1988 O-Pee-Chee diversion

Hey, let's take a look at the 1988 O-Pee-Chee set. For those who don't know, O-Pee-Chee was a Canadian company that produced baseball and hockey cards, candy, and other things. For their baseball cards, they had a licensing arrangement with Topps, and the cards were usually very similar.


So there's the O-Pee-Chee Chili Davis card on the left and the Topps Chili Davis card on the right. (I made that scan on the bottom [or right] a while ago when I was making crappy quality scans...the picture quality on the two cards is actually the same.)

So, notice a couple of the differences. First, there's the O-Pee-Chee logo instead of the Topps logo. And, as Davis changed teams in the off-season and O-Pee-Chee printed its cards later than Topps, they added a note saying that he was traded.

The back is even more different, including almost everything in both English and French.



This card back has all the same info as the Topps card, but it's written in a smaller font so that both language versions fit on there.

Here are the other differences between the 1988 Topps set and the 1988 O-Pee-Chee set:

• The O-Pee-Chee (OPC) set has just 396 cards as compared to 792 cards for the Topps set.
• OPC has no Record Breakers
• OPC has no All-Star cards
• OPC has no Team Leader cards
• OPC has fewer checklists since it has fewer cards
• OPC has manager cards for just the Expos and the Blue Jays. These cards (for Bob Rodgers and Jimy Williams) are pretty similar to the Topps versions, including team rosters on the back.
• OPC doesn't have cards for many lesser players. If you look at the checklist below, you can see that most of the players are better known players who got more playing time.
• OPC does have four cards that the Topps set doesn't have: the top two draft choices for the two Canadian teams. I'm going to feature each of these four cards on their own pages because they are pretty interesting.

So here's an example checklist from the 88 OPC set:



Anyway, there you have it. 1988 O-Pee-Chee.

Stay tuned for two things:

• I'll be posting the four top draft-choice cards
• And of course, I'm giving away this entire set. Keep your eyes out. This time, everybody's going to get a chance to get their hands on some of these cards.