[OhioLawyerF5]

Originally Posted by williemayshayes

My long winded opinion by relating Griffey and Mantle:
Collectors are driven by nostalgia more than rings.

Mantle's importance wasn't as much rings as he was seen as Joe DiMaggio's replacement...but faster and more powerful and he looked the part. Could he be Babe but also the fastest kid we've ever seen?

Griffey is an example that team success and later career falloff just doesn't matter much. His collectors see him frozen as the 20's kid in a backwards Mariner cap. He was the epitome of the 90s. By 1994 he was seen as a legitimate Mantle heir, hence the UD dual card.

That circles me back to collectors and their nostalgia...both have a large portrait card of similar pose that started a collecting renaissance in two different eras for two start up companies. I'm not aware of ever hearing that UD went with that pose on purpose, but I think they subconsciously gave us a '52T clone for a reason. To trigger our Mantle obsession over this five tool phenom in their inaugural product.

Those 2 were the literal face of collecting baseball cards for different eras and very little of that was dictated by rings.