Barry Larkin Collection 746: 1998 Donruss Collections - #20 - Prized Collections parallel

Barry Larkin

Year:  1998

Brand:  Donruss Collections

Card number:  20

Parallel set:  Prized Collection

Being a player collector for a player who's career spanned all of the 1990s means having to learn about a lot of weird and confusing baseball card sets!  Take, for example, today's card from the 1998 Donruss Collections set.  This set actually had five different Barry Larkin cards (#20 shown above as part of the the Donruss Baseball subset, #367 part of the Leaf Collection subset, #423 and #520 both part of the Donruss Elite subset) plus #600 in the short printed portion of the base set (called Donruss Preferred Collections which is confusing in its own right)!  

Even worse, each of the five Larkin cards has a parallel.  There is the Donruss Baseball Prized Collection (only 560 copies made), the Leaf Prized Collections (only 400 copies), the Donruss Elite Prized Collection (only 220 copies), and finally the Donruss Preferred Prize Collection (only 55 copies) though it should be noted that none of the parallels are serially numbered (which is kind of strange for a Donruss product)!

UPDATE:  I learned from defgav that this card is actually one of the Prized Collection parallels which definitely makes it rarer than I gave it credit for when I originally wrote this post.  Now I have to go about tracking down a regular base card but at least I have one of the more challenging parallels in my collection!

I can't even figure where I ought to begin when it comes to tracking down the various Larkin cards from this set...for now, I think I'll simply settle for the one card that I do own (though it should be noted that while the card stock is a little too thin for my liking the card actually looks really good in person).  At least Donruss got that right about this set.