[djohn]

I always love when a card company tries something cool and different. That is one reason the 90s were one of the best times for collecting cards. One of the more annoying things card companies did in the 90s was to make parallels of inserts that were extremely difficult to tell apart unless you knew what to look for. Fleer and Score were some of the worst with this. What makes it worse is that the odds for some of these cards were insanely high, so during the 90s you might not have ever even seen one to know what to look for. In 1997 Score did a insert set called "Franchise", which in itself was a nice looking set. They also made a parallel of the insert set called "Glowing" using glow in the dark ink. Glow in the dark cards sounds really cool, and they are when you can find find them. These cards were inserted around 1 in 10 boxes, making them very difficult to find. On top of that when you did pull one you had to hold it up to a light then take it into the dark to see if it glowed. You could tell them apart if you knew the subtle difference in the ink, but if you had never seen one before you couldn't be certain until you did the light test. Today's card is the 1997 Score Franchise Glowing card of Cal Ripken Jr. If you have one of the regular ones and didn't know about the glowing parallel, you might want to try the light test to see if you got one of these rare parallels.