Barry Larkin Collection 762: 2004 Leaf - #123

Barry Larkin
Year:  2004
Brand:  Leaf
Card number:  123

The 2004 Leaf set looks innocent enough if you simply glance at the above base card of Barry Larkin.  A perfectly lovely front photo coupled with team logo and easy-to-read name plate make the design completely acceptable (but perhaps not memorable).  The back of the card stays true to the Donruss-pedigree of the brand with only five years of career stats but you also get a decent write-up so again, not terrible (though I do wish the secondary photo was different than what was on the front of the card).  

So overall, no big deal about this set, right?

Wrong.

In true Donruss fashion, this set has an absurd number of parallels.  For Larkin's base card alone, there are the following:

• Second Edition (basically the retail version of 2004 Leaf with the only difference being the phrase "second edition" printed on the front of the card).
• Press Proof Red
• Press Proof Blue (#/100)
• Press Proof Silver  (#/50)
• Press Proof Gold (#/25)
• Orange County (#/5)

That might not seem to be all that bad but we are just getting started.  Barry has a second base card in the set (#259, part of the Passing Through Time subset) which also has all of the above parallels to find.

And that's nothing compared to the real kicker.  Barry is featured in one of the insert sets as well, a 50 card set called "Exhibits."

For the "Exhibits" set, each player has 46 (!) variations of their card.  Each of the variations is serially numbered somewhere between 21 to 66 copies.  Even worse, each of the 46 variations uses the exact same photograph on every card...only a tiny little difference exists to differentiate two variations (for example, one variation might have "very best wishes" on the left while another variation has that on the right).  

Truly insane...and this is one of those sets that I feel extremely confident that I'll never complete the Barry Larkin portion of.  Total insanity if you ask me!