Barry Larkin Collection 07: 1990 Donruss

Barry Larkin 

Year: 1990 

Brand: Donruss 

Card Number: 71 

While certainly not my favorite set, the 1990 Donruss set does look good for Cincinnati Reds cards (with a bright red border and a light red back, the colors complement the team nicely). This particular Larkin card was one of the first Barry Larkin cards that I pulled out of a pack, I still remember being excited by it as a youngster! For that reason, the 1990 Donruss set will also have a special place in my heart - and should Donruss get a MLB license and then pull a "Topps" and produce a retro-line of cards based on past card designs, I'd probably still buy some of the 1990-inspired cards.

***Late update***  added 12/17/2020

Just when you think you know all you need to know about early 90s baseball cards, well, you learn you don't really know anything at all!  It turns out that there are four different versions of this particular card!!

The "regular" base card is shown here - you can tell by the copyright line on the back of the card, here it reads "Leaf, Inc." (with the period).  There is a second version of this card that's identical except it doesn't have the period after "Inc".  The third version is a factory version (with a different border - the "paint splats" are different) and the fourth version is an Aqueous test parallel version that I think it fairly rare to find these days!