1989 Upper Deck

the set

notes

In 1988 a pack of baseball cards cost about thirty cents. In 1989 Upper Deck asked roughly a dollar for fifteen cards and a hologram sticker, and dealers at the first shows said out loud that nobody would pay it.

They paid it. The set changed the business inside a year.

What was actually new: card stock you could not bend without meaning to, full colour photography on both sides rather than a colour front and a grey cardboard back, tamper-proof foil packs instead of wax, and a hologram printed on every reverse to defeat the counterfeiters who had been flooding the market. Nothing else on the shelf in 1989 had any of it. Within three years every manufacturer was building a premium brand and the phrase super-premium had entered the vocabulary.

It came out three months late because the production was harder than the company expected, which explains some of what follows.

The 800 cards arrived in two parts. Cards 1 to 700 shipped in April 1989, and the 100 high numbers came in October, in packs that mixed two high-series cards with thirteen low ones. That structure still shapes the market: low series boxes sell for more than high series boxes for the simple reason that a Griffey can only come out of a low pack.

Which brings us to card 1.

Upper Deck put Ken Griffey Jr. at the front of the set before he had played a major league game. Topps had spent decades reserving number 1 and the round hundreds for established stars; Upper Deck gave the slot to an eighteen-year-old on the strength of what a scout thought he might become. The decision is credited to Tom Geideman, himself a teenager working at the company at the time. It is the single most consequential piece of card numbering in the hobby's history.

The Star Rookies run from 1 to 26 and the rest of that subset is not thin either: Gary Sheffield, John Smoltz, Randy Johnson and Jim Abbott are all in it. Craig Biggio, Dante Bichette, Steve Finley and Todd Zeile have rookie cards further into the set, and Omar Vizquel appears in the high numbers.

The team checklists at 668 to 693 are worth a look for their own sake. Each is a painting rather than a photograph, done by the artist Vernon Wells Jr., whose son of the same name went on to play fifteen years in the majors.

The errors are the other reason people remember this set, and Upper Deck was unusually specific about them afterwards. According to the company, the Dale Murphy and Pat Sheridan cards were corrected after only two per cent of the print run; the Gary Sheffield after fifteen per cent; Gary Varsho after twenty. Those percentages are why the error versions are scarce in wildly different degrees rather than uniformly.

Card 357, the Dale Murphy reverse negative, is the famous one. Pulled almost immediately, and the numbers show it: PSA had graded only around a hundred copies as of a survey some years ago, with two of them gem mint.

The Sheffield with the upside-down SS is the opposite case. It is well known, it is regularly listed as an error, and it carries essentially no premium, because fifteen per cent of a print run this size is not scarce.

One structural flaw worth knowing before you buy anything raw. The holograms were applied inconsistently, and cards with missing or duplicated holograms turn up regularly. They are not rare and they are not collectible - they are defective, and they trade at a discount.

And the set grades worse than its reputation suggests. The card stock is slick, which means the photo surface scratches if the cards are shuffled, and the hologram on the back can lift or tear. A set built to be permanent has two condition problems that a 1979 O-Pee-Chee does not.