1996 Bowman

1996 Bowman #349

By the time the 1996 edition of Bowman had come around I was starting to really get familiar with the rookie loaded checklists and buying my fair share of packs. While I like full bleed photography sets, I'm OK with a bordered design if it's done well. While I personally don't care for the '96 design now as much as I did when it was new, I still find the design to be OK. The red foil stamped Bowman logo looks out of place to me, but what do I know. It's another early card of Rey and it features a decent photo of him at the plate in what appears to be him in the process of getting a hit (or at least making contact).

Foil #349

The only thing the mid to late 90's brought upon the baseball card market was parallels. At first the trend started off innocently enough with one parallel per set, such as this foil card. Then as the years passed more and more parallels were introduced. Not surprisingly most of the cards of his I still lack are parallels.

 Bowman's Best Preview #BBP5

Randomly inserted into packs of 1996 Bowman was a 30 card preview set of the all chromium Bowman's Best set. Surprisingly Rey made it onto this small checklist.

 Bowman's Best Preview Refractor #BBP5

Refractor parallels showed up for the preview set, however I don't remember what the odds were.

Bowman's Best Preview Atomic Refractor #BBP5

I believe Atomic Refractors at this point in time were brand new to the collecting scene. Personally the card is too busy looking for me, but it's nice to have these 3 cards side by side in a 9 pocket page.

(sorry for all the fingerprints on the back of these preview cards!)