So while continuing my Purge this morning, I came across my Barry Bonds collection. It’s a binder consisting of about 150 cards with some cool inserts like serial numbered Diamond Kinds and the such. But the very first card that caught my attention was this 2002 Upper Deck Vintage Home Run Leaders error card.

This card didn’t exactly catch the same attention as the 1990 Topps Frank Thomas rare version that also lacks the player’s name his name. But in some ways I find this card equally as important, if not ironic in the least.

Did someone at Upper Deck not believe that Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa and Luis Gonzalez were legitimate homerun hitters? I’m sure this was a simple printing error — there is a corrected version with the players names — but in some romantic way, it’s fun to think that someone at UD had the foresight to eliminate the player’s names, almost as if they were leaving them off the official record. All three players shown here have been linked to performance enhancing drugs or at least been in the discussion.

This entry was posted on May 4, 2010 at 9:12 am and is filed under Newspaperman with tags Barry Bonds, baseball, baseball cards, performance enhancing drugs, Sammy Sosa, Steroids, Upper Deck. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.