Barry Larkin Collection 751: 2004 Donruss Studio - #58

Barry Larkin

Year:  2004

Brand:  Donruss Studio

Card number:  58

The 2004 Donruss Studio set is a nice, colorful set - at least for the Reds cards!  The gorgeous Cincinnati skyline shot as a background makes for a striking card and the red of the Reds' uniform really pops against that background.  All things considered, I very much like the card fronts.

The backs of the cards are fairly standard Donruss affairs but at least the write-up is appropriately glowing for this particular time period (the end of Larkin's playing career).  I'll never love only getting a single year's worth of statistics but otherwise I guess the backside is fine.

In addition to the base card shown above, there are three parallels to track down:  a Silver Proof (#/100), a Gold Proof (#/50), and a Platinum Proof (#/10).  I don't (yet?) own any of the three parallels.  Barry is also part of the partial parallel autograph series called Private Signings.  He has a Silver auto, a Gold auto, and a Platinum auto (all of which I don't own, unfortunately).

All told, I like the 2004 Studio set better than a lot of other year's editions of the brand.  I wouldn't mind having the other parallels but Donruss is kind of known for annoying, pointless parallels so it's not exactly a high priority thing for me to track down.  At the very least, I would like to add at least one of the Private Signing autographs to my collection but at least as of the time I wrote this post there weren't any Larkin autos available for sale on eBay.