Baseball Card Collecting: The Golden Age and Subsequent Overexpansion

By Paul M. Banks

Our History of Baseball Card Collecting series continues with a look at the golden age, overexpansion and recession periods. Go here for part one, covering the hobby's origins. Part two, focusing on the Topps monopoly, can be found here.

It took a victorious lawsuit to actually happen, but finally, in 1981, Donruss and Fleer were able to enter the marketplace and compete with Topps. In 1986, Sportflics (Major League Marketing) entered the market as the fourth fully licensed card producer, followed by Score in 1988, and Upper Deck in 1989.

The last one mentioned was the true game-changer, as they were the first “premium” line. Packs of Upper Deck were the first to sell for over $1 per pop. They also mainstreamed the use of holograms, which, in addition to being eye-catching, helped thwart potential counterfeiters. UD announced their arrival with authority, as their very first card is hobby Holy Grail.

The 1989 Upper Deck #1 Ken Griffey Jr. is as eye-catching a card as you’ll ever see. If you watched the Junior quasi-documentary on MLB Network, you might have recalled pop performer and Seattle Mariners superfan Macklemore describing this card, and how much it helped him discover all the Junior hype.

1989 Ken Griffey Jr. Upper Deck cardPhoto byeBay

You have to love how the gold chain that Griffey wears in the picture matches the Star logo in the bottom right corner of the card. His million-dollar smile says to the world “Yes, I will live up to the hype and become The Next Big Thing.” At the time, Griffey was about as highly rated a prospect as we had ever seen, but he had only played a few Major League games at that point. Upper Deck took a massive gamble, and it paid off big time.

After Upper Deck, all the other brands created upscale lines to compete with them. Donruss created Leaf, Fleer produced Ultra, Topps introduced Stadium Club and Score added Pinnacle.

Now the arms race was fully on. In 1993, the card companies saw the “premium” genre and raised it to the “super-premium” genre. Fleer debuted its “Flair” set and Topps launched “Topps Finest,” the first set to utilize “refractors,” an endeavor that utilized a reflective foil technology that gave the card a shiny “rainbow” appearance. This was the next ground-breaking innovation for baseball cards.

The 1980s, the period which saw the greatest growth in the number of hobbyists, was also the golden era for misprint and/or error cards. And the mother of all error cards is the 1989 Fleer #616, Billy Ripken, with “F*** FACE” written on the bat handle.

Bill Ripken 1989 Fleer cardPhoto byeBay

Once an individual becomes synonymous with something very specific in life, and it’s innocent enough, well it’s best to just lean into it. Billy is not the Ripken who is first and foremost in the baseball annals, but he does have this iconic card, something Cal does not.

The bat handle gaffe came about because he was getting pranked. Several versions of this error card exist, including one with a black box over the naughty word, another with a whiteout, a scribble, a marker loop, etc.

Ripken has said in interviews that he gave one of these cards to every single groomsman at his wedding party. In other words, he appreciated the novelty of this card as much as anyone. It was in the mid-late 1980s that baseball cards made the leap from hobby to investment practice, but during the mid-90s a market correction came along and shocked the entire system.

Watered Down Market and Course Correction

In 1984, two monthly price guides came on the scene: Tuff Stuff and Beckett Baseball Card Monthly. The latter, published by Dr. James Beckett, tracked the approximate market value of several types of trading cards. It is not hyperbolic to say that this became the bible of sports card hobbyists.

It was so big that even the early editions of the magazine itself became valuable collectibles. Through Beckett, one was able to easily chart the rise, fall, and rebound of the market. As we previously said, the early 1990s saw an arms race in the industry, and in the late 1990s, the fallout from that transpired.

You simply had too rapid a proliferation, especially considering what was about to happen regarding the labor negotiations aspect of American professional sports. In 1994, we had the first World Series cancellation since 1904, as it was part of the nearly thousand Major League games canceled due to the players’ strike. Throughout 1994-95, we also saw labor stoppages in both the NBA and the NHL.

This drove away large numbers of fans, in all three sports, and it would take several years to recover. With the work stoppages coming at a time when card production had just grossly over-expanded, it was only natural that the bursting of a bubble followed. Demand diminished at a time that had just seen supply rapidly increase.

All the while production costs were increasing too. The arms race of producing further upscale brands led to more companies having to add expensive bells and whistles to their cards. Licensing fees increased and individual players became bigger human brands, making the process of obtaining their likenesses more expensive and complicated.

Pinnacle brands folded in 1998. Pacific, which acquired full licensing in 1994, went out of business in 2001. In 2005, Fleer went bankrupt and eventually got taken over by Upper Deck. Donruss lost the MLB license in 2006. Then the MLBPA limited the number of companies who would legally be able to produce baseball cards, in an attempt to counteract the tremendous glut present within the industry.

This led to a consolidation of companies and products across the market, and as it stands today, Topps is also the only company that continues to produce pre-collated factory sets of cards. However, Topps still produces cards under the Bowman brand name and Upper Deck does the same with Fleer.

Paul M. Banks is the owner/manager of The Sports Bank. He’s written for numerous publications, including the New York Daily News, Sports Illustrated and the Chicago Tribune.