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Frank Thomas Rookie, 1990 Fleer with wrong back
Praumber
Posts: 6 ✭
I have a Thomas RC, U-87, with Edwin Nunez U-98, on the back. I've found next to nothing online about it, and a few collectors I've shown are not aware of it. One was on EBAY recently, but not anymore. SGC and Beckett have a few in their POP, but I can't find it in the PSA POP. Does anyone know anything about this card or why it's so unknown?
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PSA will not grade wrong backs
Not unless you're talking 1948 Leaf or 1941 Playball anyway.
Or, if they do it without intending to, like they did with this interesting example someone landed relatively recently:
https://ebay.com/itm/224517037342?hash=item3446421d1e%3Ag%3A2VoAAOSwhFBg3VVL&nma=true&si=fvdFIVczo%252F4r3v5EtdOkoRnRz0g%253D&orig_cvip=true&nordt=true&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2557
Plus a couple more:
https://ebay.com/itm/284207907102?hash=item422c1c811e:g:R-EAAOSwaZhgQcQQ
https://ebay.com/itm/224050894062?hash=item342a7954ee:g:bpoAAOSwBahU-zu5
Thanks. It appears PSA won't grade them and add to the POP unless they grade it as a normal card accidentally, without identifying it as a variation. Still a good card for a Thomas RC collector.
It seems like every few days now there is another one of these kinds of posts...
These cards, like a lot of other massively produced wrong backs (ie 91 Topps BB with 90 Topps FB backs), are sheet cut cards fished out of the printer's dumpsters or removed from the printer in "less-than-legal" ways. Singles from this set turn up a few times a year. Always greatly OC/miscut since they are scrap, misprinted alignments that didn't meet QC criteria. It is always the same player combos too. None of them fetch much but obviously the Thomas is always gonna get some interest.
Once again, just because you didn't see 20 of them on ebay doesn't mean they are high demand or very rare.
That’s what I don’t get - if this were coins, these would be mint errors (which PCGS does grade - owned by same parent company) and off the charts - I think at some point these sorts of things will become valuable…..saw a severely off center black refractor lebron 2003 that went for like $2k - was sad I missed it…
It is hard to understand the difference between "scrap misprint alignments that didn't meet QC criteria" and a card that somehow didn't pick up the black ink in the name box. Isn't that what an error card is? What makes one error card a scrap and the other one worth $10K is ambiguous at best. The popularity is because it's a HOF RC, not because it has an error. The value is because only a small fraction of the cards in circulation have the error. I'd like to hear from the Frank Thomas collectors out there who sent their normal U-87 Thomas RC to PSA to be graded and threw away all of the Thomas cards with the wrong back.
Interesting to see wrong backs in slabs. Did they change their stance on them? Those are fairly new slabs.
I do not think that PSA meant for those recent ones to have been graded and slabbed at all, but rather that they are ones that got through entirely by mistake. Otherwise, they would have noted the wrong back on the label.
The first part is easy to answer: the Thomas 1990 Topps NNOF came from packs, they can be pulled by collectors. They were not cut from sheets "illegally" removed from the dumpsters of printing facilities. To date, nobody has reported pulling the 1990 Fleer Wrong Back from a set and collectors place a lot of value on that distinction. A better comparison to your card would be the 1990 Topps Thomas Blank Front which is another card cut from sheets that were intended to be destroyed but made their way into the hobby. There is a reason that this card doesn't get anywhere near the sales of the NNOF.
And that last part is irrelevant since nobody is claiming that Thomas collectors threw their wrong back 1990 Fleer Thomas cards away. Anyone who comes across one will likely find it interesting and a hobby curiosity featuring a HOFer but there just isn't a distribution history for it for the hobby to latch onto. Plenty of player collectors really love sheet cut, printer's waste stuff when it creates a variant of a card they have already but almost every time they come up in discussion, nobody wants to commit much money to them, likely as a result of the "illegitimate" stigma attached to them.
Great points, thank you. I have no way to tell where this card came from 30 years ago, but I didn't buy or trade individual cards from collectors. I bought packs and sets, or got them as gifts. If I had to guess, this came from a pack, not snuck out the back door of Fleer. Wish I knew.
Well, in that case, your guess would be incorrect. First, these cards didn't come from packs at all. Second, these sheet cut wrongback cards pop up periodically on ebay for the last 16 years (that I can personally account for) and those of us in the E&V community that have been around paying attention to this stuff for aa long time know very well how these cards and the many, many others like them, made their way into the hobby. It is a pretty common scenario, especially for peak junk era cards.
I do appreciate your insight. Are you saying these cards flooded the market as soon as they we're printed, or several years later? Were they sold in cardshops? I boxed up my cards in 1997 and haven't touched them since. However it came to be in my collection, I picked it up in the early 90s when I only bought packs. Not trying to convince you, it's how I got my cards. What's E&V?
Error and variation. To answer your first question, I can only account for their existence going back to 2005ish when I turned my hobby focus on E&V cards. I began deeply researching, discovering and cataloging junk era variations, mostly due to the fact that the hobby publications had stopped. The E&V collectors were familiar with these 1990 Fleer Update wrong backs at that time so I would bet that they started entering the hobby in late 1990 (plenty of other RCs and stars bigger than Thomas at this time) or in 1991 when Thomas stuff really took off.
You should know that there are certain junk era wrong/blank front/back cards that always pop up every few years (or months) such as these. The 1990 Pro Set Football, 1987-1992 Topps Blank Fronts and 1987-1989 Topps Wrong Back/Fronts are among the most common.
FYI Here is a very recent sale of the Thomas/Nunez pair:
https://ebay.com/itm/154485697744?hash=item23f810acd0%3Ag%3AFSUAAOSwF65f%7EQ7D&nma=true&si=zKCSnj8Rylrc8iS1CTX1wWC0fA4%253D&orig_cvip=true&nordt=true&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2557
Some interesting info:
https://blowoutforums.com/showthread.php?t=1344638
Cool card. I enjoy errors like this.
I was going through cards I accumulated from packs but never seriously collected. Sifting through some 2000 Upper Deck Black Diamond Baseball I got from a purchase of a small number of packs, I stumbled across one with Larry Walker on the front and #17 Pedro Martinez on the back--two HOFers! My first thought (obviously) was two cards stuck together, but no--it's actually just one card. That's a first--for me, anyway.
I remember these pretty well. I think Beckett even had a little blurb or note about people finding them at the time.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if the Thomas cards came from sets. I ripped an '88 Fleer Update Glossy set that had 30 or so wrong back/upside down cards in them, including a Biggio, Grace and Weiss. It was only about 1/4 of the set but Fleer factory sets back then were compiled from multiple feeds so it's not surprising. All of the wrong backs have their backs upside down so it's an easy mistake to make at the printer's. I doubt their QC gave a bunny's fart about it.
Arthur
It is always possible that they also could have made their way into sets but it has been very well known among Thomas and variation collectors for a long time now that large quantities of the uncut sheets made their way into the hobby and were cut up. There are several examples linked above that show the creative ways in which they were cut and in some cases, graded as sheet segments.
I'm definitely not questioning your info, Jackson. Just thought I'd share a personal novelty that leaves the door open a crack.
Arthur