If you haven’t heard the hobby term rainbow, it refers to collecting all of a player’s various parallels in a given set. With the proliferation of these parallels, there’s many sets where the number of variants can exceed 10, 20, 30 or more copies. One of my early encounters with a rainbow came with the 2000 Pacific Prism Baseball parallel variations.
For the player collector, it can be a daunting task filled with frustration and desperation. That’s how I was as I pieced together my John Jaha “rainbow” for 2000 Pacific Prism. At the time there actually was another Jaha collector out there. When one of these cards popped up, we would often get into fierce bidding wars. There was one particular variation, I can’t remember exactly which but it wasn’t the rarest, where the other bidder would beat my bids even though we were well over $10 (like I said, I got desperate) for a common player that might have been “worth” $0.50 to a certain publication.
I think a lot of my desperation came from the fact that this wasn’t a collector-friendly set at the time so I wasn’t sure how much of the product was going to get busted. And even those that did, how many sellers were going to bother with the listing fees on a John Jaha card? I figured very few.
After many bidding wars, I was finally able to build my Jaha Prism rainbow. In retrospect, the look of the cards are very nice in their shiny kind of way. Sure, I hate the fact that I have to label them to know which variation they are, but you’ve got to love a card you refer to as the “pebbly dots” variant versus the more mundane “blue” or “red.”
So here’s John Jaha showcasing the 2000 Pacific Prism rainbow.
2000 Pacific Prism Baseball Pattern Variations
Base
Holo-Gold /480
Holo-Purple /99
Pebbly Dots Silver
Rapture Gold
Sheen Silver
Texture Silver
Woodgrain Silver
Holo-Blue /80
Holo-Mirror /160
Pebbly Drops
Premiere Date /61
Rapture Silver
Slider Silver
Tinsel Silver
