Bowman cards

Long before there was beckett.com and even before there was Beckett's monthly price guide magazine, there was the annual baseball card price guide by Dr. James Beckett.  I was in elementary school and I bought this a couple years in a row in the school book order. Those price guides started with the year 1948. And the brand of cards listed in the first several years was Bowman. So from an early age Bowman to me meant old cards that weren't made any more. Now jump ahead to my teenage years. Bowman came back! It was kind of wild; the name that was synonymous with very old vintage had new cards on the market. But being so loyal to Topps I never got into them. Now jump ahead again to my 40s. I enter the new world of blogs that talk about sportscards. I see other people's passion for the hobby and realize I had lost some of mine. Card collecting could be more fun than picking up the Topps team set and calling it a year. So recently I've started collecting team sets of all the flagship brands. And now I am immersed in the world of Bowman. Bowman has the second longest active run of years with a baseball set. Their photos are great and their designs are excellent. And I love their commitment to prospects and draft picks. Collected together with Topps flagship you get a great variety of prospects and veteran stars alike. But there's so much to learn about the various subsets and decisions to be made on which to collect.  Here are some pictures of the first few Bowman sets I found recently.

1991: This set was pretty boring if you ask me. There were a lot of head and shoulder shots and not much action. They weren't that much different than Bowman's first two return sets in 1989 and 1990.

1992: This is the year Bowman started to hit their stride. The photos were much better with lots of action shots. The colors popped a lot more, and the backs had color for the first time. And extra attention was given to young prospects in the flagship set.