(For more classic cardboard, check out our Complete Guide to the Golden Era of Baseball Cards.)
By the time collectors ripped open our first wax packs of 1988 Topps baseball cards, we were pretty sure that all the roads we’d travel in the future would be paved with gold — cardboard gold.
After all, the 1987 Topps set, with its wood borders, had exploded in value the previous summer. Not only were Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco rookie cards fetching several dollars a piece on the secondary market, but the checklist was littered from top to bottom with buck-plus cards: Mike Greenwell, Wally Joyner, Greg Swindell, Bobby Witt, Kal Daniels, Dava Magadan, Rafael Palmeiro, and on and on and on.
So expectations were high in the Spring of 1988, but it didn’t really matter what Topps spat out: we would gobble up the cards like jelly beans on Easter morning and regurgitate them a few years later when it was time to buy a car or a house, or to pay for college tuition. It was a financial win-win for us and Topps.
But, of course, we were still collectors and we were anxious to see what The Old Gum Company had been busy with over the winter. After the successful experiment in materials science the year before, many of us expected something equally outlandish in 1988.
As it turned out, Topps filled our wax packs not with birthday-cake borders or blue-red-black Atari screens — Fleer and Donruss filled those voids — but with a clean, classic design.
In fact, had the years not proven that there are enough of each card to build the first Martian land bridge, 1
988 Topps might be lauded right along with 1957 and 1967 as some of the “purest” cards of the pre-premium era.
WATCH OUT FOR THAT STEVE BALBONI CENTERFOLD
Just like those all-time great Topps sets, the 1988 issue focused heavily on the photo on the front of each card.
And, while the images weren’t quite the high-def masterpieces that would become de rigueur with the advent of Upper Deck in 1989, they are generally crisp and much brighter than you will find in other 1980s issues.
Each photo is set off by a thin piping that complements the team name, presented in large colored block capital letters across the card front. In most cases, the player’s head or bat overlays part of the team lettering, imparting a three-dimensional feel.
The Topp
s logo makes an understated appearance in the lower left-hand corner, in black or white lettering depending on the shades in the underlying photo. The only other design element is a colored diagonal stripe in the lower right-hand corner containing the player name in white or black block capital letters.
A thick white border surrounds the whole shebang.
Overall, card fronts have a clean appearance that is reminiscent of single-subject magazine covers of the era, such as the hobby-focused Beckett Baseball Card Monthly. You have to wonder if the similarity is just a consequence of 1980s styles, a coincidence of timing, or a case of art imitating art.
Maybe Sy Berger was a BBCM fan?
Regardless of how the fronts got how they got, 1988 card backs were pure Topps.
Each horizontal reverse is printed on a burnt orange background and leads off with a row of paler orange baseballs across the top. Overlaid on these spheroids are the card number, player name, biographical info and stats, position, and Topps logo.
The heart of the card back, as always, is a rectangle of complete stats. For younger
players, this includes minor league numbers and, where room allows, an extra text section with interesting tidbits about the subject.
Did you know, for example, that Mark Grant was a clothes salesman?
LOAD UP ON SHANE RAWLEY BEFORE HE EXPLODES!
Some guys were just so good back in the 1980s, though, that not even the human interest boxes on the backs of their baseball cards were enough to satisfy diehard fans. To help us get our fill of the superstars of the day, Topps included several subsets and special cards in their 792-card offering in 1988.
Among these were:
- Record Breakers (#1-8)
- Managers (starting with Sparky Anderson at card #14 and spanning the rest of the set)
- Checklists (six in all, appearing at intervals of roughly 120 cards)
- All-Stars (#386-407)
- Turn Back the Clock (#661-665)
In addition, each team was represented with a “leaders” card that showcased one or more of their stars in a fade-in dream white cloud on the front and statistical leaders from 1987 on the back.
Finally, the Topps All-Star Rookie trophy made an encore appearance in the lower right-hand corner for big-time rookies from the previous season, including Mark McGwire (#580), Kevin Seitzer (#275), and Ellis Burks (#269).
THE MATT NOKES RETIREMENT PLAN
Those guys, of course, were top of mind for collectors as we tore into our packs before Opening Day. This was the late 1980s, after all, and nothing was more important in the hobby than the next big rookie card.
After the embarrassment of rookie riches that the 1987 sets afforded, we knew it would be tough for the ’88s to deliver that same sort of thrill-a-pack exhilaration. Still, there was reason for us to be optimistic.
In addition to Seitzer and Burks, the 1988 Topps set featured first-year pasteboards for Ken Caminiti (#64), Todd Benzinger (#96), Matt Williams (#372), Sam Horn (#377), Jay Bell (#637), Matt Nokes (#645), and Jose Lind (#767). All of those players either already had a promising season under their belts — Nokes and Horn — or were considered big-timers just waiting to happen.
Nearly 30 years later, though, the plum of the 1988 Topps set is the Tom Glavine rookie card at #779, with Williams also putting together 
a superstar career.
Another interesting swatch of cardboard belongs to Joe Magrane, who debut at #380 and these days is a color commentator for the MLB Network.
Even Glavine’s epic Hall of Fame career, though, was not enough to overcome the mountain of cards and keep the prices of his rookie moving upward. Today, you can find them ungraded all day long for less than $5, and “perfect” PSA 10s will only set you back about $25 each.
Most of the other big rookies from the set never quite reached the heights we envisioned for them, and just about all of them can be found in commons bins today.
With 
nearly 800 cards from which to choose, the good news for more modern collectors is that the 1988 Topps set has a lot more going for it than the rookie cards of a former hockey player and one of the Washington Nationals deposed managers.
Like every other issue from the era, this offering is loaded with all-time greats likeRobin Yount (#165), Nolan Ryan (#250), Mike Schmidt (#600), George Brett (#700), and dozens of others who helped make the game great in the
1980s and beyond.
In terms of dollar value, none of these cards would have made you rich even if you had hoarded them in a hermetically sealed bunker for the last three decades. The best of the bunch is Ryan, and his market prices mirror Glavine’s, topping out around $25 for GEM MT slabbed copies.
VALUE IS IN THE EYE OF THE BE-FOLDER
Of course, money is only one measure of value. And while collectors in the 1980s were supremely focused on future dollars, we als
o wanted choices.
After all, for decades before Fleer busted Topps’ monopoly in 1980, we were stuck with whatever The Old Gum Company deigned to offer up in any particular year.
By 1988, though, we had four base sets from which to choose, and we were eager for more, more, more. For their part, Topps was eager to give us more, more, more.
It was a match made in card heaven, and the excess began with the base set. Topps wanted their cards everywhere, and they wanted to give us plenty of choices about how to acquire them. Most of those choices included a little something extra, in the form of insert cards.
Here is a brief rundown of the pack types we had at our disposal in the summer of 1988, along with the lagniappe in each case.
- Wax packs: Touting the customary 15 cards per pack and packaged 36 to a box, wax packs also con
tained send-in premiums that you could collect and mail away in exchange for 10 of 60 possible special glossy cards. Wax pack boxes also showcased panels of four blue-bordered pasteboards, with a total of 16 box-bottom cards available (four different panels). - Rack Packs: These were the traditional “long” packs that hung on pegs in retail outlets, each offering 42 base cards plus one of 22 different Glossy All-Stars, and packaged 24 per box.
- Cello Packs: Each cello pack contained 28 cards and a stick of gum — no other bonus in these babies.
- Jumbo Packs: These cellophane-wrapped packs featured a whopping 100 cards plus one of 22 different Glossy Rookies.
- Vending Boxes: 500 cards in an anything-is-possible brick for about 10 bucks. No bonus required.
- Factory Sets: All 792 cards wrapped up in a colorful Christmas box, no muss, no fuss.
But T
opps wasn’t done yet!
Because, if you were willing to branch out from the base product, you could find unusual and, in some cases, prescient offerings.
Among the off-main sets that Topps pumped out in 1988 were:
- The Topps Traded set issued at the end of the year featured rookies and traded stars as usual, but also members of Team USA — including Robin Ventura, Tino Martinez, and Jim Abbott.
- Mini Leaders was a diminutive (2 1/8″ x 3″) standalone set — 77 cards in all — issued in their own wax packs.
- Topps Big was a throwback and a harbinger. Oversized at 2 5/8″ x 3 3/4″ and issued in three series of 88 cards each, the Bigs were available standalone in their own boxes. Their horizontal design also drew heavily on Topps issues from 1955 and 1956, and in many ways was the seedling for the now-popular Archives series.
- Tiffany Sets were back as exact parallels to the base and Traded sets for the fifth year. Issued on premium white stock with a high gloss finish, Tiffanies greased the skids for the supercards that would hit the market in the early 1990s.
There were also Topps Coins, Gallery of Champions metal cards, stickers and stickercards, and even an experimental cloth set!
At some point during all this gluttony of cardboard, the creative minds at Topps must have taken a breath, stepped back 
to admire their work, and come to a conclusion: these cards are beautiful, and we need MORE of them — and they need to be BIGGER and of a higher dimension.
Hence, that summer’s back-to-school supplies shelves featured a special treat: full-size, two-pocket folders that were exact replicas of the normal 1988 Topps cards (except for the “folding” part, naturally). The set featured five players from each of the 26 MLB teams, for a total of 130 different folders.
It seemed that if you could dream of it in 1988, Topps already had you covered in one way or another.
VARIATION ON A THEME
Perhaps the only trend in baseball cards during the 1980s that could hold a candle (perish the thought!) to the rookie card craze was the hunt for high-ticket variations.
By 1988, most of the hysteria surrounding error cards like “C. Nettles” and “All” Hrabosky had begun to fade into the background. But then Topps introduced us to another classic that would become part of our collecting lexicon: “Comstock White Letter.”
Journeyman pitcher Keith Comstock had found his way from the San Francisco Giants to the San Diego Padres during the 1987 season … and “Padres” was supposed to show up in blue letters on 1988 Topps cards.
But Comstock’s “Padres” showed up in white … and then in blue … and, somewhere along the line, in yellow.
The white-letter variation was a sensation for several years but today sells for just a few dollars. The yellow version seems to be truly rare and is hardly ever found for sale.
Topps wasn’t done, though, because they showed the wrong player on the front of Al Leiter’s card. Given that Leiter was a rising phenom in the summer of 1988, it’s not surprising that a card picturing his brother Mark but labeled “Al” — and the subsequent corrected version — caused quite a stir in the hobby. Today, neither one is worth much, but they’re a fun pair to have on your card shelf.
In fact, if your definition of “fun” includes chasing down countless major and (very) minor variations, then the 1988 Topps set is a great choice for your next collecting target. From swapped brothers to errant print lines to color variations — front and back — the set has enough variety to keep you busy for awhile. And, with continued scrutiny by collectors, the next undiscovered error-corrected pair is just inside the next wax flap.
(Both Junk Wax Gems and the Trading Card Database have solid lists of 1988 Topps E & V to get you started on your quest.)
GET ‘EM 
WHILE THEY’RE HOT
For all the 1988 Topps set has going for it, from a classic design with strong photography to a seemingly endless variety of distribution methods, adjuncts, and parallels, the cards just aren’t very popular with collectors today.
The problem, of course, lies in that old bugaboo of market value: supply and demand.
Those two forces represent two big strikes against 1988 Topps. Like every mainstream set from the era, the base cards seem to have grown more plentiful over
the years, and the relative dearth of impact rookie cards has stifled the retro-chase factor that we sometimes see with “junk wax” product.
All of which leads to the present situation, wherein you can find three-decade-old cards for around $5 per wax box or complete set.
Sometimes, you can score them for much less.
It’s a pretty amazing bargain for cards that might have been considered among the best Topps ever produced if they had shown just a bit of restraint or if a few of the 1986 rookies had been delayed by a year.
As it stands, you’d better grab your 1988 Topps baseball cards while they’re hot. Because, like Styrofoam in a landfill, prices like these can’t last more than a few thousand centuries.
(Check out our list of the 25 most valuable 1988 Topps baseball cards!)
Want to see a video version of this article?
Recent Comments