Heck, if there had been several million less of the cards issued, it might be the greatest card since the 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle faux rookie.

But just because Junior was an all-time great and his best rookie card was the first card in the Upper Deck set that changed the hobby, that doesn’t mean you have to love said awesome rookie card.

In fact, I’ve been able to build up a level of resentment toward this card that is, if I say so myself, most impressive.

And you can get there, too, if you just follow my simple 17-step process.

But before we get started, take a good long look at the Griffey rookie:

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See that radiant smile? Appreciate the goodness of the first real premium card on the market? Feel the power that the marriage of the first card of an all-time great player with the first card of an all-time great set can unleash?

Great. Remember all that, because it’s about to change.

To truly resent this card, just …

1) Become a Cincinnati Reds in the early 1980s.

2) Listen to all the old-timers tell you about how great The Big Red Machine was. If possible, these idolators should include your own father, who never liked baseball but loves you enough to support your interests and knows just enough to make you miss the Big Red past you never knew.

3) Flirt with the Chicago Cubs in 1984 … heck, they are just as close to home as the Reds and looked like they might actually do something with their lives.

4) Visit Riverfront Stadium that same summer — 1984 — and fall in love with the ethereal green Astroturf and the debilitating-sounding *pop* of Dan Driessen‘s throws during infield practice.

5) Live and die each season of the Pete Rose homecoming. The best Reds teams of your (baseball) life take the field from 1985-88 but come up empty on any sort of post-season activity, including individual hardware (except for Chris Sabo‘s 1988 Rookie of the Year award).

6) Read the scouting reports for a young player named Ken Griffey — Junior — and think that he’ll never be as good as his father, no matter what the experts say.

7) Give up hope in 1989. You’ll still root for the Reds but know they’ll never win — anything — again.

8) Resent Seattle for stealing “your” clubhouse phenom as Junior makes his Major League debut at age 19. He grew up rubbing elbows with the superstars of the 1970s Reds and their children. How could he be in the Bigs wearing any other uniform than Cincy’s?

9) Be amazed by the 1990 World Series winners even if you feel somehow detached from them. It’s not the same team that you’ve poured your soul into for more than five years.

10) Become disillusioned, then jaded, throughout the 1990s. Sure, Davey Johnson comes to town and delivers some flashes of brilliance, but then the Reds let him walk in typical Reds fashion. The bottom falls out again.

11) Resent Griffey from afar for beginning to fulfill the scouts’ predictions about him. He is becoming one of the very best players in the game and helping to make Seattle a baseball town. That’s great for the northwest and the game, but he should be doing it all in Cincinnati, if anywhere.

12) Kiss Jim Bowden’s feet (metaphorically). Somehow, the cocky young Reds general manager swings a mega-deal that will bring Griffey home, making him the LeBron of Cincinnati before anyone knows who LeBron is. Or maybe LeBron is the Junior of Cleveland.

13) Withhold judgment in 2000. At age 30, Griffey smacks 40 homers in his debut season on the Riverfront, but his peripherals slide from his days in Seattle, and he appears in just 145 games.

14) Resent Griffey up close as he gets fat and falls apart. Junior is making big bucks, especially by Cincinnati standards, and he can’t stay on the field. Conditioning seems to be part of the problem, and an increasingly sullen attitude makes it all worse.

15) Wish for a trade to send Griffey out of town. It pains you to even think, but you realize in 2003 or 2004 that the Reds would be (much) better off without Griffey and his big salary.

16) Resent Griffey from afar. After eight-plus mostly forgettable seasons, Griffey is shipped to the Chicago White Sox at the end of the 2008 season. Things are even worse for him there, but a return to Seattle in 2009 makes everyone happy and fall in love with Junior all over again. Everyone except you.

17) Resent Griffey’s Cooperstown plaque. When Griffey is inducted into the Hall of Fame, you know he’ll go in as a Seattle Mariner because Seattle is where he did his best work on the field. Heck, the Griffey you saw in Cincinnati probably wouldn’t have even sniffed enshrinement. But you can’t shake the feeling that Junior should have been even more than he was, and he should have been that more right there on the Riverfront all along.

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And that’s it.

Now, look up above at that Griffey rookie again.

Doesn’t his smile feel more like a smirk?

Can you even believe he’s not wearing a Reds uniform?

Don’t you wish there weren’t 40 billion of these cards out there, slapping you in the face everywhere you turn?

Yeah, me too.

(This is Day 30 of our series on the “Best Card From” each year, 1960-1989. Read all the entries here and jump in on the fun right here. You might also enjoy our post on the 12 Most Important Ken Griffey Jr. Rookie Cards.)

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It may sound ridiculous now, but the start of the 1987 baseball card collecting season was marked by a frenzy of scarcity.

Now, this doesn’t and never did apply to the 1987 Topps woodies that are so iconic these days. I remember going to a flea market in late December of 1986 and already being able to buy 5000-count boxes of ’87 Topps cards that dealers had chucked into their discard piles after extracting the stars.

But by Valentine’s Day of 1987, all of the new cards should have been on retail shelves across the America … they weren’t.

Again, Topps was everywhere, but depending on where you were, Fleer and Donruss were almost non-existent.

Word spread fast, too, and any boxes of Fleer or Donruss that did make their way to local shows sold for ever-escalating premiums. Packs that retailed at 35 cents quickly moved past 50 cents, then a dollar, and two, on their way to three bucks or more.

The interesting thing was that this scarcity seemed to be regional — in central Indiana, we had some pockets of Donruss wax but Fleer was like the Loch Ness monster: often discussed but seldom seen. The situation was reversed in other areas of the country.

These circumstances led to the first large-scale networking that I remember happening within the hobby. The ads in Sports Collectors Digest were sprinkled with collectors and dealers offering up their excess Donruss wax for an equal quantity of Fleer product, and vice versa.

This deal-making helped to level out the market a tad, but there were still plenty of collectors scrambling for Donruss or Fleer cards, or both, by the time the season began.

And even well into the summer, those cards carried a significant premium over their Topps counterparts.

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Power Surge

Of course, the summer of 1987 was also notable because it marked the return of serious, widespread power to the game for the first time in decades.

Towering home runs were flying out of ballparks at a record pace, and old-school fans cried foul: the balls were juiced, the mound was lower, the umpires were rigging at-bats, batters were too muscular.

Plenty of explanations were proffered for the power surge, but the upshot was that fans loved the renewed fireworks. We always do, right?

And card collectors, especially, embraced the new generation of sluggers, even if some of them were old favorites like Andre Dawson, by then toiling for the Chicago Cubs in friendly Wrigley Field.

But the one guy who really captured our imaginations was Mark McGwire of the Oakland A’s.

Just a year after teammate Jose Canseco had nearly toppled the rookie home run record — Jose finished with 37 to Wally Berger‘s 38 for the 1930 Boston Braves — McGwire entered the All-Star break with 33 dingers.

This young giant might not just eclipse Berger’s mark but also seemed to have a bead on Roger Maris‘ single-season home run record of 61.

The marriage of baseball card scarcity and monstrous young power was pure gold.

Now, we already had a McGwire card to chase in the form of his 1985 Topps Olympics card, but it had its detractors. For one thing, it wasn’t very attractive — it didn’t even show him in his A’s uniform.

For another, it was a Topps card, which at the time gave it the stigma as being of lower quality, from a production standpoint, than Fleer or Donruss products.

Despite those drawbacks, that 1985 McGwire took off and priced many younger collectors out of the Big Mac market.

But those hobbyists could turn their attentions to current-year product because both Topps and Donruss had included him in their base sets.

The Topps card sold well and rose in value, but it suffered from the perceived higher quality of the Donruss issue in general and from the fact that it was McGwire’s second Topps card. Fleer whiffed completely and would have to wait until their Update set after the season to join the Big Mac party.

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A Clear Winner

So collectors turned to the 1987 Donruss Mark McGwire Rated Rookies card in droves.

As McGwire kept slamming balls into the Oakland night, we soaked up any and all available Donruss wax like a Mojave sponge dropped into the Great Salt Lake.

The cost of ownership for that hunk of cardboard rose to $5 and then to $7, $10, and more. By the time McGwire ended the season with 49 homers and the American League Rookie of the Year award, it looked like the card would go up in value forever.

Subsequent years saw Big Mac bounce up and down in production and popularity until he put it all together with the St. Loius Cardinals in the late 1990s, including setting a new single-season mark with 70 home runs in 1998.

By then, we knew that none of the 1987 products were as limited as we had thought they were, but McGwire’s late march through the record books and past career homers gave his rookie cards new life.

Things aren’t always as they seem, of course, and much of the sparkle has been rubbed off Big Mac’s accomplishments by the taint of the Steroid Era.

Today, you can buy his 1987 Donruss rookie card for a couple bucks a pop in solid ungraded condition.

But for anyone who lived through the McGwire-and-Donruss boom the first time around, we know there is more to the card. The mere sight of Big Mac in his batting stance in front of hundreds of empty stadium seats, with the Rated Rookies logo and the swatches of baseballs embedded in black border, punctuated by the bright red alarm bar at the bottom of the card makes our breath catch.

Because we remember it all.

And, for all it meant and all it still means, we know this is the best card issued in 1987.

(Read all about this 30-day challenge — and jump in on the fun — right here.)

You might also enjoy our complete rundown of Mark McGwire rookie cards.

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Choosing the best baseball card from 1988 is like picking your favorite sip of water.

I mean, there are millions of each to consider and they’re all about as exciting as — well, as a sip of water.

Consider the base sets …

There was Donruss, who followed up what we thought was a fairly scarce 1987 issue (it wasn’t) by trying to take their product world-wide. Rumor has it that they produced one set for every resident of China but then just issued the cards stateside when they found out how much shipping costs would run.

The gyrating red-blue-black-white borders, blurry photos, and thin card stock may have seemed like selling points in the planning room but somehow failed to connect with most hobbyists.

Then there was Fleer, whose red, white, and blue slanted design looked like something you might pull out of a box of Little Debbies. The Fleer cards were interesting, sort of, because of that fade-in thing at the top of each card where the player’s head jutted into the clouds and gave the whole thing a vague 3-D effect.

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But there was just too much busy white space and not enough meat — player photo real estate in this case.

Score debuted with a lot of fanfare because they were premiumer than the other base sets …

• Score had photos on card fronts and card backs, and the photos were pretty darn good.
• Score cards were also very colorful, with card borders coming in a variety of hues and card backs featuring lots of different colored sections and type
• And, they were the first normal card (Sportflics didn’t count) to not be sold in wax packs, opting for little plastic pouches instead.
• For a few montths, Score also had the hottest rookie card of the hottest rookie on the planet, Gregg Jefferies.

But somehow, Score fell flat.

After awhile, all the colors seemed like a gimmick, and they took up too much room on card fronts, just like the white borders of Fleer. And it didn’t take us too long to figure out that Score had made billions and trillions of their debut cards, just like all the other manufacturers.

Then there was Sportflics … no.

And finally, there was good old Topps.

Boring. Classic.

Now, Topps has been accused of being unimaginative for decades, and I’ve heard that complaint specifically about the 1988 set many times. But if you look at the design objectively, you can see it harkens back to some of the classic issues of the past.

Namely, Topps picked up some of the best elements of their 1957, 1966, and 1967 sets and plopped them onto the front of their 1988 issue.

Unimaginative? Maybe, but you have to use everything at your disposal to win in business, and no company has a deeper, um, Heritage than Topps.

And they do know how to make a timeless, attractive baseball card.

The 1988s are no exception, and given the general dreck issued that year, there’s really no place else to look for the best card of the pasteboard season.

But which one takes the crown?

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You Know … Don’t You?

Well, there are 792 cards from which to choose, plus another 132 with the same design in the 1988 Topps Traded set, but a few stand out.

Pittsburgh Pirates cards, with their black and gold color scheme, look good, so the second-year Barry Bonds is a candidate.

Nolan Ryan makes a solid mid-stride appearance, complete with dirt on his knee.

And the Al Leiter error-corrected combo makes for an interesting story.

But there was no more compelling athlete on the planet in 1988 than Oakland Raiders running back and Kansas City Royals outfielder Bo Jackson.

Topps did a masterful job of turning his #750 in their baseball set into a miniature power-swing poster swimming in Royal and powder blue.

Would Bo choose baseball or football? Or both? Or neither?

In the end, a hip injury chose for him and limited Jackson to the diamond, and even that career was too short to satisfy any fan.

But in 1988, Bo had the world by the tail and could do anything he wanted.

And that included appearing on the best baseball card of the year.

Bo knows it’s true, and so do you.

(Read all about this 30-day challenge — and jump in on the fun — right here.)

(You might also like our complete rundown of Bo Jackson rookie cards.)

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The 1978 Detroit Tigers must have been a fun bunch to root for.

Just three years earlier, the Bengals had lost 102 games, but an infusion of young talent at the Major League level had catapulted the team into .500 territory and toward the middle of the standings in the tough old American League East division.

The kids first to arrive were slugger Jason Thompson and pitching phenom Mark “The Bird” Fidrych in 1976.

They were followed to the Bigs by another smasher, Steve Kemp, in 1977, and the image of a winning team started to developed. Bolstered by fellow youngsters Dan Meyer and Tom Veryzer, as well as veterans like speedster Ron LeFlore, Ben Oglivie, and Rusty Staub, that ’77 club climbed all the way to 74 wins.

It wasn’t all rosy, as Fidrych went down with injuries twice and looked iffy for the future, but hopes were high that he and the rest of the Tigers could push even further toward the front of the pack in 1978.

And, although The Bird himself made only three starts that summer, Detroit was bolstered by a quartet of rookies who helped them notch an 86-76 record en route to a fifth-place finish.

While first place may have seemed a long ways off, that team engendered dreams of something much grander among the players and among the fan base.

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Cram in All the Rookies You Can!

Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, the 1978 Topps baseball card set was known for three things:

• It was home to the Eddie Murray rookie card, and Murray was a future Hall of Famer.
• It was home to Dale Murphy‘s second-year card, and Murphy was a future Hall of Famer.
• It was home to dozens of rookie cards of players who were at least good and maybe great, and it seemed a decent bet that at least one of them would also end up in Cooperstown, someday.

This set was an investor’s dream because it had a couple blue-chip cards which would increase steadily in value for decades to come, and it featured a slew of rookies that might pay off really handsomely should one of the involved players go on a mid- or late-career tear.

It’s pretty easy to look back now and see how it played out:

• Murray did his part by slugging more than 500 home runs among his 3000+ hits and was elected to the Hall in 2003.
• Dale Murphy declined steeply in his 30s and fell well short of Cooperstown.
• One of those other rookies did go on a late-career tear. His name was Paul Molitor, and he finished with more than 3000 hits, more than 500 stolen bases, and a .304 batting average that catapulted him into the Hall of Fame in 2004.

But even on his own card, Molitor was an afterthought for much of his career.

Terrific Tigers

As the long-time Milwaukee Brewer broke down year after year and battled drug problems, fellow 1978 rookie shortstop and rookie card playmate Alan Trammell just kept plugging away for the Tigers.

Trammell had been the proverbial slap-hitting middle infielder with that ’78 club, but he developed into a strong power bat by the early 1980s and stayed there throughout the rest of his career, which finally ended in 1996.

Next to Trammell throughout a storied run that included a five-game victory in the 1984 World Series after one of the most dominant regular seasons in history was second baseman Lou Whitaker.

Trammell and Sweet Lou seemed to match each other swat for swat and great play for great play over two decades together around the Detroit keystone, and both spent years at the top of most lists of Hall of Fame snubs.

And, like Trammell, Whitaker’s rookie card is one of those multi-player beasts/beauties in the 1978 Topps set that made investors drool and Whitaker fans weep. You could barely see his face!

Lance Parrish knew that plight all too well, toiling as he did behind the plate for the Tigers from 1977 through 1986. The catcher’s face almost never sees the light of day, so Parrish’s own quarter-rookie card must have seemed like a gosh darn spotlight to the young receiver.

That almost surely was not the case for Parrish’s frequent battery mate, young Jack Morris, though. Starting pitchers seem to have a natural penchant for the limelight, and even though the 22-year-old Morris had yet to break through to stardom, he managed to snag seven starts during that summer of ’78.

Yet he, too, was relegated to one of Topps’ super-duper super rookie four-player masterpieces: “ROOKIE PITCHERS.”

At one time or another, each of these four players looked like they were among the best in the game and like they had at least a shot at Cooperstown.

And yet, each was reduced — and reduced and reduced — to a tiny little corner of his rookie card.

Collectors and money guys liked the fact that Parrish shared his RC with Dale Murphy, and especially that Trammell and Molitor shared their cardboard debut.

But when you looked back on the magnitude of their careers, the shoddy treatment by Topps was nothing less than ignominy.

Except …

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Have It Your Way

Topps didn’t just issue their base set in 1978.

Instead, they teamed up with Burger King to issue four sets of 23 cards, each dedicated to a specific Major League team and each distributed through restaurants in and around the clubs’ home cities.

The four teams were …

The New York Yankees …

The Texas Rangers …

The Houston Astros …

… and …

… wait for it …

… yes!

The Detroit Tigers!

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And who do you think we find on the Tigers checklist other than the self-same young gents who would help build the team into a powerhouse?

And, these guys appear alone on their burger cards.

So, yes, Virginia, that means we get solo rookie cards of Alan Trammell, Lou Whitaker, and Jack Morris, thanks to Topps and BK.

Have it your way, indeed!

Sadly, Parrish still gets the short shrift here, but it’s really kind of fitting.

Of the four, he was by far the worst when it came to final Cooperstown qualifications.

So we can cut Topps some slack for dissing him again, and maybe even congratulate them for their prescience.

That still leaves us with three (still) potential or current Hall of Famers with beautiful rookie cards to consider and, spoiler alert, we’re going to choose one of them as the best baseball card of 1978.

But which one will it be?

From my memory of watching them play and for my Sabermetrics money, Trammell was always the best Hall of Fame candidate among the three, and he finally got in.

Whitaker is the most underrated of the three and probably should be in the Hall.

Morris is the most overrated — easily — of the three and doesn’t really belong in Cooperstown (to me). He was really good and racked up some nice totals, but is something like the 150th best starting pitcher ever.

This, however, is about baseball cards.

Star status and Hall of Fame prospects go into the consideration, but so do aesthetics and coolness.

And here, well …

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Trammell looks like he’s in pain or angry.

The Whitaker shot is pretty solid — he’s looking slyly to our left and the stadium looms behind him. Still, there is something in his stretch that says, “indigestion,” and the photo angle is weird.

Then we have Jack Morris, Mr. Most-Wins-in-the-1980s. The angle is weird here, too, but …

Morris is following through in an obvious posed shot, but it’s closer to real action than the other two.

And, by golly, the baseball in the upper right-hand corner that shows Morris’s position — “P” — looks like it just flew out of his hand.

He’s also glaring at us and, sitting here in the 2020s, we know that same intensity would become part of his stock-in-trade.

These three cards are like a secret treasure that toppled out of your hamburger bag just as you were about to throw it away. All of them are supercool, but Morris’s is just a bit supercooler than the others.

It’s the best baseball card of 1978, even if Morris wasn’t the best pitcher of the 1980s — or any other time period.

(Read all about this 30-day challenge — and jump in on the fun — right here.)

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We all stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before us.

That goes for scientists, who build on the discoveries of the generations before them to push forward our understanding of the natural world.

It goes for athletes, too, who pick up training methods and expectations from their older teammates and break through to new heights.

And it even goes for baseball cards and baseball card collectors.

The cards and trends we see today are the result of decades of change and jostling, trials and failures.

One of those collective mood swings that “stuck” in a big way was the rookie card craze.

But even though we take rookie cards as an inextricable part of the hobby fabric today, it wasn’t always that way.

A Bird, a Super Joe, and a Straw Walk into a Ballpark …

In fact, up until the mid-1970s or so, you’d probably have had a hard time finding a collector who even knew what “rookie card” meant.

Then, in 1976, Mark “The Bird” Fidrych broke onto the Major League scene with the Detroit Tigers and grabbed the baseball world by the throat with his unbridled enthusiasm and monster success on the mound at just 21 years of age.

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The next summer, boys everywhere and (especially) Tigers fans tore through pack after pack of Topps baseball cards looking for the first cardboard of The Bird — his rookie card.

Though Fidrych basically fell apart after that stellar first season, he had planted the seed for rookie mania, and thus for rookie card mania.

The idea lay dormant for a few seasons, but when Joe Charboneau lit up Municipal Stadium for the Cleveland Indians in 1980 and was followed in short order by Fernandomania in 1981, the rookie card craze was back.

But Charboneau flamed out and Fernando Valenzuela cooled down, leaving rookie cards to simmer with steady performances by youngsters like Cal Ripken, Jr., of the Baltimore Orioles and Tim Raines of the Montreal Expos.

In 1983, though, former Number 1 pick Darryl Strawberry landed on the New York Mets’ Big League roster, and we had the offensive equivalent of Valenzuela — a hulking, colorful slugger plying his trade in the biggest of markets.

By then, of course, the hobby was starting to boom for real, and we were fully ready to embrace the buzz that Straw created en route to his Rookie of the Year performance. By the time the 1983 Topps Traded set debuted — with the first MLB card of Strawberry in tow — in November, we were frothing to get our hands on anything related to Darryl.

The craze continued into the spring, and Strawberry appeared in all three major sets — Donruss, Topps, and Fleer — driving the new-card market like perhaps no player before him.

Sharing the Burden of Greatness

About the same time we were getting used to the look and feel of the new cardboard offerings, the Strawberry accolades were joined by other rumblings from the general direction of Shea Stadium.

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Not only were the lowly Mets winning games early in the season, they had apparently found a mound phenom who might pair with Strawberry to carry the team into a brighter future.

In particular, reports emerged of a young fireballer named Dwight Gooden who was doing amazing things every time he took the ball.

Striking out better than a batter an inning courtesy of a fastball that was rumored to hover near 100 miles per hour, Gooden burst onto the scene with a string of electric performances that ignited a national stir.

Hardly anyone outside of New York even knew what the guy looked like, but we could barely wait to hold the first Gooden cards in our hands. The Bird and Charboneau and Fernando and Strawberry had all conditioned us for the rookie card hunt, and Dwight rung the bell that set our collectors’ mouths drooling in Pavlovian style.

Gooden was named to the All-Star team, and we’d get a glimpse of him here or there courtesy of This Week in Baseball or a grainy newspaper photo, but he mostly remained a phantom until late in the season. The upstart Mets gave the surprising Chicago Cubs a few scares in the run to the NL East title, but the guys from Gotham fell six-and-a-half games short of the playoffs.

Collectors joined in with the rest of the world in watching the Detroit Tigers‘ march toward a seemingly predestined World Series championship that October, but we never lost our hunger for the rookie card of the elusive young man who might rewrite all of the pitching record book.

We hit dealer tables hard on that November weekend when the 1984 Topps Traded set first became available, and there was only one guy on our mind — Dwight Gooden.

And what a beautiful hunk of cardboard it was!

There was young Dwight on the mound in his Mets pinstripes, having just tossed a ball. He was long and lean, and the intense stare emanating from his square headshot in the lower left-hand corner made you feel like there was plenty more greatness to come.

If you pulled out your base 1984 Topps Strawberry card and set it next to this one, you’d see the future of the Mets — heck the future of the game — in the span of less than 20 square inches of blue-branded cardboard.

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Oh, sure, Gooden also appeared in the 1984 Fleer Update that fall, and that’s the set that really took off in terms of dollars and cents. It’s a great card, but it’s not the one we waited all summer to see.

And, yes, Gooden turned out to be an afterthought in these sets when all was said and done thanks to his own foibles and the exploits of Kirby Puckett and Roger Clemens.

But if you were a fan and a collector in the summer of 1984, all you wanted was a Dwight Gooden card.

When you finally got it, you knew it was the best of the year.

(Read all about this 30-day challenge — and jump in on the fun — right here.)

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By almost any objective measure — and many subjective ones — the 1981 Topps baseball card set is the best of a flawed lot of base issues from that strike-shortened year.

Consider …

• Topps checked in at 726 cards, 66 more than Fleer and 121 more than Donruss.
• Topps squeezed in a ton of rookies thanks to their “Future Stars” cards.
• Topps added All-Star banners to the guys who participated in the 1980 Midsummer Classic.
• Topps dedicated a handful of cards to the 1980 playoffs and World Series.
• Topps featured a solid baseball design with a team cap on every card.
• Topps celebrated 1980 highlights with Record Breaker cards.
• Topps continued their tradition of team cards.
• Topps offered a variety of image types throughout its set.
• Topps cards were relatively error-free, in stark contrast to Fleer and Donruss.

Lots of good stuff.

Still, it wasn’t all (Butch) Wyne(gar) and (Pete) Roses for Topps.

Many of the photos were dark and dingy. Several were grainy.

The mushy brown cardstock came back for another year and felt cheap compared to Fleer (though not necessarily to Donruss).

Also, Topps was inconsistent in where they stuck young stars — Kirk Gibson got a solo rookie card, but Tim Raines got lumped in with Roberto Ramos and Bobby Pate as Expos Future Stars, and Fernando Valenzuela ended up as Dodgers Future Stars fodder. (Donruss managed to get Raines a single of his own, and Fleer featured “Fernand” Valenzuela all by himself.)

Still, 1981 Topps was a solid set with plenty of choices for “best” card.

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You could make a case for plenty of singles as the top of the heap, in fact. Here are a few that rank high on my list:

• Pete Rose — this was the first superstar card I pulled from a pack.
• Manny Sanguillen just looks so darn happy.
• Roland Office can’t believe what’s lurking over there, behind the cameraman.
• Bob Boone has great hair even in the middle of a play at the plate.
• Mike Schmidt looks like he could whip your team with his bare hands.
• Kent Tekulve follows through, upright, while a New York Met (Bruce Boisclair?) looks on from second base.
• Gary Carter is ready for battle.
• Ellis Valentine protects his face with dinosaur bones.
• Tom Hausman is all passion and motion.

So which one actually is the best?

Well, that’s another question rife with subjectivity and moment-to-moment whims.

But right now, and given the cards I’ve already picked for various of these types of posts, I’m having trouble looking past the 1981 Topps Bruce Sutter card.

Now, critics can ding me right away because there is a ton of background in this image, and none of it is Wrigley Field.

But none of that matters.

In fact, it’s part of what makes the card great.

We get an almost full-body Sutter following through on a pitch that’s almost coming at us head-on but is skewed to our right just a bit. It’s like we’re standing in a very close-to-the-plate on-deck circle. Or like Bruce is putting some gusto into an intentional walk.

The ball is in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, just under the green N.L. All-Star banner.

It’s balanced — not quite symmetrically — with the TOPPS baseball in the lower right-hand corner, and Sutter straddles a Cubs hat as he finishes off his offering.

His long hair flies like wings from under his own cap and gives you the unsettling feeling that he might be a bit wild. A chilling thought when the baseball is coming in head-high.

Had this been any pitcher other than Sutter, it would have still been an effective card, but knowing that Sutter was perhaps the top reliever in the game when this shot was snapped makes it all the more impactful.

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The card back helps reinforce this idea, too, especially the cartoons:

Was winning pitcher in 2 straight All-Star games.”

And …

Holds N.L. record for saves with 37 in 1979.

Sutter was so good during that 1979 season, in fact, that he won the NL Cy Young award, even though J.R. Richard and Phil Niekro might have had stronger cases.

And if all that isn’t enough to make this card a keeper in your mind, consider that it’s also the very last time Sutter appeared on a base Topps card in his Chicago Cubs uniform.

On December 9, 1980, the Cubs shipped Sutter to the St. Louis Cardinals for Leon Durham and Ken Reitz (the Cards would throw in Ty Waller on December 22).

Durham helped the Cubs to a division title in 1984, but Sutter kept chugging right along for St. Louis and was a key part of their pennant-winning team in 1982.

The Cardinals let him walk as a free agent after the ’84 season, and Sutter finished up with a three-year run with the Atlanta Braves.

All-told, Sutter crafted a relatively short (12 years) but dominant career during which he racked up an even 300 saves and helped bring the split-fingered fastball into mainstream use. For his efforts, he was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2006, just the second reliever — after Hoyt Wilhelm — to achieve that status.

And, if there were a Cooperstown for 1981 Topps baseball cards, Bruce Sutter’s last Cubs card would be right there with him.

(This is the third in our series of posts about the best baseball cards from the 1980s. Check out the rest of those posts here.)

(Check out our rundown of the most valuable 1981 Topps baseball cards.)

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When Topps was planning their 1980 Topps baseball cards, they couldn’t have known for sure that it would be their last set as King of the World.

After all, even though Fleer had been battling to end Topps’ cardboard monopoly since at least 1975, the court case wouldn’t be decided until the summer of 1980. By then, the yearly Topps set would have already joined its brethren as an untouchable piece of the collecting landscape.

So Topps really had no reason to go above in beyond in preparing for 1980.

Boy, if you liked catchers, though, it sure seems like Topps was putting in extra prep work for the first set of the new decade.

Especially if you liked catchers in action, or catcher’s gear.

Here, take a look at some of the beauties Topps uncorked in 1980:

1980 Topps Jeff Newman (#34)

Newman is contemplating the consequences of Billy Ball.

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1980 Topps Carlton Fisk (#40)

Fisk is not amused with you … as usual.

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1980 Topps Ted Simmons (#85)

Simmons is perplexed by how underrated he remains.

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1980 Topps Tim Blackwell (#153)

Blackwell often moonlighted as a push broom.

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1980 Topps Butch Wynegar (#304)

Think Butch picked off the runner?

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1980 Topps Bob Davis (#351)

Davis is thrilled about playing for the Blue Jays.

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1980 Topps Duffy Dyer (#446)

Dyer wonders if he’ll ever get out from Gary Carter’s shadow.

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1980 Topps Jim Sundberg (#530)

Who’s the joker who put chewed up gum in Sundberg’s mask?

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1980 Topps Brian Downing (#602)

Brian Downing was so tough, he always wore glasses … and no one said a word. No one.

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—

There are probably others, too, but one post can only hold so much cardboard beauty.

Now, I will allow that there are a lot of similar shots here, with catchers standing fully upright as if to best display their chest guards and other tools of ignorance.

They’re still great. Love them.

And besides, Topps gave us other sorts of catcher cards in 1980, too, like this awesome batting shot of Johnny Bench:

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But which is the best card from 1980 Topps?

Well, last year I picked the Burger King Fred Lynn card as the best of 1980, but the self-imposed rules of this game say I can’t repeat.

Besides, we’re all about catchers here today, in case you couldn’t tell.

And there aren’t many better cards anywhere than this action shot of the late, great Gary Carter:

The Kid has the ball, dammit, and you’re not getting by.

From the intense warrior’s glare to the glove thrust triumphantly in the air to the crystal clear image to the gritty dust-up to the now-nostalgic red, white, and blue of the Montreal Expos‘ uniform, this card has something for everyone.

There’s even a pennant in the background in case Carter doesn’t already have you feeling rah-rah enough for the action on the field.

Man!

Greatness.

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(This is the first in our series of posts about the best baseball cards from the 1980s. Check out the rest of those posts here.)

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If you wanted to pinpoint one year as the year baseball cards exploded into a full-blown cultural phenomenon complete with national news coverage, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better candidate than 1985.

By then, we’d had four full years of real competition in the hobby, and collectors had embraced Fleer and Donruss, warts and all.

And, after nearly a decade of fits and starts, the rookie card craze was in full swing. The progression began with Mark Fidrych in 1976, sputtered a bit, and then was revived by Joe Charboneau in 1980.

Then, with the arrival of two new companies and cards pouring forth from every store shelf, Fernando Valenzuela and Cal Ripken, Jr., stoked collectors imaginations in 1981 and 1982.

Finally, when Darryl Strawberry made his cardboard debut in the 1983 Topps Traded set after mashing his way through the National League that season, collectors were absolutely hooked on rookie cards.

Straw was followed by the mystique and brilliance of his teammate, teenage pitching phenom Dwight Gooden, and the race was on to find the next breakout star before anyone else discovered his cardboard.

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Help from Old Friends

Of course, the focus on rookies was not driven by just the youngsters themselves. They had plenty of help from a couple of old-timers, without whom the hobby boom may never have occurred.

First, Mickey Mantle, golden boy of the dominant New York Yankees in the 1950s and 1960s was enjoying a renaissance of popularity as the boys from that era turned into the middle-aged men of the 1980s. They turned their nostalgic eyes toward childhood heroes and pursued Mantle baseball cards — and especially his 1952 Topps “rookie” card — with renewed vigor, and with plenty of money.

Early that year, just as the 1985 season was about to begin, commissioner Peter Ueberroth also lifted Mantle’s ban from baseball, which had been imposed for his association with a casino. Any black clouds surrounding his legend had been blown away, and the hobby embraced him like never before.

On the field, Pete Rose had come to the Cincinnati Reds the year before and was zeroing in on Ty Cobb‘s all-time hit record. Would 1985 be the year Rose became the Hit King?

Collectors sure seemed to think so, and they bit hard on all his cards, but especially his 1963 Topps rookie. Many hobbyists were soon priced out of the first-year Rose market, but it continued to change hands at a blistering pace, easily surpassing the $500 mark and edging toward $1000 by the time Pete lined an Eric Show pitch into the Cincinnati night for number 4192 on September 11.

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The Young Shall Inherit the Cardboard

With these two luminaries of the games as examples, collector resolve to latch onto the next rookie phenom was steeled, and we tore into our 1985 wax packs with the fervor of gold prospectors in the Old West.

The card companies were happy to feed our growing hunger, too, as all three sets were jammed to the gills with rookie cards, even if we had seen some of them in traded or update sets the year before.

Consider some of the rookies we might have found in any given hunk of wax that season: Dwight Gooden, Eric Davis, Roger Clemens, Kirby Puckett, Bret Saberhagen, Orel Hershiser, Jimmy Key, Mark McGwire (thanks to the Olympic team subset), and on and on and on.

Of the guys on that list, some were a year or more from making their first really big splash in the Majors — Puckett, Clemens, McGwire, Davis.

Gooden, of course, was a hot commodity right out of the gates in 1985, and he only got more scorching as the summer heated up and he tore through the league to the tune of a 24-4 record with a 1.53 ERA.

And then, there were the two pitchers who broke through in the same year we were pulling their rookie cards from our wax packs.

Unusual Name = Mound Dominance?

Orel Hershiser was a 17th-round draft pick for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1979 and spent five years working his way up the LA system before turning in a solid rookie performance in 1984 that no one noticed.

As the Dodgers pushed to a division title in 1985, though, everyone took notice of the nerdy mound wizard who won nearly every time out — by the end of the season, Hershiser’s record stood at 19-3 with a 2.03 ERA. Had it not been for Gooden’s dominance, Hershiser might have copped the NL Cy Young award, and his rookie cards would have been among the hottest in the hobby.

As it was, Hershiser’s 1985 issue climbed to a few bucks each.

But it wasn’t just Gooden who cast a long shadow from the mound that season.

Over in the American League, another youngster was stealing headlines and stilling bats.

Despite being picked in the 19th round of the 1982 draft out of high school, Bet Saberhagen spent just one full year in the minor leagues and made it to the Majors for good with the Kansas City Royals in 1984.

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As with Hershiser, Sabes’ rookie campaign didn’t raise many eyebrows, but all that changed in the second half of 1985.

With the Royals pushing toward a division title, Saberhagen began winning start after start, his record improving from 7-4 on June 22 to 20-6 at season’s end. Along the way young Bret, 20, managed to reduce his ERA from 3.28 to 2.87, and fans took notice.

The two big questions were …

Was this kid for real?

and

Would Saberhagen win the Cy Young award?

We’d have to wait a few seasons to know the answer to that first question with any degree of certainty, and a couple of months to find out about the CYA.

But that didn’t stop collectors from chasing Saberhagen’s cards as summer faded and the post-season loomed. By the time the Royals opened their ALCS match-up again the Toronto Blue Jays, Sabes was right there with Hershiser in the pantheon of most coveted young pitchers, a notch or three behind Gooden.

Most of us assumed we’d seen about all there was to see from Saberhagen for the year, though.

After all, the Royals were the weakest of the four division winners with a regular-season record of 91-71.

But in a hard-fought series, the Royals outlasted the Jays, four games to three and, although Saberhagen recorded an unsightly 6.14 ERA, KC was moving on.

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Storybook Ending

It all turned around for Saberhagen in the World Series.

He took the hill twice in what was one of the most exciting and controversial championship tilts in the last half century, and he went the distance both times. His final Series line was 2-0, 0.50 ERA, 0.667 WHIP.

Significantly, that second victory came in Game 7, which was enough to earn Saberhagen the World Series MVP trophy.

So, while Hershiser and Gooden were sitting at home waiting to see how the postseason awards fell out, Sabes was still out there making things happen for his Royals.

And he captured our imagination in different ways than his two contemporaries, too.

Unlike Hershiser, who seemed polished and almost out of place on a ball diamond, Saberhagen was rough around the edges and looked like one of our classmates. You could go out to a high school game anywhere in rural Indiana and find guys who looked and acted a lot like young Bret.

And, while Gooden also reminded us of our peers, his talent seemed to be otherworldly, out of reach of us mere mortals. Plus, he had already arrived. We saw him coming in 1985.

No one saw Bret Saberhagen coming, though, and when he sneaked up on us in mid-summer, we all scrambled to separate his cards from the Benny Distefanos and Buddy Biancalanas and pile them where they belonged — with Don Mattingly and Darryl Strawberry and, yes, even with Dwight Gooden.

You could pick from among three different Sabes rookies that year, and the Donruss card might be the best-looking of the bunch.

But if you were a kid, or at least a young adult, in 1985, chances are it’s the Topps Saberhagen that rattles through your mind whenever you think about that magical summer.

He’s smiling at the camera from under a KC cap that’s too big for his slender face, and if you didn’t know better, you’d think he just cracked a raunchy joke from the back of Mr. Peters’ health class.

It’s not the most beautiful card of the year, but it’s the cardboard stuff that built our memories.

And in this book, that makes it the best of the year.

(Read all about this 30-day challenge — and jump in on the fun — right here.)

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In the 1980s, every spring was a joyous occasion for baseball fans, and especially for baseball card collectors.

Not only did we get to enjoy the sights and sounds of our favorites teams reporting to Spring Training, but we also got our first chance to see the year’s new cards in person.

And, while 1981 — with the arrival of Fleer and Donruss — must have seemed like Christmas morning for long-time collectors accustomed to having only one set of cards each year, there was still a long stretch of cardboard winter in front of them.

The 1981 Topps set was drab, with dark photos and colored borders that somehow added to the darkness.

The 1981 Fleer set was maybe a bit less depressing but riddled with errors and blurry images.

And if you “liked” grainy, smeared photography, the 1981 Donruss offering was for you … so long as you also dug thin card stock, cognitively overloaded card backs, and an error or two on every pasteboard.

The 1982 sets were a bit better …

Topps unveiled their infamous hockey stick design that collectors seem to either love or hate, but the overall effect was a bit less dreary than the previous year’s offering.

Donruss improved markedly, replacing an uninspired card design with a simple bat-and-ball look that worked pretty well. They also cleaned up their images and card backs, as well as expanding from 605 to 660 cards.

Only Fleer failed to make appreciable improvements from 1981 to 1982, though they did continue to establish their identity with “Pete and Re-Pete” and a “Big Red Machine” card six years after the fact that featured just a few left over nuts and bolts.

Digging Out

But when collectors tore open the wrappers on our first wax packs in 1983 — oh my goodness!

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It was like the hobby sun had finally broken through the last dreary day in March and bathed the snow-covered cardboard landscape in warmth and goodness.

A little corny?

Maybe, but consider …

• The 1983 Donruss set refined the 1982 design, replacing the ball with a glove and crisping up their design elements in general. Photography continued to get better, too, though there were some tinting issues.
• For the first time, Fleer cards sported a distinctive design, one that included brown-gray borders and team logos, which hadn’t made an appearance on card fronts since the 1965 Topps set. Fleer backs were astounding — they included a full run of player stats in a vertical format and a small head photo of the player. Wow! (in 1983 terms, anyway).
• And 1983 Topps — well, it was a masterpiece in cardboard and wax. A fantastic (though somewhat borrowed) design coupled with crisp and sunny photography, innovative subsets, and the usual stellar player selection made this issue an all-time classic.

And so our metaphor holds — 1983 baseball cards were spring wrapped in wax, and I swear birds chirped and shadows lifted every time I cracked open a pack.

Mr. October in the Spring

By that glorious spring of 1983, Reggie Jackson had long since established himself as a future Hall of Famer.

After winning three World Series titles and the 1974 AL MVP award with the Oakland A’s, and after a one-year stopover with the Baltimore Orioles, Reggie signed on with the New York Yankees in 1977.

The relationship was an imperfect match of fire, production, bravado, and personality clashes, but it led to two more World Series trophies and left Jackson with more than 400 home runs when he became a free agent before the 1982 season.

Despite heading into his age-36 season with a growing reputation as a lumbering slugger, Reggie landed a rich long-term deal to the California Angels and headed back to the left coast.

His clashes with other monstrous Yankee personalities — Billy Martin and George Steinbrenner — likely had as much to do with Jackson’s departure from the Bronx as did his age, though a down year during the strike-shortened 1981 season gave the definite impression that Reggie’s best years were behind him.

That may have been true, technically, but you wouldn’t know it to look at his stat line that first year with California: 39 home runs, 101 RBI, .275 BA. It looked like vintage Reggie and was enough to help the Angels win their second division title in the old AL West.

Fans took note of Jackson’s performance, and so did Topps.

So, when the real snow finally subsided enough that February or March (or April) for collectors to make it out to their local drugstore or grocery store to find the first pile of new cards for 1983, who do you think greeted us?

In most cases, it was none other than Reginald Martinez Jackson, front man for every Topps wax box that season:

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And that Reggie card had everything that made the set so great:

• In-game action shot under a sunny sky.
• Clean design that accentuated the photography.
• Complete stats on the back.
• Close-up head shot in the picture-in-picture bubble.

And in Reggie’s case, we got some of his personality thrown in, too, along with a bit of 80s flair. We always knew that Reggie’s future was so bright he had to wear shades, but it’s a safe bet that Jackson’s 1983 Topps card itself also had something to do with his eye wear.

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Without those dark lenses, he would have been blinded by the brilliance of his own cardboard, or at least of his pasteboard neighbors in the iconic set.

In a year jam-packed with awesome cards and enough rookie talent to make even the most jaded speculator glaze over like a Krispy Kreme, the 1983 Topps Reggie Jackson card is the best of them all.

And if you don’t believe it, just ask Reggie.

(Read all about this 30-day challenge — and jump in on the fun — right here.)

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If you began collecting baseball cards in 1981 or after, it might seem almost impossible to imagine a world where there was only one choice at the checkout counter.

I know it would have been rough for me  — when I picked up the hobby in 1983, I could choose from Topps, Fleer, or Donruss nearly anytime I talked Mom and Dad into buying a pack or two.

We latecomers were spoiled.

But just because we didn’t live through the (first) Topps monopoly years doesn’t mean we were immune to its aftereffects.

For one thing, there was a price gap that separated the pre-1981 cards from all that came after them throughout most of the 190s. In particular, common cards issued in 1981 and after “booked” for three cents each throughout the decade while the 1980 Tpps versions listed at five cents each. That sum went up as you traversed backward through the Topps library, too.

That may not seem like much of a difference, but when you multiply those two cents by several hundred cards and propagate the age premium to stars and superstars, building pre-1980 sets became a bit tougher and more expensive.

My Kingdom for a New Joe Rudi

An even bigger consequence of the quarter century of Topps dominance was the lack of variety, especially for collectors of particular players or teams.

If you were the world’s biggest fan of, say, Fred Lynn, you were mostly at the mercy of good old T.C.G.

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Some years, you might get a league leader or highlight card, or maybe a separate All-Star issue, but often there was just the base card, and that was it.

Oh, sure, for fairly big names like Lynn, you might luck into an O-Pee-Chee card if you visited Canada or had a friend from the Great White North willing to do you a favor. Even if you did score an OPC, though, it usually didn’t look much different than the Topps version.

No, if you wanted something new for your collection beyond the same old same old, you had to really dig for food issues or regional sets. Kellogg’s might have been able to help you out, or maybe local law enforcement would issue one of those black-and-white “safety” cards of your guy.

It was a real coup, then, anytime you could land a second full-size, full-color card outside of the base Topps set that featured a photo different from that Topps image.

Have It Your (Different) Way

Luckily, in 1980, observant card collectors got just such a chance when Burger King issued their “Pitch, Hit, and Run” cards during the week of July 7-13. During that run, a large order of fries also netted you a cello pack of three player cards plus a checklist, which meant you’d have had to slug down a lot of grease over seven days to complete the 34-card set.

It just might have been worth the effort and the heartburn, though, because the BK cards added a bit of color to the base Topps design in the form of the classic burger logo and a bright green “COLLECTOR’S SERIES” label on the top of the cards.

Sorta ugly, but different.

But what’s really cool about the Burger King offering — which was of course produced by Topps — is that a whopping 15 of the cards feature a completely new photo.

And, voila!, you’ve doubled your player-collection target for the year.

Since our goal he(This is Day 23 of our series on the “Best Card From” each year, 1960-1989. Read all the entries here.)

Donruss had a rough year in 1981.

I mean, sure, they rode Fleer’s coattails into the baseball card market after decades of successful production in the non-sports card market, but that maiden set was something of a mess.

Consider the facts*:

• Of the 605 cards in that first Donruss issue, approximately 700 of them contained errors. (Yes, they even erred when making mistakes.)
• The 1981 Donruss cards were printed on blank pages rejected from a local Bible factory in Memphis.
• Donruss photographers were forced to keep their heads — and cameras — inside a dark, black box at all times (even while snapping photos) so no one would know they were taking pictures of baseball players. You know, just in case that Fleer lawsuit didn’t work out.
• Donruss photographers were only allowed to take photos of players in front of a cardboard replica of the brick wall at Wrigley field, draped with plastic ivy.
• The backs of 1981 Donruss baseball cards were made by pasting random sections of books that Donruss employees had at their desks onto the backs of the Bible pages (see above).
• Every stick of gum inserted into 1981 Donruss wax packs immediately melded at the atomic level with the card on top of the pack.
• That card was always of your favorite player, and you always ripped his face off trying to salvage the card (and the gum).

See, it was tough.

(* Plucked from thin air and maybe only partially — or none-ally — true.)

If Topps and Fleer hadn’t produced blah sets, Donruss might not have rebounded.

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Tough All Around

On the field, 1981 was also a rough year for Carl Yastrzemski.

For starters, he was 84 years old when the Boston Red Sox broke Spring Training. He had only managed to make it into 105 games in 1980, and 49 of those were as a designated hitter.

In 412 plate appearances, Yaz still managed to hit 15 home runs, but his .275 average was a drag to his lifetime rate, which slipped to .288. Never blazingly fast, the Boston legend had managed to swipe 23 bases in 1970, and he had a career high of nine triples in 1964.

His combined stolen bases and three baggers dropped to one (a triple) in 1980, though, and he was thrown out in his only two SB attempts.

The 1981 season picked up pretty much where the 1980 campaign had ended, and by the time the players’ strike ripped through the sport in June, Yaz was sitting at .234 with just three dingers.

He was fading fast and looked almost frail at times when you’d catch a glimpse of him on This Week in Baseball or the nightly news. The only question seemed to be whether or not Yaz would come back when (if) the rest of Major League Baseball did.

Well, he did come back.

Whether the strike helped him catch his breath or gave him an added appreciation for his status as an elder statesmen of the game — or whether these things just even out over a long season (even a strike-shortened) one — the former Triple Crown winner turned in a more respectable second half.

Specifically, from August 10 through October 4, Yaz hit .262 with five homers and a .354 on-base percentage over 58 games.

Not great, certainly, but not pond sludge either. And it was enough to convince the cagey veteran that he had at least one more year left in him.

And so our two heroes disappeared into the late fall of 1981 each following a new road, ones they had never traveled before and that would bring them together the next spring.

Two Paths Converged

For their part, Donruss beefed up their card stock, cleaned up their photography, simplified their card backs, and redesigned their card fronts. Gone was the nondescript colored piping around each player photo,  replaced by … well, more colored piping.

But also a baseball with the player’s team name, and a baseball bat with his name and position.

It was as close as we had ever seen to an Extreme Makeover, Baseball Card Edition in the history of the hobby, and it made the changes proffered by Fleer and Topps seem incremental at best, and maybe decremental.

And Yastrzemski reported to Red Sox camp about as healthy as you could ever expect a baseball nonagenarian to be. He was amped up for the season and would eventually see action in 131 contests, clubbing another 16 home runs and setting himself up for one final hurrah in 1983.

Before his swan song, though, he thrilled fans young and old from card #74 in that 1982 Donruss set.

There was Yaz, as old as Fenway Park itself, dragging his bat through the zone for a bunt, and his feet were already moving toward first base. If you squeezed your eyes tight and focused on the picture you’d just seen, this card would make you believe that your hero could fly.

That he was still young and would be there for you as long as you wanted. Season after season after season.

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Jockeying for Greatness

So is this the best baseball card issued in 1982?

That’s a tough call.

It was a transition year for me, as I acquired a few cards but didn’t really collect. That makes me lucky, because all these years later, many of the 1982s still seem fresh and exciting.

And there are some great offerings …

The Topps Cal Ripken rookie cards are iconic.

The Topps Traded Reggie Jackson makes you smile.

The Fleer “Pete and Re-Pete” offering reminds you of your father, or your son.

Some of the inaugural Donruss Diamond Kings are downright spine-tingling.

But, man, if you want proof that it’s not just possible but OK to relive the good old days — whatever those might be for you — and to do it with grace, class, and beauty?

Well, then it’s hard to beat the 1982 Donruss Carl Yastrzemski card.

(Read all about this 30-day challenge — and jump in on the fun — right here.)

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re is to find the best card issued in 1980, this news should make your ears perk up, because there is little better when you’re talking about pre-1981 baseball cards than choice.

So which is the best card?

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I’m going with the same guy who started this discussion: good old Fred Lynn.

At one time — 1975 to be exact — he was the best player in the game and among the youngest. He looked like the next Willie Mantle, for gosh sakes.

By 1980, Lynn was still an All-Star, but it was pretty clear he would not end up as an all-time great.

He did have a pretty cool base Topps card that year, one of my favorites in the set.

And then, in July, Burger King issued a colorful card of Lynn in a classic batting stance with a beautiful blue sky behind him inviting us all out to the ballpark to see that the once-phenom still had plenty to offer.

For the combined goodness of his two Topps-ish cards and for the very fact that he had two different cards, Fred Lynn is our guy.

His 1980 Burger King card was the best of 1980.

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