when the all-stars go blue

with 2024 topps series 2, topps maintained their habit of including the all-star design from the flagship sets from 35 years prior for past and current stars.  this year, sandy koufax was featured

and i am reminded that the design from 1989 topps featured blue backgrounds for national leaguers (red for american leaguers). here's kirk gibson's card from 1989 as a refresher

that one featured gibby as an all-star pinch hitter which was a nice touch. 

other dodgers included this year is mookie betts

along with freddie freeman and shohei ohtani, whose cards i showed in a previous post. i am still missing jackie robinson and clayton kershaw, but i did pick up another dodger all-star card

steve garvey gets the 1989 all-star treatment only in autograph form. in fact, the first one i picked up was the black parallel

which looks pretty sharp. garvey, of course, wasn't active in 1989 and i believe this is the first time he's been featured on a 1989 design.

koufax has another 1989 card in series 2, and it's pretty sharp in my opinion

the 1989 design doesn't seem as bad with an older, colorized photo as some other 1980's designs do, and topps seems like they are getting better at colorizing these photos, too.

the loser in all this is the 1982 topps flagship all-star design, as topps didn't start the 35th anniversary design tributes until 2018. in 2017, as you'll recall, they were still going with the 30th anniversary design. i am also a fan of the 1991 topps flagship all-star card design, but will have to get through the 1990 design next year first.