Comments on: We’re headed back to the 1980s … we want to hear what YOU think

By: Brian Lowe

Brian Lowe — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 03:55:52 +0000

1. Started collecting 1990 (jr. in college). I targeted the coveted 1989 UD Griffey Jr. and 1986-87 Fleer Jordan cards.
2. Though I think both UD Griffey and F Jordan RC’s represented the 80′s well, I have to go with
Jordan. Baseball uniforms have pretty much remained the same throughout time, but the
basketball uniforms of the 80′s with those short shorts and calf high socks depicts this era so
well.
3. No
4. No
5. Some lessons I’ve learned along the way is not to get sucked into the hype of the “new”
phenom before having proved him/herself and throw all your eggs into one basket
(Brien Taylor, Larry Johnson, Phil Plantier, Todd Van Poppel); collect for the love of the
hobby/sport and not for greed, otherwise become a dealer and worry about making a quick
turnaround; and sometimes you gotta put the hobby aside for other priorities (girls). Sorry,
but sometimes you have to bite the big one (paid for wife’s engagement ring with RC’s of
Jordan, Nolan Ryan, Kobe Bryant, and Griffey Jr.) All have found their way home with the
exception of Jordan.

By: Bill Palian

Bill Palian — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 21:43:30 +0000

Forgot
Bill Palian
Charlotte, NC

By: Bill Palian

Bill Palian — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 21:42:54 +0000

1. When did you start collecting — and was there one set or card that you keyed upon early on during the 80s? I started collecting in 1974 when I was 8 years-old. My brother started collecting the set with me and I was hooked. Growing up in Maine the son of a die hard Pirates fan it was a lean time for Pirates in the 80s until Barry Bonds and his 1986 Update and 1987 base rookies. I put several into my collection. Prior to that it was the 1983 Wade Boggs rookie. There wan’t a hotter card in New England in the 80s.

2. What card — any sport — do you think says “1980s” the most? The 1984 Donruss Don Mattingly rookie. It was a hint of what was to come for cards. More limited production and nicer designs.

3. Is there anything you miss about the 1980s card landscape as a collector? The simplicity of collecting a set. No short prints or ten different insert sets to chase.

4. Is there anything that you miss about the 1980s products that you’d like to see revived? I think the best things have continued and the bad things (gum you could crack a tooth on) have gone away.

5. It’s clear that the hobby as we see it today was born and exploded in the 1980s. What, in your mind, were some of the lessons that we learned from then to now? (Overproduction, fewer products … things to be aware of. On the other hand, things that worked … ) If you make a nice looking product with good photos and nice action shots people will purchase it. There is a fine line between overproduction and too limited and I think that balance has been reached.

6. Some people see 1980s wax/sets as a wasteland of overproduced stuff, but part of me wants to say that perhaps those grounds are possibly a key part of reviving the hobby beyond just new products. The stuff is largely readily available, often very affordable and is probably what a lot of 30-somethings remember as kids. Thoughts?
I have gone back and let my kid open a cheap box just for the trill of opening packs. They have their favorite teams and trying to buy all the new stuff for them would send me to the poor house. 1980s cards are a good way to introdce kids to the hobby and not break your bank.

By: Arik Florimonte

Arik Florimonte — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 08:18:55 +0000

Arik Florimonte
Sunnyvale, CA

1. When did you start collecting — and was there one set or card that you keyed upon early on during the 80s?

A. I guess I started around 1978, when I was 7, because that’s the first year that I had a high volume of cards. I spent hours playing baseball games using the game on the backs of those cards, and to this day I can still remember which cards had “Home Run” on the back.

The first set I finished was 1980 Topps. I had everything but the Gene Richards card, and i traded an older kid ALL of my doubles for it. Later on, and for a long time I lamented all the valuable cards I gave away, until I realized that nearly all my cards from back then were so trashed that they weren’t worth any money anyway.

2. What card — any sport — do you think says “1980s” the most?

A. I’m going to pick three. First, the 1987 Topps Bonds card, since I am a Pirates fan and I bought about 30 of them hoping they’d skyrocket in value. Second, the 1982 Ripken rookie sticks out, that was the first time I realized that those “future stars” cards counted as “Rookie cards”! My favorite card from the 80s was the 1980 Nolan Ryan — I loved the color and composition of that photo, even when I was 9.

3. Is there anything you miss about the 1980s card landscape as a collector?

A. I miss having only a few sets to collect. It is still way too confusing, and it’s impossible to collect all the cards of your favorite player. I actually tried to come back to the hobby in the early 90s, and again around 2000, but got turned off by the sheer variety and the confusion it created. I also miss being able to buy cards at the liquor store or drug store.

4. Is there anything that you miss about the 1980s products that you’d like to see revived?

A. Again, I liked the simplicity of having only one base set. I realize that’s not feasible any more, so here’s something easy: I still love the “All-Star” cards that were the same as the base cards, but just added a special All Star banner or logo on them. I think those only ran through 1981, so maybe that’s more of a 70s thing. In general I think one card of each player in each set is enough. I don’t know why we need 4 different Jeters or half a dozen Strasburgs in a set. And I’d really like Topps to “revive” the absence of Mickey Mantle cards in every set! Enough already! (That said, I admit I was a fan of the Topps short prints in 2009 and 2010)

A. To me, the hobby was born around 1980, when people realized old cards were worth money! What came after that were repeated attempts to capitalize on the newly discovered “value” of cards, much of it misguided because it ignored the health of the hobby. Overproduction and too many products were big turn-offs. I think the main lesson still hasn’t been learned: people don’t like to have to choose! If there’s only one or two different sets, you can go after everything, and that’s a lot more satisfying than having to, say, pick one set and a few players to collect and ignore 90% of what’s out there.

A. There are some advantages to the overproduction. For example, it’s easy to find cards of your favorite players cheaply, and some of them are even nice cards. And I might even be able to afford to put together a high-end graded set if I wanted. As an investment, they ain’t much, but if you’re in it because you love baseball and you love collecting, there’s something to like.

By: Jeff Fiedler

Jeff Fiedler — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 17:16:00 +0000

Sorry; forgot to include my location in my post earlier today! The previous post was from Jeff Fiedler in Washington Crossing, PA.

By: Jeff Fiedler

Jeff Fiedler — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 14:24:52 +0000

1) I started collecting in 1986 when I was seven. The first packs I can remember buying were Sportflics (still a horribly, horribly underappreciated brand; pulled a Bo Jackson rookie in my first pack, which was a mighty memorable way to kick off a collection, especially for this avid Bo fan), but the first set I remember buying a ton of was ’87 Topps baseball. For me, that was the best-looking of all of Topps’ baseball sets from the latter half of the ’80s – and still to this day one of its all-time most classic designs – and I just couldn’t get enough of it! The crop of rookies was fantastic, and I especially loved the Future Star subset – the Bo Jackson and Palmeiro rookies in that subset are two of the coolest-looking rookie cards of that time period. (I snatch up every copy of the former I come across in budget “monster boxes” at shows; I just LOOOVE that card! I must be up to 150 copies by now …) (I’ve managed to score a Tiffany version of the latter since those days, which is even cooler to look at, though a Tiffany copy of the former continues to elude me. One day …)
2) The card that most says “1980s” to me is Jose Canseco’s ’86 Donruss Rated Rookie card. It may not be the most sought-after or famous card of that decade nowadays, but THAT was the card that all my collector friends and I most salivated over at the time and dreamt of owning eventually. I didn’t finally get one until the end of the ’90s (and unknowingly, since I actually discovered it in a box of mixed cards I got at a flea market), but even then – long after the card had reached its peak value and level of popularity – I can still remember thinking, “I can’t believe I actually own one of these after all these years!” My jaw just dropped when I pulled that thing out of the box. It still had that aura about it for me, even at just a tiny fraction of its former value.
3) There are two things I miss – and miss HORRIBLY – about the collecting landscape in the ’80s:
- For starters, when was the last time you saw collectors get excited over base cards (and short-print variations like those in 2010 Topps don’t count, folks) – just a simple same-print-run-as-every-other-card-in-that-set base card? When was the last time you saw someone got excited over a SUBSET card? (Heck, how often anymore do you even hear the WORD “subset”?) Most collectors these days can’t seem to get excited over a card unless it’s got an autograph or swatch of memorabilia on it. I have quite seriously seen people buy packs and throw all the base cards they’ve pulled from it into the garbage. How did the hobby ever come to that??? Autographed inserts weren’t so awful when there were just one or two signed cards to be found per product and you had to literally rip open several thousands of packs to find one – i.e. the Sandberg “Signature Series” card pull in ’91 Donruss – but the hobby eventually took them to the point where pulling one no longer was quite as meaningful or shocking and a box without a game-used or signed card was suddenly considered a lemon, whereas, in the ’80s and early ’90s, you had people getting excited over simple and plentiful subsets like Diamond Kings and Rated Rookies and Dream Team. The hobby was healthier for that. It just all became about hitting the big-money cards and base cards suddenly became almost an annoyance to box-breakers – how did we allow ourselves to ever get to that? We didn’t need those cards back THEN – why do we demand them NOW?
The more we’ve lost our ability to appreciate little things like that, the worse the state of the hobby seems to get.
- Secondly, I miss being able to buy a pack of cards for fifty cents at most and being able to come home with a whole bagful of ten to fifteen packs for $5. THAT is the definition of collector-friendly. Yeah, the production quality of cards may be better these days, but … when you’re just a little kid, that kind of thing doesn’t matter; even when Upper Deck came into the hobby, I was impressed, yeah, but I still faithfully stuck with my cheaper Topps and Donruss and Score packs, just so I could have more packs to open when I got home! We’re never gonna bring enough kids back into the hobby to ensure its continued existence unless we can do something more about pack prices. Just make a back-to-basics, simple cardboard set again if you have to – no signed or game-used cards, certainly; just a few inserts, if any at all; and make the base cards no more lavish than, say, any Score set from the ’80s [Score cards from the '80s and early '90s were FANTASTIC for a kid collector - full-color, easy-to-read backs; heavily info-laden; the best and coolest-looking subsets of any brand out there; and all for the same price tag that every other brand carried] and top them at 50 cents a pack. That was the absolute perfect price for a pack of cards; once you could no longer get a pack for the same price as a candy bar or bag of M&M’s, the hobby just lost something for me. We badly need a product like that right now – something you could actually buy a full, 36-pack wax box of for under $20. (Oh, how I miss that!) $10-and-up blaster boxes of five or six packs are NOT going to bring all the young collectors back. You can buy a full box of any ’89 product for less than that these days and have at least four times more the amount of packs to open. But today’s 10-year-old collector doesn’t want to open an ’80s product, of course – they want/need a set that consumer-friendly but with today’s players; who’s offering that to them???
4) Other than pack prices? I miss 36-packs-per-wax-box, 15-cards-per-pack being the standard rather than the rarity it now is; you got a heck of a lot more cards for your money back then, and they also provided a longer source of entertainment. You can bust most boxes today in a matter of minutes – not a whole heck of a lot of fun. And you bust open most boxes today and look at the height (or lack of) of the stack of cards you’ve just pulled and you can’t help but think, “Wow, that ain’t a whole lot of cards for me to put away …”
I also miss insert sets being almost exclusively a rack-pack phenomenon (i.e. Fleer’s Hall of Famers, Headliners, For the Record, etc., one-per-rack-pack inserts of the late ’80s); it kept the number of insert sets to a minimum – which, in turn, meant a greater number of (and more lovingly-crafted) subsets; when inserts started to explode in the ’90s, subsets became all but a total afterthought to the manufacturers – and presented an additional small (but not buyer-unfriendly) challenge for the more ambitious collector. (Rack packs were awesome. They still technically exist, yeah, but they’re fairly obscure these days and I can’t remember the last time I saw one for anything less than four or five dollars, which is a complete turnoff. When I first started collecting, I could get three or four rack packs for that kind of money.)
5) I think the most important lesson to be learned from comparing the ’80 card market to today: kids are as important to the market as adult collectors. The manufacturers lost complete sight of that. The industry dug itself into a huge hole by pricing kids out of the hobby and have never really recovered from that.
The next lesson: the simpler, the better. The more different products you issue – and the more complicated those products (i.e. multiple and hard-to-distinguish parallel sets, too many short-print cards, etc.) – the less attractive it is to a potential collector, irregardless of their age but ESPECIALLY for a kid debating whether to pick up the hobby. Rave if you must about 1/1′s, but card collecting was arguably much more fun – and unquestionably more kid-friendly, anyway – when it was still feasible to obtain a copy of every existing card to that point of your favorite player. A kid in 2011 can no longer do that the way we could back in the ’80s, and the hobby is worse off for that. I mean, why even BOTHER keeping a checklist these days of your favorite player’s cards? – it’s a totally lost cause trying to obtain a copy of each (particularly if you are a kid and hence have a very limited amount of money at your disposal), a totally lost cause. That never used to be the case.
One thing I can say I definitely do NOT miss about collecting in the ’80s: the gum. It was terrible, and it nearly always left a stain on the back of the bottom card in the pack. I know some people get nostalgic for when packs still had gum in them, but … I myself do not miss that. I also don’t miss oversized sets like ’89 Bowman and all the Topps Big sets; those things were a royal pain to store. I was really glad to see that fad go away.
6) You hear hobbyists and dealers these days complain all the time – and I mean all the time – about late ’80s/early ’90s overproduction, but here’s the thing everyone completely fails to remember and appreciate: that era MADE this hobby. The cards may have been overly plentiful in those years, but so were the card shops and the number of customers IN those shops. (Conversely, when the production numbers started shooting significantly down, so did the number of shops and the number of collectors.)
I can’t remember ever being in a shop on a Saturday afternoon back then where it wasn’t jam-packed – and I mean jam-packed – with other kids. Kids buying fistfuls of packs and tearing them open and trading cards, and of what? – over-produced product. Donruss, Pro Set, NBA Hoops. It didn’t matter to us that it was over-produced. WE didn’t see it as overproduction. “Overproduction” is just something people who were only in the hobby for the money/investment thought about. We knew the cards were ubiquitous – we didn’t care! (Actually, the overproduction made it more FUN for us, ’cause there were a lot more stores and places for us to ACQUIRE more because of it!) All we cared was that this was a really cheap and fun hobby. Most young collectors back then were in it for the fun of it (and make new friends in the process), not as any kind of serious investment. We weren’t expecting to strike it rich from buying this stuff. We didn’t really pay any concern to production numbers. I don’t know why the manufacturers ever thought us young collectors cared about that. [When they clamped down substantially on production numbers and the prices shot up as a result, my brother and I saw that as an effort to play to the in-it-for-the-investment faction of the collecting world and move away from the in-it-for-the-entertainment crowd that most of us youth belonged to, and we bailed from the hobby as a result. I eventually came back, obviously (but now buy cards almost exclusively via shows and seldom buy any packs of new product; I bust older wax when I'm in a pack-busting mood) but my brother never did; the whole thing just soured his perception of the manufacturers and their appreciation (or lack of, rather) of us younger collectors.]
And it was a rare thing back then to find a drugstore or gas station or kwik-e-mart without a box of that year’s Topps product on its counters next to the register or mixed with the impulse-purchase candy. That was actually a really beautiful thing for the hobby. It created more collectors. There were a lot of impulse pack purchases back then, by kids and adults alike. You don’t see that anymore. [When was the last time you were in a gas station and saw someone throw a pack of cards on the counter to go with their bottle of soda? It doesn't happen.] People without card shops nearby still had no shortage of places to obtain packs. These days, you have to hunt high and low in a convenience store or drugstore to find where the boxes of cards are, if they carry any at all. Most toy stores these days don’t even carry sportscards, and I can’t remember a toy store from my youth – chain or independent – that DIDN’T have a wonderful and affordable sportscard section.
Curse the overproduction of the era if you must, but the hobby was BOOMING then, was it not? Do you have nearly as many customers – and particularly kid/beginning collectors – now as you did then?

By: BIGAIRBROWN

BIGAIRBROWN — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 00:58:55 +0000

I started collecting in the late 80s and MY Favrit card had to be The Rickey Henderson rookie. It was just so cool and I was able to purchase a couple in jr high from a classmate. The card that reminds me of the 80S the most would have to be the Barry Bonds and Bo jackson rookie. I remember when there was a hobby shop on every corner . those were some good times .I used to go after school and hang out and bust wax. Mid 90s was when I stopped collecting . I moved on to high scool to bigger and better things like girls and sports. iI had put the cards away. know im 34 and just got back into collecting in 2007. I was amazed at What happened to the industry and with cards like autos and memrabilia. I do miss the the local hobby shop. But auther then that I dont miss the overproduction years. I wasted alot of hard earned money on cardboard crap
Thanks big air

By: steve archer

steve archer — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 00:31:48 +0000

I technically started collecting in 1981, by purchasing a few packs/boxes of both football and baseball. I had opened most of the packs & then rubberbanded them in groups-mostly bulk but lika a lot of kids by teams as well….for reasons unclear to me now I left some packs unopened. Flash forward to early 1992 and thats when I really started my collection by finding those cards (within a paper grocery sack in my parents attic in their garage). I had a few football packs and a few baseball packs as well…plus I had 4 Montana RC’s……I then proceeded to trade my packs and all but one of the Montanas at several of the card shops we then had in my town (we have ZERO now) for items such as: 1990 score BB set, 1991 topps football set, etc. To most people this was a ridiculous thing to do…becasuse of the trade aspect and how I was receiving pretty much junk…..but, I was then and am now- A COLLECTOR and not AN INVESTOR. I still collect these days and have that 1981 football set I pieced together & although my Montana only came back a PSA 8…..I will always enjoy that part of my collection forever. Although the 80′s has the reputation of over-production (and there was) and mundane looking cardboard…..it was still then, a hobby to be enjoyed for mostly collecting and had not yet hit the ceiling for a greedy environment….but that all changed in 1989.

By: Mark A Wines

Mark A Wines — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 19:02:57 +0000

I started collecting in 1978 when I was 8 years old, my father got me started. The first set I collected by hand was 1980 Topps and my favorite card from that set was the Ricky Henderson Rookie card with Modesto listed on the back which I still have in perfect condition today. My dad collected when he was young (1958 & 59) and used to flip cards with his friends against a wall and the person with the closest card to the wall got to keep em all. He saved his cards in a shoe box and gave them to me when I turned 14. Turned out he had 2 1959 Mickey Mantle #10 cards and a 1958 Mantle in excellent shape, along with four hundred and forty two 1958 and 59′s cards in all. Collecting for me seems to have had its cycles, stopping when I learned to drive at age 16 (to many other things to do) and then starting back up again in 1999 due to the HR record cards. Slowed back down again and restarted in 2010 with Stephen Strasburg being in my home town. I think the cards have come along way and are much neater looking today. Let’s remember the past but go hard into the precious present!!!

By: Gary Hurd

Gary Hurd — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 14:58:00 +0000

1 I started collecting in earnest in 1980. We had just moved to Minnesota and my step-dad bought me and my brother each a pack of baseball at the local store. The first card I remember seeing was Don Money. Which I thought was kinda funny because his last name was money. (sorry I was 7 at the time)

2. If I had to pick one card that says 80′s it would be Joe Montana’s 1981 RC. For my birthday that year a friend got me a box of football and at the party we busted the packs, got no Joe but about 5 Walter Payton’s

3. Yes, being able to go the the nearest K-Mart of ShopKo, (because we had no Wal-Mart) and get a box for under 20 bucks

4. Yes, Topps should bring back the glossy send in sets. Those were awesome and would be great for autographs

5. I always thought that when Upper deck came in 89 that there were already too many companies. Granted that first set is very nice, but with it came the over a dollar pack, and it took some of the fun away. The things that worked were you knew there only so many companies (3) and that the high end stuff would be available (Tiffany) through dealers only. You didn’t have to worry if that 85 Kirby Puckett you just pulled out of the pack was his rookie or not, you knew it was.

6. I agree. I just recently decided to consentrate on building Topps sets from 1980 (which I have) to 2010. Base only no high end crap, because to me that is what collecting is about. I mean think about it, I believe it was 82 or 83 when I first got a price guide. Back then the 52 Mantle was only a few hundred bucks… so this stuff that is getting to be thirty years old, may start to rise in value shortly, not that it will ever reach the Mantle level but still.