruss guidelines 1. The checked gamers are those that made it into the Leaf set.
Sharp-eyed readers could discover a handful of prime gamers that didn’t make the reduce, amongst them Jim Rice (50), Tony Gwynn (63), and Ryne Sandberg (67). Nonetheless, these names are hardly random. They seem to replicate a strategic selection not to double up on gamers who already had Diamond Kings playing cards.
The rest of the Donruss checklists exhibits kind of the identical phenomenon. As an example, right here is guidelines 2 with all main stars besides Cal Ripken (169), who’s a 1985 Diamond King, checked off.
Ditto for guidelines 3, through which the key stars omitted past the Expos Rose card are all Diamond Kings: Lou Whitaker (293) and Don Mattingly (295).
Among the many greater names on guidelines 4 to not crack the Leaf set are Paul Molitor (359) and Tommy John (423). Neither participant was a Diamond King. A notable inclusion was Terry Puhl (426), the one Canadian-born participant on your complete Donruss guidelines.
High gamers from guidelines 5 not in Leaf are Dusty Baker (445) and Joaquin Andujar (449). Andujar is a Diamond King however Baker isn’t.
The highest participant omitted from Leaf on the ultimate Donruss guidelines is Davey Lopes (604). Two future Canadian legends (Joe Carter, Jimmy Key) fail to crack the Leaf set as nicely.
Abstract
The components for the 1985 Leaf guidelines concerned a number of issues that appeared predictible:
- Hold the Diamond Kings
- Hold the highest stars
- Hold many of the Expos and Blue Jays, together with Canadian-born Terry Puhl
It additionally had a handful of surprises:
- Dump nearly all of the Rated Rookies
- Dump nearly all of the (unrated) rookies
- Introduce a model new “Canadian Greats” subset
Lastly, the Leaf set economized by dropping the additional Pete Rose card in addition to base playing cards of all 26 Diamond Kings. The outcome was a scaled-down model of the Donruss set, wealthy in star energy and native heroes, whose 12-card packs—most significantly for me—had greater than double the possibility of a Doc vs. the usual Donruss set.
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