TCDB Kirby Puckett Project: 1995

1995 would mark the last year of Kirby's career.  Kirby suffered an eye ailment in the next spring training and never played with the Twins again.  So, from his first year in the majors (1984) to his last, the cards span 13 pages in TCDb, meaning somewhere between 1200-1300 cards for his major league career.   1996 set inclusions are not unreasonable, as he was with the team for spring training and those checklists are done pretty early, but for sake of argument we are sticking with 1995.  There are 43 total pages of Puckett cards, meaning that about 70% of his cards have come out after he retired. 

One thing that jumps out when scanning through the cards I'm missing currently is that there are a lot of variations on cards that have popped up over the years.  Three types specifically come to mind. One is the Donruss variations where the Leaf Inc on the back either ends with a period... or doesn't. Second, the 1991 Upper Deck Hologram variations, and third are the Topps codes on the back with *C or *D or whatever.  All these variations seem more factory based, and not exactly intended by the company.  

I imagine they cause lots of angst amongst those who don't care about such minor things.  If I want my checklist to only have one version of the 1990 Donruss All-Star card, that's fine, but this guy over here has 5 versions of it and now I have to as well.  (This card has an error version as well, so it goes error/dot, error/no dot, correct/dot, correct/no dot, factory set version).  Now by now you know I'm crazy, so I don't mind trying to get all 5.  But, it would be nice for a collector to have a checklist that fits their collection better.  I know some collectors don't care for the all the parallels that just change colors.  In my other player collections, I'm trying to collect all cards with print #s higher than 100.  

Pack Border

Factory Set Border

681 cards places me in 12th place.  Still left to add are 1996-today, the top-loader cards, and the odd shaped cards.  I think I can get top 5, but there is a lot of dead space between 2005-2021 in my collection.  Well see!