1996 Topps Gallery Baseball Forum

I just received 3 of these cards in a trade.  When I went to upload the images, the database shows them as SN999 yet the 3 I just received are not SN.  My information source says that they should be yet the ones I have are definitely not even though they do have the "Players Private Issue" stamp on the front.

Can anyone shed some light on this?

They should have a 3-digit number on the reverse. See the Daulton, which we own, and I scanned for here, as an example:

http://www.tradingcarddb.com/ViewCard.cfm/sid/10810/cid/1873086/1996-Topps-Gallery---Players-Private-Issue-148-Darren-Daulton?PageIndex=1

Dan,

I saw those with the SN but the ones I have don't have that even though they have the front stamp.  The base set does not have the front stamp.  I cannot find anything on a parallel set that was not SN.  I uploaded the three images of 1, 6 and 17 so you can see the front image.  I suspect others have this issue as some of the images uploaded are also missing the front image.  I did find that supposedly Topps destroyed 400 sets of the PPI but nothing about if it was 600-999.

I suspect that the quality control was poor as it is in the years where producing quantity was more important than quality.

There's always the possibility that they produced more, unnumbered ones, to use as replacements for damaged, packed out SNed cards. There's also the possibility that these unnumbered extras found their way out of the warehouse without Topps managements' knowledge (i.e., not an official release) without replacing a damaged card. If I was in the market for one of these players (as I was when I found the Daulton), I would not even look at ones without the number on the reverse. (Just my opinion on that.)

As far as which serial numbers were destroyed, there are several examples on COMC with a SN in the 600s, 700s, 800s, and 900s, so it looks like after they sent the first 100 to the players, of the remaining 899, it's random as to which 400 were destroyed. There are also at least two examples of non-SNed ones, with no indication (Rick Aguilera - highest priced one, Todd Greene - lowest priced one). They do seem to exist, but not many and probably not from packs.

So what do with do for the database purposes?  Create a new parallel of PPI not-SN'd?  It is odd that one trader wouldhave 3 of the non-SN'd if they were more random than most.

Must be pretty common. COMC.com has a separate section for the missing serial number cards.

https://www.comc.com/Cards/Baseball/1996/Topps_Gallery_-_Base_-_Players_Private_Issue_Missing_Serial_Number,sc,ot,i100

Being that they are that common (my trade partner got these at a garage sale), do we create a parallel set to the base set?  I imagine others will have some in their collection and will not know if they should put them with the SN or just leave them out of the database.

I doubt they're a parallel. No idea which cards or how many cards are missing the SN. Considering that the SNs were foil printed, it's more likely a simple printing error. Some sheets missed the foiling for serial numbers. Possibly the foil ran out and some sheets got through before new foil was loaded.