Timing is everything. David Cone should be remembered as one of the best Mets pitchers ever. But because he didn’t play on the 1986 team – along with an unfortunate issue or two during his Mets tenure – he’s rarely among the first pitchers fans tick off when listing the team’s greats. The fact he had some big moments in his career later on with the Yankees and is now a Yankee broadcaster doesn’t help, either. Timing, man. It makes him the perfect choice to pick to represent the 1990 Topps set.
Earlier, we talked about the “Junk Wax Era,” where trading card companies cranked up the printing presses and put out an obscene number of cards. We also talked about how there’s no consensus as to when either this era started or ended. But pretty much everyone agrees that this 1990 set would have been included. And that’s a shame, because this should have been a classic Topps set, rather than one that makes collectors wince.
Cards should be vibrant and colorful – not making you think about station wagon paneling like those 1962s or 1987s did. Perhaps this 1990 set was an homage to the 1975 set, the most colorful of them all. But where maybe the 75s might have stepped over the line from colorful to garish, these 1990 cards seem to have the colorful mark hit just right.
The set announced itself with authority, leading off with Nolan Ryan and then including a 5-card subset of Ryan in honor of him reaching 5,000 strikeouts. Each subset card showed Ryan on a different team. And it also featured individual All-Star cards – which all sets should have – and had a memorial card for Bart Giamatti, too.
By this time, Topps had mastered the tight focus action shots, like this one of Cone. It was quite the contrast to those 1971 action shots that left you wondering just who the photo was supposed to be honoring. Great design, great photos, intriguing subsets – what more could you want?
In addition to the time period in which it was released working against it, the 1990 Topps set had the misfortune of going up against the 1990 Leaf set, which is generally considered one of the best releases of the era. While the 1989 Upper Deck set gets the glamour – mostly due to the Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card – the ’90 Leaf set is better in just about every other way.
After 1990, Topps put out base sets in seven straight seasons with plain white borders. Kind of like how the Mets went from Dwight Gooden, Ron Darling and Cone to Mark Clark, Bobby Jones and Pete Harnisch. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Topps followed up the white borders with gold borders in three consecutive years. Can’t tell the players without a scorecard and can’t tell the 1991-2000 set year without flipping over the card and looking at the back.
We should give both Cone and the 1990 set a stronger look and appreciate them more than we do.
Cone was indeed a great pitcher. Also should be considered as being obtained in one of the best deal the team ever made. I believe he and Keith Hernandez were pretty close while teammates.
The card itself is good but as you observed, the team’s competitive edge was beginning to slip.
Jim – I thought of you recently, as I picked up a bottle of RC cola. Didn’t taste as good without ballplayers on the can.
It will be interesting to watch how Fantatics transforms the Topps franchise over the next few years.
Loved Cone as a Met — hated that trade to the Blue Jays.
Didn’t Cone famously throw like 150+ pitches in a meaningless SF game? My recollection is fuzzy.
People in my card groups are uniformly negative about Fanatics – saying the only thing they have going for them is money and their jerseys and customer service are terrible. For the people who still collect modern, my hope is that with the purchase of Topps, that Fanatics just stays out of their way and they let the people who’ve been running the operation for Topps just do what they’ve been doing.
July, 1992, under Jeff Torberg:
>> With an exhausting, exhilarating performance that wound up requiring the staggering total of 166 pitches, Cone defeated the San Francisco Giants, 1-0, last night at Shea Stadium. The lead stood up, even if Cone was barely able to when he was done. <<
The Mets went 72-90 that season.