Frank Thomas is Just the Start
When the 1990 Topps Baseball set was released, kids flocked to hobby shops and convenience stores to pick up the latest Flagship baseball cards. It wasn’t long before collectors discovered that a young prospect named Frank Thomas had versions of his card floating around that didn’t include his name on the front. The error card attracted a lot of interest and became highly collectible — especially when Thomas became one of the best players of his generation. The card became known as the Thomas No Name on Front (NNOF).
For decades, collectors held onto the lingering question: Why is Thomas’ name missing on only some of his cards? It was a question that collector Ross Clark pondered and was determined to try to figure out the answer to.
Clark figured the Thomas card couldn’t be a one-off. Other cards in the 792-card set had to be missing ink. Clark purchased an uncut sheet with Thomas’s name on the card — Sheet F- because it contained orange for the borders of the cards. He laid out the uncut sheet and placed a piece of manilla folder on top of Thomas and the players surrounding him to show what he thought was the direction of the missing ink. Clark purchased lots of 50-100 cards of these players to see if he could find a pattern. But he didn’t have any luck.
Clark, who runs the website bighurthof.com, decided to take his theory public and seek assistance from fellow collectors. He posted on the message board Collectors Universe in March 2009.
“I said, my expectation is that the card next to it — which is the Craig Biggio — and some other cards are missing some black ink,” Clark said. “I’ve been looking for a long time and have never found one. But I’m desperate, so I’m letting the world know that I think these exist.”
Less than a week after Clark’s post, a fellow collector made a discovery. He pinpointed some portions of missing black borders on the cards of John Morris (top right corner) and John Hart (top left corner). On the uncut sheet, the Morris card was located directly under the Thomas, and the Hart directly to the right of the Morris.
Over the next several months, collectors on the message board pieced together the entire blackless area and all 13 impacted cards. Known as the 1990 Topps Partial Blackless Cards, the group includes Thomas, Morris, Hart, Biggio All-Star, Kevin Tapani, Marcus Lawton, Fred McGriff All-Star, Darrin Jackson, Julio Franco All-Star, Jeff Russell All-Star, Carlton Fisk All-Star, Joe Magrane All-Star, and Jim Acker.
“It almost looks like a liquid has been smeared across the sheet,” Clark said. “I spoke to a lot of printing experts at the time, and ultimately, they said the most likely thing that happened, because this is offset lithography, is that the rubber blanket that comes in contact with the plate after the ink is transferred to the plate likely had been cleaned at some point with a solvent. It wasn’t removed properly, and that solvent blocked the black ink from being transferred from the plate to the rubber blanket, which would ultimately transfer the ink to the cardstock itself.”
To pay homage to the 1990 Topps blackless cards, Topps put out 35th-anniversary NNOF cards in the 2025 Topps Series 1 release. A 100-card insert set features the likes of Thomas, Shohei Ohtani, and Julio Rodriguez. Those NNOF cards are numbered to 35.
Few Blackless Copies Exist
During the printing process, Topps must have caught the issue with the ink fairly quickly because there aren’t many copies of the blackless cards. Years later, PSA and Beckett started recognizing the partial blackless cards and now label them as such on their slabs.
PSA has graded 59 copies of all the 12 players who aren’t Thomas. Beckett has slabbed 32 copies. The highest-graded card is a Lawton PSA 9.
“In theory, they’re all of equal rarity,” said Clark, who now owns eight partial blackless cards. “I would say that the ones that are toward the top left of the sheet, like the Fred McGriff, the Julio Franco, the Lawton, tend to be the ones that you see sell the least. The Carlton Fisk and the Biggio sell more frequently, probably because people are looking for those names.”
For the Thomas card — which comes in both the NNOF and Partial Blackless versions — PSA has graded 285 NNOF copies. Just one has reached a perfect 10. PSA has also slabbed 57 Partial Blackless Thomas examples. Beckett has graded 125 NNOF.
“Because these cards were unknown for years, many of them were discarded,” Partial Blackless collector Brian Gerrans said. “I’m sure that many collectors that may have had these in the 1990s got rid of them after 20 years of sitting in their basements.”
Completing the Set
With such few copies of the blackless cards being slabbed, Gerrans is the only collector to complete the 1990 Topps Partial Blackless set on the PSA Set Registry. The set consists of 14 cards: the 12 Partial Blackless, the Thomas NNOF, and the Thomas Partial Blackless, which includes his name, but some of the black border is missing.
Gerrans had always known about the NNOF Thomas card and picked up his copy in 2021. While tracking down that card, he stumbled upon the Collectors Universe thread that revealed the Partial Blackless cards. He got hooked on collecting the full set.
“I was the first to have PSA recognize the partial blackless Thomas,” Gerrans said. “My favorite thing to do is lay them out the way they were on the sheet so you can see the huge white swath from top left to bottom right. Super cool. I am happy that I was able to put this set together. It is going to get more difficult to complete as other collectors assemble their sets.”
Collector Mark Dupray is also looking to complete the partial blackless set. His journey with these rare cards takes him all the way back to 1990. While living on a military base in Japan with his family, Dupray, a teenager at the time, found some 1990 Topps rack packs to purchase
“It was so rare to get cards on the military base,” Dupray said. “We bought them all up.”
Dupray remembers opening the packs and being disappointed because there were cards without black ink. Seven years later, while looking through his old cards, Dupray found a Lawton card with part of his name missing. He thought that it looked a lot like the Thomas NNOF card. After placing his other 1990 Topps cards outside in a recycling bin, Dupray looked up the Lawton and found out it was fetching serious money. He raced back out to the recycling bin to retrieve the other cards.
Remarkably, Dupray found 13 Partial Blackless cards. His find produced doubles of the McGriff and Morris cards.
“I ended up completing everything except for the Frank Thomas,” Dupray said. “I got the last couple off some of the guys in the community.”
Diamonds in the Rough
Videographer Brandon Verzal was at an ice arena in Nebraska in 2019 to work on a story about a hockey player. Arriving early for the interview, Verzal killed some time by walking around the rink. He randomly came upon a vending machine filled with trading card packs from the 1980s and ’90s, including 1990 Topps. Verzal was aware of the Thomas NNOF and thought he might as well try his luck. Buying three packs of 1990 Topps, Verzal waited to rip them open until he was in his car. The card on the back of the first pack was a Thomas. Remarkably, he flipped it over to reveal it was the NNOF.
“I didn’t know its rarity, so I went home and started reading articles online,” said Verzal, who later graded the card and received a Beckett 8.5. “There are people who did the math, and you’d have to open up a pack every minute, and it would take you a year and a half to have a chance of actually finding one of these. Then I thought, OK, this is something pretty cool. I was just in shock when I saw the odds and the fact that it was sitting in a minor league hockey vending machine.”
Verzal returned to the ice rink the next day to buy the remaining 1990 Topps packs in the vending machine. He opened the packs, but there weren’t any more Thomas NNOF examples.
Fast-forward to mid-2021 when Verzal was getting ready to record the first episode of the television show, The Card Life, for which he is the director and producer. Verzal was heading to Phoenix for a segment with Dupray and his Partial Blackless collection. He had no idea about the Partial Blackless cards; on a whim, he threw his box of 1990 Topps cards into his luggage for the shoot.
The Card Life host, MLB pitcher Matt Strahm, talked with Dupray about the Partial Blackless cards and mentioned that the show’s producer had pulled a Thomas NNOF a few years earlier and had some 1990 Topps cards to look through.
“So as I’m filming, Mark finds the first one within like two minutes. He looks at me, the camera guy, and he’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re going to freak out,’” Verzal recalled. “I can’t talk back because I’m not supposed to be part of the feature. But he’s like, ‘You have a Joe Magrane Partial Blackless card here. This is probably the best condition one I’ve ever seen.’”
Dupray flipped through the rest of Verzal’s cards and found Partial Blackless cards of Fisk, Morris, and Hart. Verzal later got his Morris graded at a BGS 8. It’s one of just six Morris cards graded by either BGS or PSA.
“It was unbelievable,” Verzal said. “The raw footage is hilarious because I’m trying to film. But also, from a personal standpoint, I’m trying to look at what he’s pointing out and showing. Mark was almost shaking. He was so excited. He’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s never been a collection like this shown on camera of going through it.’ He just kept saying, ‘This is unbelievable. This is unbelievable.’”
Dupray is one of 81 members of the tight-knit Facebook group 1990 Topps Partial Blackless. The group tries to get the word out about the Partial Blackless cards.
“We try to get people to look through their old collections to surface some of them,” Dupray said. “There’s over 250 Frank Thomas that exist, so I would assume there would be 250 of each of the other cards. There’s a ton of them out there; people just need to know to go look for them.”
The partial blackless cards add a lot of intrigue to the 1990 Topps set.
“It’s just knowing that there are cards that have been out there in peoples’ boxes, completely oblivious to it, and they go back and dig through things they haven’t looked at in 20 or 30 years, and all of a sudden, they find a card worth thousands of dollars,” Clark said. “It’s like a treasure hunt for people.”
