The year 2019 was a pretty significant year for Gary Carter in the baseball card world. Including printing plates and Topps.com oversized “wall art” cards, “The Kid” had a total of 202 different cards produced during the calendar year, up from just 92 in 2018. And since 18 of those 92 cards from 2018 were Leaf Metal Sports Heroes, which were actually released in March 2019 (despite their ’18 markings), that means Carter had about 3X the number of new cards released in 2019 than the year before!
Between the big three card producers –Topps, Panini and Leaf/In The Game— Gary appeared in 23 different sets. His very first card of the year was a Topps.com exclusive Throwback Thursday "1976 Star Wars design" card with a print run of 513. He later appeared in all three major Topps releases –Series 1, 2 and Update— as well as Allen and Ginter, Archives, Diamond Icons, Dynasty, Five Star, Gypsy Queen, Luminaries, Triple Threads and Tribute. Carter also appeared in the Ginter X and Reflections Topps.com online sets as well as the aforementioned #TBT and the ever-popular Topps Living Set, his very first foray into the supposedly never-ending set. His 1953 design Living Set card featured him from his initial run with the Montreal Expos and had a print run of 2,606. Since a player can appear only once for each team they played for, Carter can still appear as a Met, Giant and Dodger should Topps choose to make them.
Gary also appeared in Panini’s Diamond Kings, Flawless, Leather and Lumber and National Treasures sets. Despite being unlicensed, the design and image selection used by Panini in 2019 was pretty on point. They also stuffed their Flawless release with some of the nicest patches Carter has ever had.
Conversely, the unlicensed and somewhat homemade-looking Leaf/In The Game card company included Carter in two of their sets featuring very poorly designed cards that did not even have an image of the 2003 Hall of Fame inductee and 11X All-Star. For this reason, I passed on owning any of them, including a beautiful laundry tag that was sadly wasted on a very visually unappealing design, again, sans player image. Too bad they didn't put their Leaf Metal Sports Heroes designer on the job or spring for an image.
Without further adieu, here are the 2019 Gary Carter cards I've picked up as of this writing...
That's it for 2019 blogs. I hope you've enjoyed this site so far and will come back in 2020 to see what new Gary Cards get released and/or added to my page. As you can see, we've already added a spot for the "new" decade. Thanks for visiting and Happy Holidays!