$1 pack baseball cards? Do I look like I’m made out of money?

I was 11 years old when Upper Deck baseball cards were first sold, and I quickly moved from being suspicious of them (too slick, too fancy, too expensive) to loving them for those very reasons. My prized possession was UD ’89 #01 — Ken Griffey Jr.’s rookie card. Darren Rovell explains the importance of that card. I still like Topps best.

Published by Waldo Jaquith

Waldo Jaquith (JAKE-with) is an open government technologist who lives near Char­lottes­­ville, VA, USA. more »

14 replies on “$1 pack baseball cards? Do I look like I’m made out of money?”

  1. I used to collect ball cards when i was a kid. At least my pre-teen years. But I would leave ’em in my pocket all the time, and they’d go through the wash with my jeans. Eventually, just seemed like a waste of money if every pack just got destroyed with my Levis.

  2. Every time I walk through Target, I find my body affected by the trading cards tractor beam hidden in that special nook between the final cash register and the aisle of adult diapers. I finally yielded to my curiosity one day and was stunned to see that full boxes were selling for $19.99. “Holy crap! I could buy FIVE OF THESE RIGHT NOW and probably make a FULL SET!” Full boxes were the stuff of very special occasions back then — Christmas, birthday, etc. I remember skipping lunch in jr. high just to save my dollar bills to buy 2 packs of cards. 7th grade economics at its finest.

  3. A pack of baseball cards that does not include a hard, pink stick of bubble gum IS NOT WORTH HAVING.

    I always hated that Upper Deck crap when I was a kid. Give me Topps. The hard stuff.

    And lets not even get into [spits on ground] *Fleer*.

  4. My 5,000+ baseball cards are still under the bed. I think Donruss was cheaper than Fleer, but they had puzzle pieces.

    I never had the Griffey rookie, but I did have the ’92 Topps Nolan Ryan card, #1 in the set. I remember being just amazed at how many years he had played, since Topps included stats from every year.

    I stopped collecting after the baseball strike.

  5. I’m a topps fellow too. I’m still trying to collect by hand all of the 91 and 92 sets. I’m also collecting the ’91 Upper Deck set.

    I think the downfall of card collecting started with Topps Stadium Club. This set forced smaller collectors out by making packs too pricey. A devolution into trying to outdo the competition with “gold cards”, inserts, and game used material occured. People didn’t know what to collect then. Before all you had to worry about was 792 cards (topps set). By the mid 90s, people were looking at the main sets, off shoots, subsets of those off shoots.

  6. Crap. Now I’m going to have to waste time and go check out what’s in the box, again. What does one do with a box of 1989 Donruss commons, anyway? Winter heating?

  7. Fleer and Donruss were crap, Score was worse (though it is the only full set I ever got as a kid). Topps was the best.

    Now it’s hard to even look at what’s available when there’s a million different sets churned out by each company. Pffft.

    I’ve got about thousands of cards in boxes that have moved from place to place that I have to get rid of. But, like everyone else my age, I got into the hobby when the market was flooded. I think the whole stack’s worth only $500. Ah well.

  8. The best cards out of the ’89 Donruss would be your Griffey Jr. and Randy Johnson rookies…although I think Bernie Williams had a rookie card that year too. I feel like such a geek knowing that…

  9. The Griffey’s are still hiding somewhere (along with the McGwire rookie card I am certain I had), but it was fun to pick through something I’d not looked at since 1990, at least. The Smotlz error cards, the sadly wrong Ty Griffen #1 draft pick cards, the shiny Upper Deck cards. Oh, and the half dozen really rare Gregg Jefferies Rated Rookies cards. Heh.

  10. Kevin,

    There are no ‘best cards’ from the ’89 Donruss set. IT’S DONRUSS.

    If Topps was like the Transformers then Fleer was like the Go-Bots. And Donruss is basically like some off-brand robot toy that looks like a Transformer, but you would get it out of the packaging only to discover that it’s cast out of a single piece of plastic and does not transform at all.

    Am I alone in finding the Tommy Lasorda cards of the mid to late 80’s completely hilarious? You’d be going through a stack of cards and here’s all of these guys in action poses. Swinging a bat, throwing or catching a ball. Maybe running. Now and then just standing there for an upper torso and face shot. But then you’d get to the Tommy Lasorda card and that fat bastard was almost always sitting in a golf cart. Too fat and lazy to even bother standing up to have his picture taken for his baseball card.

    http://bp1.blogger.com/_4lJTcxT9wLY/R5ibZKHjgpI/AAAAAAAAAWo/nJMrO0OIAhk/s1600-h/74A.jpg

  11. MB – Argh, don’t get me started on Gregg Jefferies. Was my favorite player, went after every card of his, for the longest time was the only autograph I had…

    My inner child’s heart still weeps…

  12. I just retrieved the cards my brother and I collected in the 70’s and early 80’s from my parents basement. I have yet to go through them fully, but I did find some interesting cards like star wars and kiss cards.

  13. Jason-

    I did the same thing with Will Clark. I am naturally a right handed hitter but I became so enamored with his swing that I learned how to hit lefty to emulate his swing.

    I still have hundreds of Clark cards…they’re worth practically nothing.

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