The 1974 Topps Pete Rose baseball card was a cardboard embodiment for a man who stood as an almost mythical figure when I started collecting baseball cards in the early 1980s.

For example, my dad used to tell me stories about Rose’s exploits with the Cincinnati Reds even though Dad was never a baseball fan and Pete had been in Philadelphia for about five years by that point.

It was relatively easy to find information about Rose in those pre-Internet days, too, which helped build him up as larger-than-life in my impressionable mind.

He was interviewed and written about in The Sporting News and Sport.

He was all over the pages of hobby publications like Sports Collectors Digest and Baseball Cards.

And he was featured prominently in every baseball card set and subset I came across — Topps, Fleer, Donruss, Topps Foldouts, Topps Stickers, Fleer Stickers, Topps All-Stars, and on and on and on.

4192

Pete was a bona fide legend, but that wasn’t the only reason he was getting so much play. No, it was becoming clear that Rose would do whatever it t ook to hold on long enough to break Ty Cobb‘s all-time record for career hits, commonly accepted at the time to be 4191.

Hence, “4192” became synonymous with Rose and his chase.

Given all that, I expected to see Rose around each cardboard and paper corner as I devoured every bit of information I could find about baseball and baseball cards.

But I was a new collector, and my world was modern. I wasn’t at all prepared for the display case full of old cards that ran me over one day when my parents took me to a junk/antique shop in the next town over when I was about 11.

There were cards from the 1950s and 1960s, with names like Mantle, Mays, Aaron, Clemente, Koufax, and all the other mythical figures I was learning about.

It was a mesmerizing sight for young eyes accustomed to thumbing through wax packs filled with the round headshots of 1983 Topps and the bat-and-glove design of 1983 Donruss.

The Best of the Best

As mindblowing as all those golden swaths of cardboard were, though, one card knocked all the others to the side like a raging bowling ball and grabbed me by the throat — the 1974 Topps Pete Rose base card.

Of course, I didn’t know what issue it was from at first sight, and the card probably looks pretty mundane to modern collectors. After all, 1974 Topps features some of the grainiest photos and one of the more blah designs of the entire decade.

But, man, Pete looked absolutely perfect in this shot.

His laser stare was locked on an unseen pitch rocketing his way. He gripped the bat in both hands, throwing it forward to bunt the ball. His legs were already motoring toward first base, so confident was he that he’d succeed in his mission.

And just in case things didn’t work out, Pete’s mouth hung open as if he’d take a bite out of the ball if it came to that.

This man was throwing his whole being into getting on base for his beloved Cincinnati Reds, and the simple red banners accentuated Rose’s Cincy uniform.

The whole concoction was a red-alert, blood-pumping bundle of baseball grit that was irresistible to a young fan with a burning passion for the game.

It was a masterpiece in cardboard for which I gladly plunked down my hard-earned $3.50.

A pittance to pay for a card that still burns as one of my favorite from the 1970s more than 30 years later.

(This is Day 11 of our response to Tony L.’s 30-Day Baseball Card Challenge. See all our posts in this series here.)

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See …

Several years back, when I chose the best baseball card from each year, the 1986 Topps Don Mattingly came out on top for, you know, 1986.

Awhile later, I posted a link to that article on Twitter, and one of my followers, @MSUBeastLansing, reminded me there were other great cards from 1986, even from that same Topps set:

pic.twitter.com/Q5dYma53VO

— GreenIsGood.BeGood (@MSUBeastLansing) June 9, 2018

Faced with this evidence, I was forced to reconsider (yes, again) my self-imposed restrictions for this series — limit the number of catchers, limit the number of Cincinnati Reds chief among them.

But this is a card I somehow hadn’t seen often in my life until the point of that Twitter exchange, and it’s quite striking.

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Diaz has thrown off his mask and is knee-deep in a home-plate dustup as Tom Herr of the St. Louis Cardinals slides in feet-first. The bright red Cards and Reds helmets look almost identical to each other, since we can only see the backs, and you might think the two combatants toiled for the same team if not for Diaz’s slightly grayer uniform.

One of the great things about looking through old baseball cards in this electronic age of ours is that it usually takes only a few keystrokes to find out a whole lot more about what’s going on in the pictures that were such mysteries to us as children.

Now, if you’re the type who doesn’t want to see behind-the-scenes snippets from Star Wars because it will spoil the illusion, you should probably stop reading here.

But if you’re interested in the context of this Diaz-Herr play, I can provide some likely insight …

On September 4, 1985, the Reds were in St. Louis to take on the Cards at Busch Stadium in the last of a three-game set.

The Card were in first place in the NL East, and the Reds were fighting to stay in the NL West race. Their 69-61 record entering the game was a minor miracle compared to the mess they had been since 1982, but they needed help to catch the Dodgers.

They wouldn’t find that help in St. Louis.

After the Reds managed only a Max Venable single against Kurt Kepshire in the top of the first, the Cards loaded the bases with two out in the bottom half of the frame.

Herr had provided a large helping of the early heroics, singling against Andy McGaffigan and then stealing second. Terry Pendleton singled to left to score Vince Coleman from third, and Herr decided it was worth the gamble to try and make it 2-0.

It didn’t pan out, because Venable’s throw found Diaz waiting right where he should be, and that’s where we come in with our 1986 Topps card.

Herr was out.

In the end, though, that one-run margin held up as the Cards won 3-2 on a Mike Jorgensen single to score Pendleton in the bottom of the ninth.

St. Louis, of course, went on to lose a controversial World Series to the Kansas City Royals, while the Reds made a late push but came up 5 1/2 games short in the division.

You couldn’t lay too much of the blame on Bo Diaz, though, as the veteran catcher hit .261 with three homers and 15 RBI after coming over from the Philadelphia Phillies on August 8.

Over the next few seasons, Diaz became one of my favorite Reds (which admittedly is a bit like “favorite cookie”), and it was sort of sad when they didn’t re-sign him after the 1989 season.

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Even sadder was that ugly day in 1990, just over a month after the Reds completed their World Series sweep of the mighty Oakland A’s, when I saw the news in the sports section.

On November 23, Diaz had been adjusting a large satellite dish on his roof at home in Venezuela when something went wrong — the apparatus slipped or shifted or just fell, and it crushed Diaz’s neck and skull, killing him instantly.

Knowing and remembering these dark details is one of the hardest parts of being a baseball fan, but that’s what happens when you are immersed in a team and in its players.

And it also makes the bright points so much sweeter and more poignant.

Bright points like the 1986 Topps Bo Diaz card, with a cameo by Tommy Herr — it really may be the best the set has to offer.

(This is the 19th 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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With due apologies to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Edgar Martinez, I know who the real ancient mariner is — it’s legendary Boston Red Sox outfielder Carl Yastrzemski.

By the time I started collecting baseball cards in earnest in 1983, Yaz was in his final season with the Sawx, which was totally amazing considering that he was 71 years old at the time. So it wasn’t surprising that he was all over the place that summer, from This Week in Baseball to Baseball Cards Magazine to an intriguing 1983 Topps Super Veteran card.

As I devoured every word I could find about the hobby, it became clear that Yaz wasn’t just an elder statesman of the game — he was a future Hall of Famer and a collector favorite.

In fact,  1960 Topps Carl Yastrzemski rookie card was the first rookie card that I can remember being hyped as such. It introduced me to the concept that older cards of a player were more scarce and valuable than his later cards, and they didn’t come much older than Yaz or his horizontal first issue.

I don’t remember exactly how much the card was pulling in that summer, but I do know it was several orders of magnitude greater than any pasteboard I was even considering adding to my own collection. I think it was going for around 50 bucks at local card shows, but it could have been 20 or 100.

Anyway, the images of the hobbling old man in the Red Sox cap at the All-Star Game that summer became intertwined in my collector’s psyche with the shy-looking young man encircled in a whole lot of orange ink on the front of his 1960 rookie card. How could any one player have held on that long?

Thanks to the tens of thousands of words written about Yaz that year, I was eventually able to piece together a big hunk of his story. Born and raised in the Bridgehampton, NY, area surrounded by the sea, Yastrzemski somehow found his way to the ball field instead of a fishing vessel and then found his sweet left-handed swing.

When he was 19, the New England boy was signed by New England’s team — the Red Sox — to a minor league contract

Two years later, he made his Major League debut — and stuck. That would have been 1961 if you’re keeping score at home, which means Topps added Yaz to their set a good year before he ever stepped foot on a Big League diamond.

As it turned out, that was pretty typical of Yastrzemski: doing things that others couldn’t.

There was his ability to step into the left field shoes vacated by Red Sox legend Ted Williams.

There was the Triple Crown in 1967.

There was the 23-year career that seemed like it might never end.

And there was the funny looking rookie card that helped jump start the hobby just as our cardboard dreams were starting to heat up.

Yaz was never my favorite player, but he is forever engrained in my collecting memory, and catching a glimpse of his 1960 Topps rookie card still gives me chills.

(This is Day 10 of our response to Tony L.’s 30-Day Baseball Card Challenge. See all our posts in this series here.)

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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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It has been well documented that the 1988 Score baseball cards set has no soul. That’s especially disappointing when you consider that the issue was supposed to save the hobby, from being great, I suppose.

Because the hobby was already great.

But 1988 Score was going to …

• Bring revolutionary, tamper-proof packs — though Topps did that in 1983.
• Wow us with full-color photos on card backs — though Sportflics did that in 1986.
• Include Magic Motion technology — though Kellogg’s and Sportflics already did that, in the 1970s and in 1986.
• Tantalize our senses with borders colored by the rainbow —  though Topps did that in 1975.

It seems there was nothing new under wax, or plastic, as it were. That didn’t stop Score from cranking out 74.12 million of each card, though.

Now, taken on a case-by-case basis, there actually are come nice looking cards in the 1988 Score set, and the photos are generally solid.

Some of the best cards include:

• Nolan Ryan bringing his Texas heat for the Houston Astros.
• Jose Canseco going all Paul Bunyan in the batter’s box.
• Eddie Murray powering through the strike zone.
• Vince Coleman scorching the basepath.
• Gregg Jefferies being an iconic rookie card as he throws to first base.

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But for this series of posts, where I’m picking the best card for each base set in the 1980s, there can really be only one choice …

Card #180, of Bo Jackson.

Awhile back, when I picked the best baseball card from each year, the 1988 Topps Bo Jackson took the Olympic-year gold.

But that card was off-limits for this series because I’d already written about it, so Shawn Hillegas took 1988 Topps honors.

And that leads us back here, where we can make ourselves whole again with the 1988 Score Bo Jackson.

It’s not quite the stunner that the 1988 Topps Bo is, but it’s not far off.

Bo is in his home white Kansas City Royals uniform, his powerful arms fully extended, his soon-to-be-troublesome hips ready to snap into the swing. Bo’s head is down and his eyes are locked on the ball, maybe a curve just dropping into the zone.

Will Bo make contact? Smack a home run? Generate a gale-force whiff?

The next split second would tell us, if we could only unpause the frame. But then … the moment would be gone, and we’d have to rely on our memory to recall it.

As it is, this card will live forever in its bath of Royals blue, on the borders and on Jackson‘s uniform.

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On this card, Bo will always be young and healthy and like no one else we’ve ever seen in Major League spikes.

And he’ll always have the best card from the 1988 Score set, no matter how much hope you still hold for a Gregg Jefferies comeback.

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(This is the 25th 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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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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Look, we all know that the Ken Griffey, Jr., rookie card is the greatest card in the 1989 Upper Deck set.

I admitted as much when I anointed it as the best card in all of 1989 last year as part of a similar (but different) series of posts on the best card from each year from 1960-89.

Heck, the Junior rookie is one of the greatest baseball cards of all time when you consider everything. It’s the first card in the first set of cards from a company (Upper Deck) that changed the hobby forever, and it pictures a once-in-a-generation player in Griffey.

It looks pretty darn good, too.

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But I’ve already written about that card, so it can’t be my choice for best 1989 Upper Deck card here and now (unless it somehow morphs into a catcher card — then we can talk). Them’s just the rules.

So that frees us up to thumb through the other bazillion 1989 Upper Deck cards in search of The Best 1989 Upper Deck Card, Senior Division (as opposed to Junior, get it?).

There are plenty of strong candidates, too:

• Ramon Martinez banking into a turn as he prepares to land a pitch on his rookie card (#18)
• John Smoltz looking in for the sign from his rookie card (#17)
• Gary Sheffield actually *smiling* in the dugout on his rookie card (#13)
• Bo Jackson on the hot corner  talking with Royals third base coach Adrian Garrett about how easy it will be to score on card #221
• A young and lean(ish) Kirby Puckett leading off first base with Mark McGwire lurking and hulking behind (#376)

They’re all great, and they’re not alone. Love it or hate it, you have to admit that 1989 Upper Deck is jammed full of some of the best photography the hobby had ever seen.

So which is the best card among the non-Junior crowd?

As with so many of my selections in this series, it comes down to personal choice, guided by aesthetics and a sense of history.

Setting Junior aside, then, the best baseball card in the 1989 Upper Deck set is McGwire’s own pasteboard at #300.

By that point in history, of course, everyone knew that Big Mac was a slugger (if not a hitter) of Ruthian proportions. McGwire had smashed the rookie home run record with 49 in 1987, after all.

He followed that up with 32 home runs and 99 RBI as the Oakland A’s rolled to an American League pennant in 1988.

With 1989 dawning, the young slugger was looking to bounce back to the 50-homer potential he displayed as a rookie, and Upper Deck captured the feeling of giant expectations — and ability — that swirled around McGwire.

Big Mac stands in stark profile against a twilight sky, just a young baseball god and his weapon (a wooden baseball bat). The camera angle helps McGwire dwarf the trees in the background and makes it seem like anything is possible.

There is also a striking desolation, a loneliness, to the shot, and the overall effect is eerily prescient.

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Within 10 years, McGwire would demolish Roger Maris‘s single-season home run record by slamming 70 of his own in 1998, and he’d also separate himself from the pack as a legendary slugger.

But there is sometimes a fine line between standing alone and being alone, and the whispers of steroid use that exploded to shouts in the late 2000s helped to separate McGwire from the game he loves.

There has since been some repair as Big Mac has moved back into the game as a coach, but what once looked like a surefire Hall of Fame resume still has him on the outside looking in at Cooperstown.

No matter what, though, he’ll always have the Best 1989 Upper Deck Baseball Card, Non-Junior Division.

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This is the 30th in our series of posts about the best baseball cards from the 1980s. Check out the rest of those posts here.

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

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