Biggest years in the hobby- Modern
 

I was thinking yesterday about the biggest years in the hobby, at least since 1980. By biggest, I guess I mean most noteworthy and exciting but feel free to add your own adjectives. I wasn't really thinking of valuable cards, just years which were pivotal in the hobby.

-1981- First year Topps monopoly broken, 3 major sets plus lots of minor sets (Drakes, Coke, etc). Guy burns 52 Mantle, Baseball strike, first Topps boxed traded set.

-1984- Rookie card mania, Mattingly and Strawberry. Short printed Fleer and Donruss sets. First Tiffany sets, First Fleer Update set short printed. First Beckett Monthly

-1987- Giant production, Rookie card mania with Canseco, Bonds, McGwire, dozens of others, most of which are commons now.

-1989- First year of Upper Deck, spawned higher end issues for first time. Otherwise RAMPANT over production. Also football/basketball get popular with ProSet and Hoops leading the way.

-1998- Pinnacle/Score bankruptcy, game used started to emerge a little. Sosa/McGwire home run race set cards on fire.

-2005- Maybe more infamous, steroid scandal craters 80's rookies, Fleer fails, Donruss loses license.

1989 Fleer glossy -The Ken Griffey Jr. card from this set is regarded as one of the most important early parallels in hobby history and is more often than not found with centering, print lines, and gloss imperfection.

1984 Topps football ( I know you posted this in baseball)

Do not remember the year but when Topps got control of all the major licensing.

1990. first autographs in packs.

1992- Topps gold-hobby’s first true parallel set.

1992 - beginning of the Insert-craze Era

1989 Griffey a parallel? Nope, it's just part of the set.

so the 1991 Desert storm aren't parallels? Or the 84 Nestles? I guess if you count it as cards that potentially came from the same pack.

84 FB was no big deal in 84. My set was like $6-7 a couple years after that.

Years I'd nominate

1993 First modern set with an announced print run- Topps Finest.

Whatever year they started selling cards on shop at home. Not a shining moment overall, but a sign of how big things had become.

Steve 1989 Fleer glossy is a parallel according to Beckett. The entire write up except the common flaws was taken from he Beckett site.

1984 Topps football was a a big deal due the rookie craze and the fact that it had a Marino and elway rookie. I don’t think the question was what was big at the time but most noteworthy.

Through 1994 I have collected anything and everything listed for Topps in the SCD Standard Catalog, using the last catalog that listed post 1980 issues. Starting in 1995, the year of The Great Proliferation, the sheer number of different and new issues by Topps caused me to surrender. Since then I have stuck to just the base set, any update to it, and the Heritage sets to keep the run going.

I was in the Air Force in the 80's and 90's. I can remember that in the 1989-1991 era, there were at least 25 guys that I knew in my squadron that collected cards of some sort. Everyone was jumping in. By 1993-94, it was down to just a few. That's kind of the way it is now. So, I would say that the 1989-91 time span was the biggest - and not just baseball cards. Remember that sets like 1989 Score Football, Pro Set Football and Hockey, NBA Hoops and Fleer Basketball, and Upper Deck in all three sports were extremely popular.

I would go with 3 years

1981 End of Topps monopoly. This was also the beginning of the rookie card craze.

1989 Upper Deck, beginning of premium products with 1.00 packs. We now have 27k packs.

1992 Beginning of insert craze and the peak of the hobby. Now inserts and RCs are all that people chase. Jersey and Bat Cards. Autographs and cut autos. Finally Autographed Rookie Cards.

1993 - I know inserts were out in most products by then, but this year was what I considered the beginning of what would become the era of some of the nicest looking insert cards ever made, before or since.

I remember when I saw this in a print ad. I thought it was the greatest looking card ever!

Didn't hurt that I was on a bit of a Padres kick either and he had a mammoth year.

Oh, to be excited over something like this again...

2001 - Ichiro and Albert Pujols rookie craze.

1995 - Hideo Nomo: The beginning of the Tsunami that hit American Baseball. It was believed he was the first Japanese player to make the majors. However....

(Forgive them, for new collectors do not know what they say)

Thanks to the Boyd & Harris book Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubblegum Book (1973) that proved this a tenant false and brought the 1965 Topps card #282 from a $5 common to a $40 semi-star status.

Nothing in 1983 and 1984 was short-printed. Production numbers increased every year that period for all three companies.

Arthur

Post 1980..
1981 I agree absolutely 3 sets!!! It was a big deal
1984 Donruss and Fleer were both tough to buy at local shop
1989 Upper Deck... All the early boxes I opened had 2 or 3 Griffey's
1994. Baseball Strike ... for a time America's least favorite pastime... the following years saw real reduction in card production.
1995 Upper Deck Be A player Hockey..An Auto in Every Pack!!
2009 The Mike Trout high value Rookie card era we still live in.
2016 Topps Now cards produced like social media snapshots..And Topps Transcendent 26k set????
All of it was fun to collect
Jonathan

1984 Fleer and Donruss were easy to find early in the year. Our local candy wholesaler had plenty of Donruss. Demand driven by Mattingly and Strawberry caused the product to dry up. Topps printed cards all year long, Fleer and Donruss didn't, so there was a perception that they were short printed. They were not, it was just that Topps was still delivering Topps to wholesalers into September/October.

LOL, I thought you meant the Upper Deck... Sometimes I totally miss things.
I see Fleer glossy as more of its own set, but it's interesting Beckett thinks of it as a parallel. How do they list the Nestles, and desert storm, and for that matter the tiffany and score glossy sets? They were all issued on their own in different forms.

Maybe, I saw the question as more along the lines of what was a big deal n a year and affected the hobby at the time and after.
All the other sports lagged behind Baseball until... I don't actually recall when. I know I bought older cards from other sports for very little right into the late 80's. The Marino and Elway were key cards, but hadn't taken off yet. Same for the Gretzky rookie. I got mine in lot that came in a monster box that just happened to have the whole set from that year. I think $50 for the whole box.

Now if I could recall just when everyone suddenly got interested in cards from the other sports, that would have to be a big hobby event.

Before 1992 I think parallel was more of a loose term. They had a bunch of Tiffany/glossy sets done before this one ( 1989 Fleer glossy). The thing is it has a Griffey rookie that is diffeicult to find in high grade because of factory issues. We can also add the 1989 Bowman Tiffany to 1989 cards that make a splash now. They made less Bowman Tiffany but there have been more high grades in the Bowman Tiffany then Fleer glossy. I was just adding to the fact that 1989 was a game changer. Without these other griffey rookies all we would have is a bunch of mass produced Griffey’s( like the upper decks never ending printing)


I also think that almost ever year from 1980 till now has some significance to the modern collector. So I was just cherry picking some big moments that popped in to my mind.

1989. Hoops with David Robinson and Score Football with Barry Sanders, Troy Aikman, etc. The first football Beckett was December 1989, Basketball March 1990, Hockey September 1990.

Interesting take on 1989. And it does make sense, the UD cards were the big thing once they came out, along with the Billy Ripken.

And yes, there's probably something special that happened every year since 1980. Some more special than others, but that's more an individual thing. Like 83? when Topps sold uncut sheets rolled in huge "packs" through at least one of the chain toy stores. Special to me because it was a pretty weird thing to do even for Topps. But probably not so special to anyone else.

I forgot about that, I remember the Topps Gold and the Fleer Rookie Sensations being popular, though if I remember correctly the Rookie Sensations were one per pack but the style of pack they came in was scarce.

When I think of "chase" cards I think of 1993 on to about 1999-2000 when attention turned to the game used. There were a few GU starting in about 1997 but there were so few that not many people had them.

I have it down to 1993 and 2001.

1993 - The launch of SP Baseball and SP Football. Both products were incredibly popular plus the die-cut inserts were always in demand. That same year, we were introduced to 1993 Topps Finest baseball and the "refractor" craze was just beginning. Another brilliant product that took the hobby by storm. Inserts were a big focus, not only in these products, but others as someone else mentioned, but SP and Finest were HUGE!

2001 - Ichiro and Pujols drove the baseball card market. Low serial numbered cards and redemptions of either one of these two HoFers were HUGE too. Football was special too with Michael Vick (before his downward spiral), LaDainian Tomlinson, Drew Brees rookie cards hitting the market. I still remember opening a box of 2001 Topps Heritage and hoping for one of these studs, but ended up pulling the #2 overall pick, Leonard Davis. I still have the card, lol.

Anyway, there you go!

No, they were not 1 per pack. They were random with no stated odds. Out of a box of cellos, I have seen boxes with only 1. I believe the average was about 4. It has been 25 years since I was busting those. That is why the Frank Thomas was bringing big bucks at the time.

There were definitely more than Rookie Sensations. All of the Ultra inserts were hot. Donruss made their popular Diamond Kings inserts. Collectors were chasing everything to complete their master sets. Card companies saw collectors would bust more packs to get these cards, so they just kept upping the odds until we got /25 inserts and 1/1 parallels.

When I think of 1993, I think of Shaq and the beginning of the end of baseball cards. Maybe it was just my area, but the only thing people bought was Basketball and Finest Baseball. SP and other products sold poorly. My sales of baseball cards was probably about 10% of what they were in 1992, then after the 1994 strike, nothing.

Shaq was huge. I forgot that he was under contract with "Classic" until the end of the year (1992). Series two products were popular, from the 1992/93 Hoops, that included the Magic All Rookie insert to the 1992/93 Stadium release which included the Beam Team card. Good times!

And there's 94, which had (I think) the first 1/1 cards. Edge football had a series of cards called supreme season review or something like that. Really long odds, like 1/4000 packs. I got one, and since it wasn't labeled or serial numbered it took a while to figure out that it was one of those, and even longer to find out that it was a 1/1.

There was hardly any mention of them at the time, and even less since then.

[QUOTE=steve B;1737333]LOL, I thought you meant the Upper Deck... Sometimes I totally miss things.
I see Fleer glossy as more of its own set, but it's interesting Beckett thinks of it as a parallel. How do they list the Nestles, and desert storm, and for that matter the tiffany and score glossy sets? They were all issued on their own in different forms.

Just as an FYI -- and I'm doing this from long-ago memory and that's more than 10 years now. The reason they are called "Parallels" in Beckett is because the checklists are identical and to ensure the checklists moved properly and did not have to be typed in AGAIN, we used a parallel nomenclature.

That way, one could just copy over a checklist in the data base fairly easily. Of course, there was the month I deleted the 1989 Topps set from the data base but that's a different story but related to this.

Rich

Thanks Rich! I think it's interesting to hear the inside story of how things got where they are in the cataloging end of the hobby.

Oddly, considering the hobby in general much of what I've heard is pretty straightforward compared to the cataloging of stamps, where egos etc get in the way of getting obvious stuff added and getting old mistakes - often made decades ago corrected.

1990 Donruss - officially, the end of the 'true' error card.