Barry Larkin Collection 786: 1988 O-Pee-Chee - #102

Barry Larkin

Year:  1988

Brand:  O-Pee-Chee

Card number:  102

As a kid, I think I had maybe five or ten total O-Pee-Chee cards that worked their way into my collection somehow (probably from making schoolyard trades of baseball cards).  Thus, the brand was always a mystery to me until I got much, much older.  For me, O-Pee-Chee has always been "French Topps" which I guess is basically accurate, at least for the late 80s.  

In the early 90s (1993 specifically), O-Pee-Chee would start releasing their own base card designs but for many, many years the company instead had a deal with Topps where they used the Topps design for that particular year (thus why the 1988 Topps and 1988 O-Pee-Chee cards look identical at first glance).  The main difference in the 1988 cards (besides the logo) is the French text on the back of the card.  

It doesn't affect Barry Larkin collectors, but it should be noted that the checklists for most Topps and their O-Pee-Chee counterparts were not always the same.  The O-Pee-Chee sets often had a stronger bias towards Canadian teams (which makes sense given the cards were printed in Canada) as well as a later release date which allowed the company to include updated cards of traded players.