2002 Fleer Baseball Forum

As much as I hate variations I think I've possibly stumbled across one in this set. I checked the external link for this set. I'm on my phone and never have luck adding links or photos so I'll describe what i see to see if anyone else knows something about this.

So the card no 504 in my hands has a different back than what we show in the base set or it the gold parallel. My card has the shaded baseball field in the Did You Know section  but does not have gold lettering in the player bio area.

Any thoughts?

I'm not really the expert when it comes to the printing process, but this sure does sound like missing foil or whatever is used to make the gold printing.

I'd have to agree.  It just missed the gold foil/ink step.

I somewhat agree but the printing on back is black and they wouldn't have covered that up with a gold overlay.

I think the problem lies in our base set images. The scans are washed out SO badly that they are actually missing the baseball field in the background.

As you can see from the COMC scan, it has the field. The scan here:

Yeah, it's THAT bad that elements of the card are missing. If anyone wants to take the effort to report any in this set, these are very much INCOMPLETE images and as such, should be removed.

Sounds to me like you have the base card. It is supposed to have black print on the back and the shading in the DYK box. The scan here is highly washed-out and from 2012. The gold back parallel is a much more recent and vibrant scan and those were not foil on the back, just gold print.

EDIT: Dan's post above wasn't there when I typed my reply. But it proves what I said.

That seems like what it probably is. Thanks for all of the input.

As a collector of errors, I can tell you that it is perfectly normal for a company to put foil or another color over black. If the purpose is that the black is used as a shadow or glow effect for the word. For example, 2011 Topps base set has black under the foil on the card front.

Yes, black is often used "beneath" to give a darker tone or shadow.  The gold overlay won't be solid but more like a fine mesh so the black beneath is exposed. As a famous artist on PBS used to say, "You can't have light without dark."