1985 Chong Modesto A's #16 Steve Howard

    If there could possibly be a "white whale" of my Steve Howard collection, this would be it.  As mentioned in the post on the 1986 Chong Modesto card, singles in this set are extremely hard to find due to the presence of the Mark McGwire cards and the very low (relative to other contemporary sets) print run.  The 2006 Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards puts the original print run at 500 sets with the six naming errors, 500 more corrected sets and another 700 set corrected run with slightly different cropping on the McGwire.  So out of a possible 1700 Steve Howards that should exist, I've seen only this one in the last 5 years.

    So, now The Total Steve Howard Experience is complete, here it is in technicolor (where available):



All I left out was the 1990 Topps Traded Tiffany since it doesn't exactly show up on a scan. Yeah, I included both the CMC Pre-Rookie and the CMC Tacoma Tigers cards and they look the same, but they had different backs (you just have to look at it from the other side of the screen).

Congratulations, Mr. Howard, for surviving 9 years of minor league baseball!