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Barry Larkin Collection 611: 1999 Upper Deck SPx - #31

Barry Larkin
Year:  1999
Brand:  Upper Deck SPx
Card number:  31

Despite all the bells and whistles on the card, this is nothing more than Barry's base card from the set.  He does have a pair of parallels of this card as well, a Radiance parallel numbered out of 100 and a one-of-one parallel called Spectrum that I'll definitely never own (as of this post I don't own one of the Radiance parallels either for what it's worth).

This is one of those classic small Upper Deck sets which barely features any Reds (only Barry and Sean Casey made the cut for the base set according to the checklist).  I don't have much interest in sets that all but ignore the Reds typically...so SPx never ended up on my collecting radar back in 1999.  That begs the question, did I miss out on an awesome set?

In a word, no.  In two words, not really.  The front of the card looks better than it scanned, but it's still not my cup of tea.  The back suffers from the usual abbreviated career statistics that Upper Deck often utilized.  Furthermore, while the card back has a clean enough design, why isn't the color red featured prominently rather than the blue ribbons?  It would have been a fairly simply change to make those little ribbons team specific colors - and I think that would have been a great modification to the card design (especially since Upper Deck grouped players in the set by team).


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