I've noticed lately that as they age, the one really noticeable place people gain weight is in the face. Even athletes, whose job it is to stay in impeccable shape. Just look at Tony Perez's Super Veterans card in 1983 Topps; he almost looks like two different people.

I bring this up because the more I look back through all these cards of Fred McGriff, the more it appears that he didn't gain face weight. Can that be right? His helmet looked comically oversized even late into his career (whereas someone like Tony Gwynn filled out under his helmet).

It's always shocking when you see an old retired athlete (take Larry Bird for example), because usually the first thing you think of is Hey, he really let himself go. And yet, take a look at this photo from a dinner in 2007. McGriff doesn't look like Rickey Henderson, but he also doesn't look like he stopped working out occasionally.

Anyway, I didn't really want to talk about face fat. I wanted to talk about good old National Packtime. Take a look at the lineup of this little set from 1995:

Alex Rodriguez
Barry Bonds
Cal Ripken
Ken Griffey Jr.
Tony Gwynn
Frank Thomas
Mike Piazza
Will Clark
Juan Gonzalez
Jeff Bagwell
Kenny Lofton
Fred McGriff
Deion Sanders
Matt Williams
Jose Canseco
Bob Hamelin
Tim Salmon
Raul Mondesi

You know, for all the future Hall of Famers and on-the-cusp guys in the set, the guy I was most excited by was Raul Mondesi. (You want to read something interesting? Read Mondesi's wikipedia page.) I still feel like Mondesi could, if he wanted to, get back into playing shape and make an impact on a team like Pittsburgh or Seattle. And I bet that with a few rigorous workouts, that face fat will leather itself taut. (Scroll down to the bottom of this page to see what Mondesi looks like now.)

I never saw Fred McGriff play in person. And yet, here he is in Fenway Park circa 1989-1990. A friend of mine used to have tickets about 20 rows behind home plate and I remember going to a number of games around that time.

Nor did I ever really watch games that McGriff played in. My family, like everybody else who got cable, got all the Braves games on TBS. But that didn't mean I watched them. So then here's my question: Can I legitimately call McGriff my favorite player if I a) never saw him play in person and b) never made much of an effort to catch his games on TV? I think I'm safe.

McGriff fit what I was looking for in a baseball hero. To me, he was obscure. And if you know anything about my values system, obscurity ranks very high. Oh sure, he wasn't a face in the crowd to fans of the game. But ask a random person on the street who McGriff was and I'd bet nine out of ten wouldn't know. And yet, here's the funny thing: if McGriff had spent his career in a baseball mecca like Boston or New York, I'm completely convinced that his national presence would've rivaled that of Boggs, Mattingly or any other of his more famous contemporaries.

Before Topps' institutionalized exaltation of players like Pete Rose, Hank Aaron, Nolan Ryan, and Mickey Mantle, and Upper Deck's lavishly illustrated Baseball Heroes, hero worship was one of the many options in composing a baseball card set. Witness Fro Joy's 1928 Babe Ruth, and Lou Gehrig's face and facsimile signature on every card in the 1934 Goudey set. But most of all, feast your eyes on the big wet sloppy kiss on the lips that is Fleer's 80-card set from 1959: Baseball's Greatest, Ted Williams.

Six cards of a guy I can live with (that's about the length of a standard subset). And even 250 cards with Gehrig's little smirking face in the corner isn't bad (Gehrig is just part of the design, not the subject of each card). But 80 cards of the same player? You'd think that would be overkill. Of course, you'd be right. It turns out that you can form a pretty good picture of who Ted Williams was as a ballplayer with just five or six cards, not 80. And you really only need one card to form a solid image of who Ted Williams was as a human being: card #54, "Dec. 1954, Fisherman Ted Hooks a Big One."

From the back:
"Ted is an avid and expert fisherman. He devotes more time to fishing than anything else, except baseball. His status in the fishing world is as renowned as his status in the baseball world. Williams is particularly interested in game fish, such as marlin, tarpon or sailfish. On December 10, 1954 at Cabo Blanco in Peru, Ted caught the 8th largest black marlin ever landed with rod and reel. It weighed 1,235 lbs. Ted calls this 'my greatest fishing thrill.'

(The Best of the Set is Ted Signs for 1959 (card #68). It's by far and away the most valuable card in the set, and the most important for set collectors.)

Fleer made a big splash by signing Williams away from Topps in 1959, and they planned on getting their money's worth out of the deal. The set from 1959 was just the start of Teddy's cardboard coronation as he approached retirement. 1960 saw the first of two Baseball Greats sets of retired players, which lauded Williams as the brightest star among stars.

So then why, if 80 cards is overkill, does this set pull rank on a number of full-bodied sets made up of a season's worth of players? For a number of reasons, not the least being that it was the first post-war set of unabashed hero worship.

Fleer wasn't the first rival of Topps to sign away one of its major stars, but it was the first to do it after Topps swallowed Bowman in 1955. Also, it wasn't just a small-time regional star Fleer built around. It was Ted Williams, The Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived. I don't know if this is a fair assessment, but if Fleer doesn't land Williams in '59, does it release baseball cards in 1960, 1961, and the aborted series in 1963? I'm not sure those other sets happen without Williams on board. Heck, the whole reason the Baseball Greats sets exist at all was to include cards of Williams as part of his contract.

Also, if this set didn't exist, I'd argue that subsequent hero worship would've looked a lot different. Remember, Topps' Babe Ruth Story subset in the 1962 set came on the heels of Williams' defection to Fleer (and Maris' record-breaking 61 home runs in 1961). Before the BRS subset, Topps had limited experience in the way of hero worship: they gave Ted Williams card #1 three times (1954, 1957, 1958) and within the first five in 1955 and 1956. The only other instance I can think of is Roy Campanella's post-accident 'Symbol of Courage' card (#550) in the 1959 set.

Following the BRS, hero worship was part of the Topps repertoire, to be used in 1974 with Hank Aaron, 1985 and 1986 with Pete Rose, 1990 with Nolan Ryan, and in the recent abyss composed of every Mickey Mantle, Alex Rodriguez, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds insert set the company has felt compelled to produce. All of these go back to the Babe Ruth Story subset in 1962 Topps, which in turns goes back to Fleer's 1959 set, Baseball's Greatest, Ted Williams.

Up until my most recent week's absence from writing, I was on a tear, one not unlike Fleer's first series of cards in 1963. I'm not in any way equating my writing with this set in terms of importance within the hobby, nor is Topps suing The Baseball Card Blog to get the idea into my thick skull that baseball cards is their thing, not mine.

Because Topps blocked Fleer in the courts, what could have been a landmark set and perhaps the start to a beautiful Fleer decade was stopped before it really got started. With only 66 cards, plus a scarce, unnumbered checklist, the set Fleer released has to be viewed as incomplete.

As far as formal checklist strategy is concerned, there are a number of interesting things going on. This is the first Fleer checklist to group team members alphabetically by team, though on a much smaller scale than in the sets released in the 1980s. 1963 opens with a handful of Baltimore Orioles, then a bunch of Boston Red Sox, followed by a few Cleveland Indians, Kansas City A's, New York Yankees, Minnesota Twins, Washington Senators, Chicago Cubs, Cincinnati Reds, Houston Colt .45s, LA Dodgers, Milwaukee Braves, New York Mets, Philadelphia Phillies, Pittsburgh Pirates, St. Louis Cardinals, and San Francisco Giants.

At 66 cards, not everybody from these teams is included. Take the Yankees: only Ralph Terry and Bobby Richardson are in the set. Presumably Howard, Mantle, Maris, et al would've been in a later series. What is surprising is the All-Star quality found in the short checklist. Brooks Robinson, Roberto Clemente, Carl Yastrzemski, Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, Warren Spahn, Don Drysdale, and Willie Mays all made it in. And let's highlight the Mays card for a second. His is the only card separated from the rest of his team (Mays is on card 5, while the other Giants are on 64-66). Another notable card in the set is that of Milwaukee Brave Joe Adcock (#46). This is a short-printed card, making it harder to find than the other 65.

The design is classic Fleer, following 1960's and 1961's lead with white borders. This set also marks the first modern-era use of fielder position silhouettes in the front-of-card design (1973 and 1976 Topps being the others). Finally, the Best of the Set is the rookie of Maury Wills (#43). For reasons that are still hard to figure out, Wills was one of the very few players whom Topps did not tender a player contract to before his rookie season. Therefore, this is his true rookie card. His first Topps card would not come until 1969. All those times you've seen Maury Wills on a 1962 Topps design? Yup, card doesn't really exist.

It's almost too good to be true: before-and-after cards of Roger Clemens from the early Nineties.

Do you think that when it's all said and done, Roger will build a secret lab in his basement and pump himself silly with growth hormone? I like to think that he will skip the steroids and have retractable alloy adamantium Wolverine claws installed in his arms, so that when he has reason to be angry he can really go ballistic.

And maybe someone could slip Mike Piazza a pill that would make super-powerful, red optic blasts come out of his eyes. That way, when Old Man Wolverine Clemens comes to pick a fight, Piazza-clops will be there to meet the challenge... at least before Wolverine Clemens rips Piazza-clops' arms out of their sockets.

I might pay to watch that on pay-per-view.

Note: I can't find the piece of paper that has my ordered list of remaining Countdown sets. I've decided to wing it, but I must warn you: there will be no set number 12. This will be corrected in later versions of this countdown.


When I say '1994 Fleer,' what is the first thing that comes to mind? The Update A-Rod rookie? The elegant design? How about the ridiculous amount of insert cards? Or is it so overwhelming a set that you're blinded by a swirl of all of the above? If your answer hovers somewhere around that last option, don't worry, you're not alone.

Following the logical design arc from the year before, 1994 Fleer not only boasts the best-looking front and back tandem of the company's decade, but considering the hodgepodge puke they released in 1995, the clean, almost flawless '94 seems like the end of an era.

Sure, the set's epically minimal design does sort of predict that 1995's design could possibly be the worst, most seizure-enducing stationary-subject product ever created by human hands (taking cues from the basic card backs of 1993 Score, the Fleer back-of-card used two lightly translucent boxes, set askew to suggest a very pleasant Frank Lloyd Wright sensibility), but the jump from a practically graphic-free layout to an overloaded frame the very next year is cause for alarm.

But enough about the design. This is clearly one of, if not the best Fleer checklist of the early decade. Following the new company tradition of an expansive set, each team had at least 20 players represented (the last 660-card Fleer checklist was released in 1990; subsequent sets from 1991 - 1994 consisted of 720 base cards. 1995's checklist dipped down to 600). Add in an Update checklist of 210 cards, not to mention a boatload of inserts--and by the way, this set should really be considered the epitome of the decade's insert mania--and you've got yourself a true 'master set.'

1994 Fleer and Update make nice additions to any collection, to put it mildly.And before I wrap this up, a quick note about Alex Rodriguez. I find it interesting that the two companies to produce his rookie in 1994 were Fleer and Upper Deck. Upper Deck now owns Fleer and Rodriguez himself is a Topps spokesman (Upper Deck's chief rival). It leaves the unanswered question of whether the hobby would have progressed differently had Topps, Donruss and Score produced Rodriguez rookies as well.

What says ‘premium’ to you? A) Super-glossed, full-bleed photography, B) Snazzy graphics, foil stamping and serial numbers, or C) Gradients and metallic ink? If you answered ‘C’, then welcome to Fleer HQ, circa 1991.

As the second company to go premium (Donruss was first with 1990’s Leaf), and soon to be overshadowed by far superior Topps Stadium Club, Fleer’s inaugural Ultra set wasn’t bad. In fact, for a set that seems in hindsight like a calculated risk, you could say that it was better than you’d expect, especially when you consider the kind of crap Fleer was producing in the three years leading up to it. It’s almost as if they sequestered their best and brightest designers and asked the others not to speak to them until Ultra was ready to ship.

I say ‘calculated risk’ because there had been very few ‘premium’ sets made before Ultra. Upper Deck in 1989 and Leaf in 1990 proved that there was a market for a better card, and it was really only a matter of time before the other companies would follow suit with their own higher quality sets (Topps would debut Stadium Club that same year, with Score releasing Pinnacle in 1992). No matter what, it was imperative that Fleer release some sort of premium, before they found themselves lagging too far behind the rest of the pack. And Ultra wasn’t just a pre-emptive strike against the competition: it wasn’t a big secret that a premium brand would also mean perennial premium dollars for Fleer. But there was risk involved. What if it was a bad set? Had a weak checklist? Got approved with an ugly design? And what if collectors refused to pay the suggested pack price?

Lucky for Fleer, their best and brightest came through with a nice design, complete with a crowd-pleasing coat of silver ink, and a price that collectors accepted as justifiable given the quality of the card and set.

Ultra wasn’t the first set to incorporate metallic ink, but it was the first set to practically dip its design in it. Where other sets used black, Ultra used silver, and the design wasn’t necessarily the worse for that decision. The fronts were clean, featuring what is probably the best photography ever seen on Fleer cardboard. Take this image of Old Man Dave Winfield: you can see that he’s looking for the Eephus pitch. In previous years, the photography was sometimes so muddled that you could barely make out his face.

The backs forwent with a traditional player-in-background action shot and silhouetted him twice (once in the field, once at the plate) and as a large headshot outlined in an elemental shape that lords over both. It makes for a bizarre design—the headshot brings General Zod trapped in his hologram to mind, flipping through space forever. In fact, the backs would’ve worked much better had the Fleer photographer slipped each player a twenty and asked him to bug his eyes out and do his best ‘Mime-Trapped-In-A-Box.’

Who knows how much Fleer banked on the success of Ultra, but had it failed, the decadent years that followed would have played out very differently.

If anything, it takes guts to recognize and react positively to change. Considering that baseball cards were relatively stable in their manufacture and presentation (two-color back, no gloss, cheap cardboard stock) for the 100 years leading up to 1986, it only took the big three companies at the time (Donruss, Fleer and Topps) between four and five years to change at least one of their products to more along the lines of what we expect from cards today: foil-stamping, bleed photos, full-color backs and varying degrees of coated stock. In the grand scheme, that’s no time at all.

1991 Fleer Ultra deserves all the credit for giving the company a significant presence in the then-new world of ‘premium’ cards. Collectors responded to the classy look and feel of the cards and felt privileged to be able to buy them, like they were making an investment. Ultra laid the groundwork not only for other premiums that followed, but for the maturation of Fleer’s flagship for the rest of the decade.

The only problem was that Ultra, despite its quality (no whiteout scribbles on these!) and marbleized grandeur, was kind of ugly. Sure, the cards briefy had value, and I salivated over them as much as the next kid, but I always felt like something was missing, design-wise.

Someone at Fleer must have agreed, because not two years later Flair debuted as the company’s ultra—no pun intended—premium card set. And ultra it was. Each card was a little piece of art and each pack resembled an Art Deco cigarette case. Buying a pack of Flair for $3 netted you a stack of shrink-wrapped cards, thicker than any kind of card I’d ever seen (even thicker than Sportflics) that were, in a word, beautiful. Delicate gold leaf names on glossy stock and a mix of veterans on a simple checklist. Looming action close-up ghosted in a Field of Dreams, Riders on the Storm kind of way behind a studious action shot. A great first step in building a reliable brand.

Growing up outside Boston, I always thought that when the guy down at my local card shop said 'Fleer Flair' real fast he sounded kind of dumb (Flee-ah Flay-yahh). Despite the regional patois faux pas of name choice by Fleer, Flair seemed more like an actual set than its competitor, Topps Finest. Finest felt more like it was for high rollers, like you needed a key to the Playboy Club before you could buy a pack. It was certainly not for a pimply high school freshman like me.

But Flair… though I didn’t quite see the point of paying so much for a pack of cards, at least I had the money to do it. It was within my reach. In the end, I bought only one pack of this set, no matter how many times that card store guy tried to push it on me.

Honestly, I didn’t think Fleer had it in them to create a well-designed set, but 1993’s offering was pretty great. Actually, I should probably amend that: the front of the card was great. The backs, not so much.

Coming off an unprecedented string of bad card design (1989 to 1992), the 1993 Fleer fronts were like a breath of fresh air: nothing competed with the photo for attention, borders were a dull metallic silver and name, team and position were relegated to the left vertical border. Even the Fleer logo was reserved. And everything was treated with a light gloss. In a word: nice.

1993 wasn’t the first year Fleer’s base set boasted a full-color back, but it was the first year you really noticed. With an action shot of the player silhouetted against a large graphic of their last name, the player’s stats and biographical information were mere afterthoughts. Sure, it was an ordered mess, but it always felt like they could’ve done more with less back there.

Like 1993 Donruss and 1991 Topps, 1993 Fleer can best be described as a transition set. 1993 was the first year Fleer applied any sort of gloss to the base set, and the last year the base set was free of any sort of foil stamping. Also, it wasn’t the first year the company included inserts (you’ll have to go back to 1986 for that), but it was the year Fleer took a moderate step towards their soon-to-be unchallenged position in the hobby as the House of 1,000 Inserts (128 to be exact, up from 100 in 1992). To be fair, 1994 was really the year Fleer went batshit crazy for inserts; ’94’s master set included—are you sitting down?—236 different insert cards.

And you know what? The various 1993 inserts were attractive additions to the brand. Hey, I don’t mean to imply that a lot of inserts automatically kill a set’s overall attractiveness. They can make a set better if they pull their own weight. And I think that’s the case here, with the possible exception of the Tom Glavine Hero Worship set, but even that one contributes a nifty autographed card.

No, what really sinks Fleer’s ship is the fact that there are so many cards on the checklist with very little going on (720 in the base set plus 310 in Final Edition, that’s 1,030 total base cards, plus 128 inserts… making it 1,158 cards for the 1993 Fleer master set. That’s a gigantic set with very little payoff. I say ‘very little payoff’ because of those 1,158 cards, none of them featured Derek Jeter. Or Chipper Jones. And out of the two rookie-centric insert sets, only a handful of the 56 players included were any good (even at the time). It boils down to a lot of nothing. Nice to look at, sure, but nothing nonetheless.

‘Tall Boy’ is an affectionate term usually reserved for the hallmark oversized Topps basketball issues from the Seventies, or Parkhurst hockey from 1964-65. But what about this mid-Nineties Fleer incarnation? Tall Boy is an accurate description, though there's probably not much affection behind its use here. The name ‘Extra Bases’ was probably meant to imply the collector was getting more bang for the buck (if you count getting a glorified bookmark as a bonus).

It’s not that I didn’t care for this set—I collected enough wrappers to send away for the Pitcher’s Duel mail-order subset—it’s just that I remember buying packs and thinking I was wasting my money. Turns out I was right. I mean, it’s one thing for Topps to unleash a slightly larger Bowman, as they did in 1989. It’s another thing entirely for Fleer to smugly release a gangly rectangular disaster and expect the hobby to cater to it. I don’t remember if Ultra Pro or any of the other archival/display plastics companies responded with a special top loader or pocket page to fit this set, but I sure as hell never found one.

In case you still don’t remember what set I’m talking about, the cards were long, thin, colorful rectangles. Like other Fleer sets at the time, packs included a hearty slew of inserts, some of which were die-cut.

Extra Bases was a set with a regular checklist (big stars, rookies, commons) but cannot in any way, shape or form be considered a mainstream set. It was a disposable, experimental product of the bloated hobby landscape at the time. And frankly, a set like this would not be made today.

I don’t really remember too much about this set (I was pretty strung out on the glorious 1994 Score set at the time), and I haven’t come across too many of these cards when I’ve gone through my collection. I do remember that Fleer carried the oversized theme throughout the four sports (or at least basketball and football) with Jam Session (basketball) and Game Day (football).

I can’t say that I know what they were thinking, unless these sets were their rather late contributions to the ‘let’s make baseball cards fun for kids!’ movement (Topps Kids, Donruss Triple Play, Upper Deck Fun Packs). This hypothesis makes the most sense, as Fleer sort of sat that one out until the release of Extra Bases in 1994.


Yes, I stole this image off eBay. But then I remind myself that stealing images off eBay is not that bad. Heck, The New York Times did this two weeks ago in their obituary for movie poster artist John Alvin (their crack team of photo editors pulled an image of Alvin's 'Blazing Saddles' poster right off the site. You can tell by the little camera watermark in the lower right corner).

Reader Luqman thinks he can top Topps. I'll let him tell you about it.

"This one’s rougher than most due to my near total lack of image editing skills, but I think you get the idea. Obviously the text should gradually get larger from left to right on the team name bar, and vice versa on the player name bar, however to do that competently is well beyond my skill level.

A few design points:

1. Since this is base Topps, there is going to be foil somewhere, therefore the player name, position, and Topps logo are in “foil”.
2. In terms of general card design, I like white borders, large pictures, and a splash of color

In terms of grading the design, I think if someone competent worked on the text, this could be a solid Topps design similar to a mix of 1974 and 1980, but at this point it kind of looks more like a marginal improvement on 1990 Fleer."


Not thrilled with the thick white borders of 2008 Topps? Think you could do better if only given the chance. Boy are you in luck. Send me your design and I'll post it on the blog!

This trade comes in from Matt in Manchester, Connecticut.

Giving: Jeremy Bonderman, #58 (red back)
Getting: "Clutch Hitting," 1987 Fleer 1986 World Series factory insert set

Matt writes: "I chose this card to symbolize my favorite baseball moment of all time." Whether Matt knew it or not, this card symbolizes one of the very worst moments of my childhood: the 1986 World Series. I can still remember walking through the living room crying after the Red Sox lost in stunning Red Sox fashion to the Mets.

I didn't get over that series for a very long time. As they say at the trial of Ted Stryker in Airplane! II: The Sequel, when trying to determine the place of death:

Prosecutor: Over Macho Grande?
Witness: I don't think I'll ever get over Macho Grande.

The 1986 World Series will always be my Macho Grande. Thanks for bringing that one up, Matt.


If you want to get in on the fun and trade with me for a 2007 UD Goudey card, email me!

57. 1994 Leaf
Oh man, it’s been a long day. And here I am, staring down 1994 Leaf and I can’t even remember the damn thing. Nothing—and I’m scanning that old Beckett I told you about before, and yet still nothing. According to my mid-Nineties price guide, there were eight insert sets and it looks like Ken Griffey Jr. and Frank Thomas dominated just about all of them. That brings up a funny point: remember when you’d scan the latest Beckett or Tuff Stuff and notice that they’d list every single insert card from a set except for one and then also note what a common from that insert set went for? I hated that. It’s obvious that they had the page space to list every card (plus I collected Fred McGriff, and more often than not he’d be the one they’d leave out).

So coming back to this Leaf set for a minute, I feel like a dunce for ranking it towards the middle of the pack (granted, the high end of the middle) and then not remembering one thing about it that may have made it special, or horrendous. So let’s try to forget this ever came up.


#56. 1993 Fleer Ultra & #55. 1994 Fleer Ultra
1991 is generally recognized as the Year of the Boom in the hobby, though perhaps a more apt name would be the Year of the Great Crescendo, as it was not so much the beginning of the present day landscape—1993 was. No, 1991 was truly the last year of the Topps Dynasty. (Yes, I know I’m on record as having said that 1989 was truly the last year of the Topps Dynasty, but generally unwritten history’s designed to be a little fuzzy, so cut me some slack). So with three important products coming on the scene in 1993 (Fleer’s Flair, Topps Finest and Upper Deck’s SP), not to mention that scallywag Score Select, it became more important than ever that the premium products already out there were strong enough to deflect the new competition.

1993 Fleer Ultra survived the influx, but not without boring us all to tears in the process. Ultra’s marbleized design ruled across all four major sports (baseball, basketball, football and hockey) in 1992, and instead of mixing it up and trying on something new, the Fleer execs pulled a Donruss on us and gave Ultra the subtlest of facelifts for ’93. Granted, the cards were good looking and the inserts somewhat desirable, so no big deal, right? Well, I would argue that precisely because they didn’t even try to raise the bar for 1993, Ultra put the onus on 1994’s product to perform in an ever-expanding marketplace. And while 1994 Ultra at least had a major design overhaul, a boatload of inserts, autographs of Daulton and Kruk and draft picks, it was no prize pig.


54. 1991 Fleer
I have been moved to tears over matters of the baseball card encrusted heart only twice: upon seeing the beautiful T206 Wagner framed, matted and on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the first time I ripped open a pack of 1991 Fleer.

From the moment my hands touched yellow cardboard, I knew that this was the worst set ever made. If all the card companies had attended the same high school, 1991 Fleer’s face would’ve been plastered all over the senior superlatives pages: ugliest, most worthless, most useless. Not even pimple-faced, greasy-haired Donruss would’ve been seen hanging out with this one.

So then why the hell is it ranked here and not at the bottom of the pile? Because. That’s why. Back in the day I would have characterized this set as Ugly with a capital ‘U’. But I’ve mellowed out, and some may even say I’ve matured just a little bit. I’ve grown to appreciate the inner beauty in ugly things, so now it’s only ugly with a regular lowercase ‘u’.

To be fair, there are positives (they’re just few and far between). Take the Pro-Visions and All Stars insert sets. Those PV’s really knocked my socks off, mostly because it was completely obvious to me that if Fleer had only made the whole regular set with kick-ass black borders, I would’ve collected this set by choice, instead of by necessity, as it was still one of the only sets I could afford.

The checklist on this set was pretty drab. Granted, Fleer had all the big names, and even a great card of Bonds and Griffey billed as ‘Second Generation Stars’, but what it had in stars it lacked in rookies. To illustrate this point, let’s briefly compare Fleer’s 1991 (meaningful) rookie class with that from 1991 Score.

1991 Score
Phil Plantier
Brian McRae
Mike Mussina
Carl Everett
Jeff Conine
Todd Van Poppel
Rondell White
Chipper Jones
Ivan Rodriguez RT
Luis Gonzalez RT
Jeff Bagwell RT
Pete Schourek RT

1991 Fleer
Phil Plantier
Luis Gonzalez
Jeff Conine
Brian McRae
Ivan Rodriguez U
Jeff Bagwell U
Pete Schourek U
Mo Vaughn U
Chuck Knoblauch U

Fleer loses this one easily, for two reasons. First, Fleer did not include cards of draft picks so therefore didn’t have rookies of Mussina, Everett, Jones, White and Van Poppel. Because they didn’t include draft picks in the 1990 set either, they had to wait on Vaughn and Knoblauch for almost two full years later; both debuted in 1991’s Update set.

Granted, both the Fleer and Score rookie crops pale when compared with Bowman. In addition to everyone named above, Bowman had perennial Blue Jay Pat Hentgen, Jim Thome, Tim Salmon, Bret Boone, Roberto Hernandez, Wil Cordero, Kenny Lofton, Javy Lopez, Ryan ‘The Forgotten Superstar’ Klesko, Eric Karros and that unforgettable hobby monster, Raul Mondesi. Bowman was all about the long-term, the rookie that would mature into the superstar. Score was all about having close to a thousand cards in the base set. And Fleer, sadly, was all about neither of the two. For Fleer to have had an impact, it needed immediate rookie sensations to carry the set (the company even acknowledged as much the next year with their ‘Rookie Sensations’ insert set).

When I approach this set today, I save my tears. Sure, I still feel bad about this set; upon close inspection it represents the idea of ‘wasted opportunity’ surprisingly well. It had the potential to contribute more than it ultimately did. But 1991 Fleer does not break my heart anymore. Today my heart is tired from much bigger things than a pile of lousy yellow cardboard.

#61 & #60. 1992 & 1993 Triple Play
When we sit by the fireside, maybe in a few years, with a blanket wrapped around our legs, one hand poking at the fire with a long stick, the other matting down the last few strands of our hair with the spittle collecting at the corners of our mouth, what will we be thinking about?

Please, please please—let it not be these godforsaken sets, with their hideous renditions of orange and black. Let it not be silver lettered surnames, writ large and wide like proclamations, like billboards worthy of our time and energy. Nor let it be the emotionless action photos of crashes at the plate, or the scratch-off game cards that subliminally spawned the deep-seated-yet-hard-to-pinpoint-quite-
how-it-started-so-very-long-ago love for instant win lottery cards.

No no no—no more Roger McDowell in funny getups, doing funny things in funny situations. No more Phillie Phanatic rain dances on the dugout roof. No more cards from Paul Molitor’s gap-toothed grade school glory.

Let’s not think about these lame little brothers to Topps Kids and Upper Deck Fun Packs. Let’s remember that these set names shorten to TP for a reason. Let’s try to forget that we spent $15.00 at one point for a box of the 1993 version.

Yes, let’s hope that we’re watching TV. And not thinking about any of this.

#59. 1992 Fleer
Here’s another set I’d rather not have to think about ever again. And yet every so often, I find myself looking through that old Beckett from 1995 and I can’t help but search out my shoebox of cards from 1992, just to make sure for the thousandth time if I had any of those insert cards. And I don’t, though I did buy a Frank Thomas Rookie Sensation for fifty cents at a card show a few months ago. (Oh, how the mighty have fallen.)

Because that’s what this set had going for it: insert cards. You could argue that if Upper Deck brought inserts and autographs into the spotlight, the guys at Fleer kicked in the footlights, the fills and maybe even the houselights in the insert bonanza. Think about this. From 1986 to 1989, Fleer produced four straight years of 660-card sets, 132-card updates and 18 total insert cards. In 1990 they kept things cool at 660/132 and upped the insert total to 30. In 1991 they bumped the regular set to 720, kept the update set at 132, and took the insert total down to 22. But 1992? That year saw the regular and update sets stay at 720/132 and the number of inserts climb to 97. 97! That’s an unbelievable 441% increase from the year before.

And yet as ridiculous as that jump is, 97 individual insert cards is on par with almost every other product line for the year: Donruss had 67; Leaf had 24; Pinnacle had 135; Score had 124; Stadium Club had 3; Studio had 14; Ultra had 65; Upper Deck had 98 and Leaf and Topps had parallel sets.

The other thing that Fleer had was its Update set, one of the few sets in 1992 to have a card of Mike Piazza, the 1992 National League Rookie of the Year and a sure bet for the Hall of Fame. It also had first cards of mid-Nineties hobby superstar Kenny Lofton, Tim Salmon, Tim Wakefield and the immortal David Nied, the original member of the Colorado Rockies. (And for ten points: name the first Florida Marlin.)


#58. 1992 Fleer Ultra
1992 Fleer Ultra had to exist, so right away it’s set itself apart from many of those ranked before it. Why did it have to exist? For a number of reasons, the first being that the hobby had to find out if 1991’s Ultra was a one-trick pony or if it had legs.

And not only did Ultra have legs for the long haul—it’s still going strong today, sixteen years later—but it had four legs, as the marbleized 1992 design hoofed its way across baseball, basketball, football and hockey. Not only that, but it cemented the Fleer mothership in the somewhat uncharted waters of random autographed insert cards and cribbed a page from the Topps playbook on Hero Worship before Topps had a chance to capitalize on the idea. Case in point: by the time Topps got around to worshipping their forever-sober/strong-kneed version of Mickey Mantle in 1996, the idea seemed a little warmed over to the early Nineties generation of collectors, as Fleer and Fleer Ultra had, by that time, been playing the Hero Worship card for going on five years.

Why else did this set have to exist? Because it completely elevated 1991’s Ultra. More so that Upper Deck and Leaf, and with the exception of Pinnacle and Stadium Club, 1992 Fleer Ultra had some heft. It felt like what a premium card should’ve felt like: glossed up, with matrix-y computer graphics on the back. Plus that polished marble on the front and those little gold rookie flags around the fireball logo. And cards that Tony Gwynn autographed (and probably didn’t exist anywhere except as words on the box)

Yeah, it’s not worth jack now. Yeah, the graphics haven’t aged well. Yeah, it feels tired in the grand scheme of things. But to put it plainly, 1992 Fleer Ultra was the shit.


More Countdown coming soon…
By the way, if you answered ‘Nigel Wilson’—ten points to you!

The checklist is complete. The sets have been ranked. And while I originally thought there were 76 sets from 1990 to 1994, I recounted and found there to be 77, so that’s the figure I’m sticking to.

A few more notes before we begin. Like the Eighties countdown, the worth of an individual card or set will not be considered when ranking these sets, but may be mentioned anecdotally in describing a set. Also, I am going to say that my personal favorites of the years in question will not get preferential treatment, but we all know that that’s a very tall order to fill and I may stray from that rule. Also, I recently came across an old Beckett from November 1995, and will be referring to the stuff in it on more than one occasion. For starters, let me say that I forgot how big a deal Kenny Lofton was; his 1992 Fleer Update card is high column listed at $32.00! Are you kidding?

Finally, what makes a countdown like this so great to me is that thinking back on all these sets, I was able to come up with good things and bad things about almost all of them. There were only a handful that I had no recollection of collecting, and almost none where I couldn’t think of anything to say. I’ve decided that the sets that fall into this category, those that are so boring and non-descript that even I can’t think of one good or bad thing about them, were boring because they simply had no reason to exist. I’ve put these sets at the bottom of the list, but really they shouldn’t even be in the countdown.

In no particular order…

#77 1994 OPC
#76 1993 OPC
#75 1993 OPC Premier
#74 1994 Triple Play
#73 1994 Sportflics

Now, let the countdown begin.

#72. 1991 Leaf
Let’s start with some easy multiple choice. Let’s say that you’re in charge of Leaf, it’s 1991, and you’ve just come out with one of the great sets of 1990: a set with a perceived limited production run, chock full of rookies, plus a great design and loads of star cards that everyone, young and old, want to get their mitts on. How would you follow this great success? Would you a) put out another great set following the same principles, b) take in a ton of advance orders and then split for the border with the cash, or c) over-produce, strip the base set of important rookies, stuff them in an insert set that no one will ever be able to complete, commission and greenlight a shitty design and then laugh all the way to the bank? If you answered ‘c’…congratulations, you’re correct.

Seriously, how did Donruss and Leaf screw this up? A company simply doesn’t abandon a winning formula, especially at a time when there are a thousand competitors in—let’s face it—a niche marketplace. Why, why, why didn’t they include important rookies in this set? Why did they only include them in the Gold Leaf Rookies insert set? If Leaf had included a Jeff Bagwell rookie in the base set, this would have been a monster in the early Nineties. Instead, it was the hobby’s biggest joke; one from which Leaf would never recover.

#71. 1990 Fleer
I’ve given this a lot of thought over the past few days: Were it not for the colossal let-down that was 1991 Leaf, 1990 Fleer would be the worst set of the first five years of the Nineties, and for a variety of reasons, none so prevalent as it simply had nothing to offer. You’d think that 1990 would’ve been a stellar year across the board for baseball cards, as 1989 had so much going for it and the hobby was experiencing a boom larger than it had ever seen. That was simply not the case. While other sets figured out a way to capitalize on the hype, a few didn’t (Fleer chief among them).

This is not to say that they didn’t try new things with this set; they did. In addition to the requisite combos and doubleheaded rookies, they included 'Players of the Decade,' a new subset of stars of the 1980s. Fleer also led the way with three insert sets: All-Stars, League Standouts and Soaring Stars (after a 1991 hiatus, this insert set was renamed Rookie Sensations for 1992).

But they took more than a few bad turns. For some reason their design team (which was in the middle of putting together an unprecedented four straight years of bad design, 1989 to 1992) approved a bland white border and bland red, white and blue back—virtually guaranteeing that collectors would confuse them with novelty deck-of-cards sets you could buy at Circle K, Kmart and other fine drugstore and discount department store chains. They then proceeded to miss out on the key rookie of 1990, Frank Thomas. Oh, and like most of all the other manufacturers that year, they printed 1 billion cards.

It’s not so much that they printed so many cards. It’s that they printed so many cards and none of those cards was of Frank Thomas. Taking nothing away from Juan Gonzalez, David Justice, Marquis Grissom, Ben McDonald, Larry Walker, John Olerud, Delino DeShields or even Sammy Sosa, Thomas was hands-down the best of the bunch. So to come out with a set that doesn’t have a card of him? What’s the point of that? Exactly. There is no point. You’re just killing time until you have a chance to show the world you realize you screwed up and pray that collectors are completist enough to hold out and buy your lousy Update set at the end of the season, where not only will there be Thomas, but Olerud, Carlos Baerga (was there ever anyone bigger than Carlos Baerga was in 1993?) and Travis Fryman too.

Too bad by the time the Update set came, nobody really cared about it, either.


#70. 1990 Bowman
OK, so I didn’t mean to set up Frank Thomas as the savior of baseball cards. In reality, he was a standout from the many that made up the great, overlooked rookie class of 1990. And while it’s a good thing that Thomas is in this Bowman set, it’s also true that this set is not a classic simply because it has a card of Thomas in it. Far from it.

1990 Bowman must be viewed as a transition set between the 1989 and 1991 Bowman sets. 1990 was the first year to use the modern card size (1989 was the same size as the 1950s issues, just slightly taller than what is considered the ‘modern’ card size that began with 1957 Topps) and really the first Bowman attempt to fashion itself as the ‘Home of the Rookie Card,’ something it would achieve with the 1991 set. So where does that leave this set? Well, it’s got a lot of rookies; all the big names are here, all in the one series, which is nice. Plus the front was one big color photo with a tiny white border along the bottom with team and player names (also nice). But that’s where the niceties stop.

Those minimal fronts became a big sea of boring faces as the set progressed. Also, what was with the backs? Who was it at Bowman/Topps that decided a grid-like breakdown of the past year’s stats would be a good thing? Granted, it was something that set Bowman apart, but for the worse. I could never make heads nor tails of the stats on the back of a Bowman card from 1989 to 1991.

There nothing really that bad about 1990 Bowman, it’s just boring. Minimal design is one thing, but boring? 'Boring' is never going to cut it in baseball cards. C'mon Bowman, you know that.


#69 to #65 Coming Soon