Derek Jeter cards: The 1995 Fleer Major League Prospects variation

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Tracking down all of the variations of a card could be tough, especially when you’re looking at cards from 1990s. Unlike parallels of today, we’ aren’t chasing rainbows. Some of the older variations were not explicitly done.

There could be corrected errors, printing variations or some other quirk to a card that for player collectors, it means having to chase a whole new version.

This is the case with Derek Jeter’s 1995 Fleer Major League Prospects cards. It’s a relatively inexpensive card, which can be had for a couple of dollars. 

Both versions are cheap — and yet one of them has alluded me for longer than I could care to admit. The difference in the cards is on the backs. On the bottom of one version card is a line of legal text than you see on all baseball cards.

The Jeter 1995 Fleer Major League Prospects card has a variation with no legal line and missing MLB and MLBPA logos.

I have several copies of the one without the text. A few months ago, I finally picked up the one with the legal line for just a few bucks at a card show.

Beckett doesn’t recognize the two variations, however the PSA Registry has both listed. I often look through the PSA Registry to compare checklists because PSA will often notate these types of variations.

The 1995 Fleer Major League Prospects was a 10-card set featuring Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, Ray Durham and Garret Anderson. The insert was randomly inserted into packs at a rate of one in every six packs. Of the other nine players in the set, it doesn’t seem the other cards have this issue of no logos — at least none have popped up to this point.

If there were, at the very least an ARod would have shown up because he has been a highly collectible player.

How did this happen? There hasn’t been anything written about it, but it certainly seems like a printing error, but could also be a pre-production error that was caught during the process.

This isn’t a case of the foil stamp not hitting properly or a certain color not printing either because the entire line of legal text is missing while all the other text on the back is still there.

Considering how cheap both versions of the Jeter go for, it doesn’t seem as though one is more rare than the other. It’s just an interesting quirk.

And for a player collector like me, I needed both versions of the card.