Before we get started, just a quick note regarding the nature of these rankings: Comments have been left railing against my choices for top-ten-caliber sets. As a response, I’d like to simply reiterate that I’m not ranking these sets based on my own personal like or dislike. I’m ranking them in terms of their importance to the hobby at the time and taking into account if the hobby (or part of the hobby) adopted an innovation introduced in a given set. One comment expressed a strong dislike for the ‘Bowmanization’ of the rookie card. 1991 Bowman may be reviled by some, but it’s one of the most important sets from the early Nineties simply because it changed the nature of the rookie game. Now let’s get back to the Countdown.




Most of the sets in this Countdown are separated by only the slightest differences. Some had an important rookie, others featured excellent design or an above-average checklist. Very few of these 70-odd sets actually had much hobby (or historical) impact. In their collective defense, at the time of their release sets were made to be competitive with each other, not to have a place in history. That’s what makes it all the more impressive that certain sets were able to attain an instant-classic status.

One such set is 1993 Topps Finest. There’s simply no way to over-estimate its importance within the hobby at the time or the precedent it established for all the sets that have since followed. That’s a bombastic statement to make, especially for the set that is only ranked fifth, so here’s some bombast to back it up.

Let’s start with the short, stars-only, elitist checklist. Now, Finest wasn’t the first set to feature a short base card checklist (OPC Premier was probably the first modern set to do so), just the first to make that fact meaningful. Let me explain.

In 1992, Topps released what would be its last 792-card flagship set, ballooning that figure to 825 cards for 1993. By setting the cap on Finest at 199 cards, Topps cut 626 potential subjects—essentially guys #8 through #25 on each team’s roster. With an entire checklist comprised of only stars, Topps was able to set Finest apart as the company’s home for the game’s elite (or ‘finest’… See what they’re doing there with their name? Ehh?).

The choice of name would end up with multiple meanings: not only did the set feature the finest players in the game, but the cards were among the finest collectors had ever seen. People were blown away. Etched metal, crushed beer can art, whatever you want to call it—Finest innovated card design across the hobby for years to come (whether you personally approved of that or not (I was among those who did not)).

And it did so without straying from the rules of what a baseball card should look like. The player’s name was in a small box next to the Topps logo, and with a large action photo that clearly showed the name of the player’s team and his main function on the field (pitchers were shown pitching), all the design had to accomplish was keeping the player rooted in reality, which it did with the deft sandwiching of metal between player and photo background. As for the backs, they were an afterthought.

As if the base design wasn’t enough, Topps included a hard-to-find parallel set: Refractors. Seeded one in every nine packs, there was a very good chance the average collector (ie the kid who scrimped and saved for weeks on end just to buy a single pack) would never find one. And because the Refractors were a parallel of the base set, there were 199 different ones to collect. Talk about tall orders to fill if you decided to go for the master set.

But who really could afford to do so? Only six cards came per pack, with only 18 packs per box. Let’s say you bought a box: that gave you 106 regular cards and two Refractors (barring doubles). You would still need 93 cards to complete the base set and a whopping 197 Refractors. In the end you were probably looking at buying three to four boxes just to make one base set. Unless you had a barrel of disposable income, the Refractor set was out of your reach. And who ever heard of needing disposable income for new cards? Nowadays that seems like par for the course, but at the time it was an outrageous proposition.

The single most significant innovation that Finest contributed to the hobby was the new audience it was able to draw to collecting. Let’s face it: Finest wasn’t for little kids (unless they were ‘discerning’ little kids), it was for investors, er, I mean collectors ready to spend real money on baseball cards of contemporary stars. And while other brands had set their sights on attracting collectors of this nature, those similar sets from the period (1990 Leaf, 1989 Upper Deck, 1991 Stadium Club and to a certain extent 1992 Bowman) have lost their value. That this edition of Finest hasn’t is simply remarkable.

How does it continue to be relevant? With a checklist comprised of superstars and no real rookies to speak of. With fewer cards per pack and fewer packs per box. And with an innovative design and parallel insert technology gimmick that has set the pace for the fifteen years and counting. Like I said: remarkable.

I didn’t know how to approach SP. Not in writing about it and its historical significance for a company like Upper Deck (I happen to believe that it redefined the company and together with Topps Finest pushed The Hobby at large down the deep, dark, foil-stamped, holographic tunnel from which it’s never re-emerged), but when I first saw it on the shelf at my local card shop. Don’t get me wrong; I like this set. It intimidated me to no end when it originally came out, but I’ve warmed to it as card prices in general have inflated over the last fifteen years. It’s just, well… When it comes to owning baseball cards, I have a bit of an inferiority complex.

Let me re-phrase that. When it comes to life, I have a large inferiority complex. I can’t tell you why… but I want to thank all those collectors who’ve loved and destroyed the crap out of their cards. Without you there would be nothing out there for me to buy.

I’m not ashamed to admit it: I love creased, dinged and frayed cards. Cards that show a lot of wear have always been friends of mine. Just this afternoon I re-sorted my vintage notebook and I’d have to say that about 90 percent of the cards in the book have paper loss, noticeably chipped corners, creases and/or sun damage. A personal favorite is my copy of Jim Bouton’s 1966 Topps Venezuela card: it’s covered in scribbles from the previous owner plus I can fold it twice and it doesn’t snap to pieces. And that’s one of the better cards in my collection.

The writing was on the wall for me when Score came out in 1988; that set did a lot of things that Topps, Fleer and Donruss weren’t doing at the time (full-color backs, photos on the backs, printed on a nicer, cleaner card stock, poly-bagging packs), and really it was only a matter of time before there would be a new set with packs that I couldn’t afford. That came sooner rather than later with Upper Deck the next year. After that it was Leaf in 1990, Stadium Club and Ultra in 1991 and so on and so forth until I could barely afford any packs by the time I stopped buying new stuff in 1995. But I digress…

Of the three ultra-premium sets that debuted in 1993, SP was the most subtle and most delicate. Maybe it was the etched copper foil stamp, or the simple two-color block pattern along the left edge —for me reminiscent for some reason of nautical flags and tags of preppy designer clothes. Or maybe it was ikebana design of the thin, circuit-like metallic ink line that traveled up the right side of the front to provide underscore for the team name along the top. (The light bulb filament-like bob and weave shape of the line would also lend visual cue to the die-cut edge of the Platinum Power insert set. See what they were doing there? It’s a nice touch that ties the insert and base sets together without working too hard.)

But most likely, it earned this distinction because instead of using the Upper Deck and individual teams’ logos, the company name and team names were spelled out in the same copper metallic ink. Because of the omission of these graphics, the SP aesthetic wasn’t piecemeal, and the designers had control of the entire layout of the card. (If you need a refresher course in ultra-premium card design in 1993, take a look for flaws in Topps Finest and Fleer Flair: Finest uses the same Topps logo as the company’s other brands, while Flair’s otherwise elegant design is taken down a few notches by the mostly-harmless-but-by-no-means-elegant team logos, positioned in the upper right hand corner on the back.)

With nine players from each team represented and a total checklist just shy of 300 cards, the make-up of SP was strong, and on the strength of design, overall checklist and availability was able to turn a relatively weak rookie class into desirable cards across the board. Derek Jeter and Johnny Damon (on his only rookie from 1993) lead the pack, but am I wrong or did Beckett have the Chad Mottola card somewhere around $5 at one point?

1993 saw Upper Deck grow up. Not only did the company successfully transform its flagship from a fun-loving, cartoony, young-person’s baseball card set to a mature, classy, young-adult’s baseball card set, but it birthed a brand that gave the company a strong foothold in the rapidly expanding ultra-premium market. If I thought I was intimidated by SP when I first saw it, what about Topps and the other Upper Deck competitors?

42. 1994 Bowman’s Best
I never collected this set. Not when it first came out, and not any time since. My collection does not have one single card from this set. Chalk it up to lack of interest, I guess. So then why do I have it tucked into the middle of this Countdown? It’s because of my interest (bordering on obsession) with the art of checklisting.

This first edition of Bowman’s Best is a landmark in the way Topps divided the checklist, as well as in card distribution within packs. That they seeded two 90 card sets–red for stars and blue for promising rookies–within the same packs marks the first time in company history (as far as I can tell) that this was done (and that neither was an insert set). It’s a remarkable achievement. I’m not so sure you can say the same thing about the cards themselves.


41. 1994 Finest
In 1993, Topps Finest was something of a pioneer. It was one of, if not the first of the ultra-luxury sets. The checklist was limited to 199, with room only for the upper echelon of players (though guys like Dave Fleming and Mike Devereaux snuck in somehow), not to mention that the quality of the cards was staggering: the backs featured a full color gloss and the fronts resembled pressed beer can art. Everything about the set breathed ‘fine art a la baseball,’ and the quantities available and pack and individual card prices only reinforced that idea. And I haven’t even mentioned Refractors yet.

This background is important because without it, you can’t begin to understand why 1994 Finest was a major letdown. Finest’s debut the year before had got a lot of things right; the bar was set high, but not impossibly so. The limited checklist and quantity available allowed Finest to cater to a higher-end customer, and limiting the number of insert sets down to just the Refractors parallel set—especially in the context of insert mania in the early Nineties—gave the brand a refined air. Packs were expensive, there weren’t that many cards per pack, and the Refractors were scarce. In other words, everything fed off each other to create a perfect storm of collector buzz.

So why didn’t Topps follow the same game plan for 1994? Were they frightened of possibly appearing staid in the overwhelming hobby environment of push-push-push? It’s hard to say. Instead of taking the lead from the previous year, 1994’s Finest was bloated: With a total of 440 base cards—more than twice the amount from the previous year—it became just another ‘premium’ set without much substance.