Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Puzzling baseball card

I was sorting through some old baseball cards when I came across this strange one. Pictured below are two copies of a 1988 Score card (158 of 660) featuring Lee Mazzilli of the New York Mets. The two cards are obviously from separate print runs (as you can tell by the difference in color saturation), but they should be identical in every other aspect.

They are not. Can you spot where they differ?














Yes, oddly enough, the two print runs featured two different spellings of the same player's name! (I believe the one on the right is the correct spelling.) I've never seen such a discrepancy before. It seems that Score misspelled Mazzilli's name at first, caught the error somewhere along the way, and corrected it. But not before some mistake cards got out.

If you collect cards, please let me know: have you seen a mistake like this before? If so, can you remember the example? If not, what do you think about Score's 1988 Lee Mazzilli mistake?

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