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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The modern baseball card game is tough to get a handle on for a crusty old dude like me, and to be honest, I’m not really trying to get a handle on it.

There have just been too many thousands of cards issued in too many configurations with too many bells and whistles since I last seriously collected new material in the 1990s for me to catch up in any reasonable way.

But, man, there sure are some good looking cards out there today! And by “today”, I mean stuff that’s come out since roughly 2010.

My Twitter feed and blogrolls and Facebook walls are filled to the brim everyday with cards that look better in a lot of ways than the cards I collected as a kid. And a good hunk of those “better” cards are retro in some way — old players on new cards, new players on old cards, old players on old cards that they don’t belong on from a canonical standpoint.

It’s dizzying and exhilarating all at once.

But even among the cards that I love when I see them online, there is a problem — not all of them are real.

A New Breed of Artist

Thanks to the handiwork of cardboard and digital artists like the late, great Bob Lemke, CardsThatNeverWere, Joe Shlabotnik, and others, nothing is off limits in terms of player-set combinations. “Cards that never were” have become a thing unto themselves, and I love looking at these gorgeous creations and imaging a younger me pulling them from wax packs.

But it doesn’t feel quite right to include one of those mythical concoctions in something so serious and buttoned-down as the 30-Day Baseball Card challenge. (Kidding about the gravity of this series, and Tony Lehman at Off Hiatus Baseball Cards has given us full license with his brainchild.)

So my hackles were up as I searched for a card to include in this Day-15 entry … “One of your favorite cards from the 2010s.”

When I saw Dwight Gooden staring down — the catcher? a runner? a coach? — someone from the mound and within the confines of a 1972 Topps framework, my heart rapped out a couple of jagged beats before logic set in.

This thing had to be a digital creation.

Right?

As it turns out … wrong!

A quick bit of research revealed that this was an actual creation from an actual card company.

In particular, I had discovered the 2013 Topps Archive Dwight Gooden, card #34.

Dr. K — Better than Ever

Now, I’m sure there are other cards from the 2010s that could give this one a run for its money on my list of favorites, but old #34 is grand enough that it deserves its own post.

Here are just a few reasons why:

• Dwight Gooden was the first out-of-this world phenom that I drooled over. Darryl Strawberry and Ron Kittle were top-notch in 1983, but they couldn’t hold a candle to the Gooden of 1984 and especially 1985.
• I was born in 1972 (that used to seem so recent!).
• I hated the 1972 set when I first started collecting, but it’s grown in my esteem over the years. It’s now one of my favorites.
• Gooden’s hair on this card is just a tad longer than I remember it during most of his career. That extra little *poof* sticking out from under his cap puts him right in line with the styles of the early 1970s. He looks like he could have been a member of the cruddy 1973 Mets team that somehow almost won the World Series.
• The back of this card looks like a genuine 1972 Topps card, funky orange background and all.

For a (literal) product of the 70s, a child of the 80s, an inveterate baseball fan, and a hopeless baseball card collector (you can’t ever really move on from this hobby), this is just about the perfect modern card.

And it’s real, to boot!

When collectors tore open our first wax packs of 1984 Topps baseball cards as another cold winter yielded to the hope

of Spring, we had no way of knowing just how significant those little rectangles of cardboard would become.

But looking back, it’s easy to see they were no ordinary baseball cards.

No, nestled there beneath the waxy shield and cuddled in close to sugary pink confection of summer were tiny paper time machines. If we had paid attention, those cards would have given a glimpse of America’s near future. And now, more than three decades later, they can transport us back to a simpler time and remind us what promise is all about.

ALL ABOUT THE TEAM

As temperatures warmed out of the deep freeze in 1984, Americans turned our thoughts toward the Summer Olympics, which would be held on United States soil for the first time since 1932. In the midst of the Cold War and on the heels of the American boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, the Soviet Union announced on May 8 that they would sit out the Los Angeles games. Thirteen of their allies followed suit, and the noose of nuclear threat tightened.

Although there were some rumblings that an Olympics without the Soviets would be cheapened, the overwhelming American response was to turn our focus inwards. We were America. We were hosting the Olympics. And we were going to dominate the competition, no matter who did or did not show up for the festivities.

We were a united front against the world. A team.

By the time the USSR dropped their diplomatic-athletic bomb, baseball fans were getting a look at another united team, the likes of which many of us had never seen before.

The Detroit Tigers opened the 1984 season with a 9-0 run before finally losing to the Kansas City Royals on April 19. By May 8, they were 24-4, and streaked all the way to 35-5 before settling into a more “normal” dominant pace that left no doubt who was the odds-on favorite to win the World Series come October

Meanwhile, the Chicago Cubs and San Diego Padres were already looking like they might give their fans a summer to remember.

Throughout the game and all across the nation, everyone was talking about teams.

And Topps was there for us, accentuating our focus on the club with every new pack of cards.

A BLOCK OFF THE OLD PIP

In 1983, Topps scored a big design victory (check out our guide to 1983 Topps here) by dusting off the bones of their 1963 issue and updating it for a new generation of collectors. The large action photo combined with a small, circular head shot to produce a picture-in-picture (PIP) effect that delighted most collectors.

Never one to let an opportunity to bleed an idea dry go to waste, Topps revised their 1983 design for 1984. The large action shots were still there, as were the head shots, but with a twist. Rather than being confined to a coin-spot of real estate, the cameos protruded from a square of solid color. And this time around, all of the head shots were anchored to the lower left-hand corner of the card, whereas the 1983 versions had alternated from side to side depending on the aesthetics of the individual card.

But the dominant design element of a typical 1984 Topps baseball card is the team name in large block franchise-colored letters running vertically down the left-hand side and ending just above the player’s head. It’s as if Topps knew we’d all be clinging to team allegiances like never before as the summer heat wore us down. The relegation of the player name and position designation in small block letters — same color as the team name — to a trailing rectangle underneath the main photo served to sharpen the club focus even more.

Collectors tend to be ambivalent toward the 1984 design …

On the one hand, it’s a garish and fitting tribute to the me-me Eighties, and folks tend to either love or hate the decade itself.

On the other hand, the huge team name made it easy to sort the cards by franchise if you so desired. Of course, thanks to Topps’ indecipherable numbering scheme, you couldn’t put your cards in order by team and by number like you could with their Fleer counterparts.

But the ’84 Topps cards were great for team collectors, and that trend continued when you flipped your cards over.

The first thing you’re likely to notice about 1984 Topps card backs is the jarring explosion of purple and red ink of varying shades. But once your pupils stop spazzing and you regain your focus, you’re greeted with a handsome team logo in the upper right-hand corner of the horizontal obverse. The other corner contains the Topps logo and the card number, with the player name and a block of vital information nestled in between.

Below all of that is the ubiquitous “Complete Major League Batting/Pitching Record,” spawning ground for thousands of future Sabermetricians and a distinguishing factor that the other companies never seemed to master quite as well as Topps.

Overall, the basic 1984 Topps design is distinctive and represents a mash-up of sorts. Squint your eyes, and you can see elements of several classic Topps set, including 1983, 1967, 1964, 1963, and 1958. In a broader sense, you might even throw in 1954-1956, thanks to the dual-image concept.

Of course, design alone can’t always push a card set to the top of the heap, and that was especially true in 1984, when both Donruss and Fleer stepped up their games considerably. Luckily for Topps, they had plenty of tricks up their (card) sleeves and packed their base set with all sorts of special goodies.

TOPPS — THE CAREER LEADERS

Although The Old Gum Company was feeling the footsteps of its competitors more than ever as 1984 dawned, there is no denying that Topps was still king of the world in terms of their overall body of work.

You might say they were the career leaders in producing awe-inspiring swatches of cardboard.

Perhaps playing on that theme, Topps hit on an idea that was completely novel at the time: Active Career Leaders cards.

In particular, Topps picked out nine key statistical categories and dedicated a horizontally-oriented card to the career leaders for that stat in each league. For instance, “NL Active Career Hit Leaders” features a rectangular head shot of Pete Rose (3990 hits), flanked by Rusty Staub (2685) on the left and Tony Perez (2588) on the right. The card back shows the top 10 hits leaders in the NL at that time on the left, and the right-hand side shows the all-time MLB list (with Ty Cobb still on top!).

By combining these all-time greats with a bold red, blue, and yellow color scheme, Topps made sure their special cards really stood out, no easy feat in this set.

Topps issues of the era were always loaded with special subsets, but the 1984 version is especially packed.

The full roster of focused subsets includes:

• 1983 Highlights (cards #1-6)
• Team Leaders (starting with card #11 and scattered throughout the set)
• Managers (starting with card #21 and scattered throughout the set)
• Checklists (starting with card #114 and spaced about one per 100 cards from there on out)
• 1983 League Leaders (cards #131-138)
• All-Stars (cards #386-407)
• Active Career Leaders (cards 701-718)

That’s a lot of “special” for one set, but it’s worth noting that three of those 1983 highlight cards featured three players each. The last (#6), commemorates the simultaneous retirements of Johnny Bench, Gaylord Perry, and Carl Yastrzemski.

As a fan who was just making my entrance to the game as Bench was exiting, I can tell you his farewell was in no way a “highlight,” but I can’t blame Topps for trying.

And try they did …

In fact, the only way Topps could have crammed in more “specials” would have been to include a bevy of “Rookie Stars” as they had for several years through 1982. But just because there were no designated first-year cards, that doesn’t mean Topps missed the rookie-card boat.

In fact, for several years, a pair of rooks formed the collective …

STRAW THAT STIRRED THE HOBBY DRINK

In 1983, young Darryl Strawberry of the New York Mets excited collectors like few rookies had before him.

Together with the Chicago White Sox‘s Ron Kittle (#480), Strawberry helped usher in an era of big first-year mashers who would help drive the hobby to new heights throughout the 80s.

Collectors were eager to snag his first regular-issue Topps card, making early sales of 1984 product brisk and encouraging thousands (millions?) of schoolyard trades across the nation.

While Strawberry’s strong sophomore stats made a cardboard slowdown unlikely, the emergence of Don Mattingly in the Bronx ensured that all three 1984 sets would stay in the limelight throughout the season.

Mattingly had been relatively unsung as he worked his way through the New York Yankees’ minor league system in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but he exploded onto the national scene in 1984 by catapulting to the top of the leader board for the American League batting crown. He would eventually snatch that title from teammate Dave Winfield, batting .341 to the veteran’s .340.

Though he wasn’t a rookie, Mattingly gave collectors a rare treat for the era — a breakout season while his rookie card was still available in current wax packs.

Not surprisingly, Strawberry and Mattingly were the key cards in the 1984 Topps set — and its Donruss and Fleer counterparts — for a decade or more. At their peaks in the late 1980s, each card would set you back at least $20 in raw condition. And, even though neither player lived up to the lofty lifetime goals we all had for them, they finished with solid careers laced with streaks of true greatness.

Today, the Mattingly and Strawberry rookies are still the keys to this set, but you can pick them up in nice condition for just a few bucks each on eBay. Graded mint copies of either card are still among the most valuable in the set.

REDUS OUR RIGHTS … WE WEREN’T HOME BLYLEVEN

In reality, it has been pretty easy for the Mattingly and Strawberry rookies to shine through the decades because the other rookie cards in this set have had about as much impact on the hobby as a balled up sock thrown against a boulder. Among the luminaries are Craig Lefferts (#99), Brian Harper (#144), Bill Krueger (#178), Bill Doran (#198), Andy Van Slyke (#206), Jose Oquendo (#208), Tom Candiotti (#262), Jeff Russell (#270), Tony Phillips (#309), Alejandro Pena (#324), Kevin Gross (#332), Spike Owen (#413), Gary Redus (#475),  and Pete O’Brien (#534).

Not the stuff of dreams, though some of these guys forged solid careers, and Reds fans have fond memories of both Doran and Redus.

Fortunately, the 1984 Topps set features plenty of other guys who evoke fond memories for fans across the full baseball spectrum. Among the superstars and future Hall of Famers who remain popular from this issue are Robin Yount (#10), Wade Boggs (#30), Paul Molitor (#60), Reggie Jackson (#100), Ozzie Smith (#130), Dale Murphy (#150), Andre Dawson (#200), Rickey Henderson (#230), Tony Gwynn (#251), Pete Rose (#300), Tim Raines (#370), Steve Garvey (#380), Lou Piniella (#408), Tommy John (#415), Dave Winfield (#460), Nolan Ryan (#470), Cal Ripken (#490), Rollie Fingers (#495), George Brett (#500), Joe Torre (#502), Alan Trammell (#510), Jim Rice (#550), Carlton Fisk (#560), Tony LaRussa (#591), Ryne Sandberg (#596), Rod Carew (#600), Phil Niekro (#650), Rich Gossage (#670), Lou Whitaker (#695), Mike Schmidt (#700), Dwight Evans (#720), Bruce Sutter (#730), Tom Seaver (#740), Dennis Eckersley (#745), Jim Palmer (#750), Dave Parker (#775), Steve Carlton (#780), Bert Blyleven (#789).

Wow! Quite a list of baseball bigwigs, huh? And it’s not exhaustive, either — there are plenty of fan favorites that I didn’t specifically call out here. In any case, this role call is a dripping testament to just how magical the era was, and it’s amazing that you can still buy most of these guys for well less than $1 a pop today.

HOW YOU GOT THEM … AND WHAT YOU GOT (AND WHAT ELSE YOU COULD GET)

If you wanted to buy 1984 Topps cards back in the day, you didn’t have the luxury of surfing over to eBay, but you did have the convenience of picking some up at your local store. Topps gave you a variety of purchasing options, too, in case the venerable wax pack didn’t float your boat for some reason.

Among the ways 1984 Topps was offered to collectors (info courtesy of BaseballCardPedia and others):

• Wax packs: 15 cards, a game card (see below), and a stick of gum per pack; 36 packs per box; 30 cents per pack
• Cello packs: 28 cards and a stick of gum per pack: 24 packs per box; 49 cents per pack
• Rack packs: 54 cards and one of 22 Glossy All-Star cards per pack; 24 packs per box; 99 cents per pack
• Sugarless rack packs: 36 cards and three sticks of sugarless gum per pack
• Factory sets from J.C. Penney (“Christmas” sets)

That’s a pretty good array of purchase options and it served to get Topps in front of collectors everywhere.

But Topps being Topps, and 1984 being the first year when both Donruss and Fleer could legitimately challenge The Old Gum Company for card quality, Topps wasn’t content with peddling their base set.

Instead, they upped the ante all across the board and cranked out a lineup of parallels and standalone issues that could satisfy just about any hobbyist and in many ways foretold the future of the hobby.

In particular, Topps graced us with:

• A “Tiffany” set, limited to 10,000 complete factory boxes. These cards were identical to the 1984 base issue except they featured premium white card stock, extreme gloss finish (front and back), a limited print run, and, of course, a high price tag. Collectors had clamored for these features for years, and Topps delivered on them a good half-decade before Upper Deck made them the norm. Today, the complete Tiffany set sells for $200-500 depending on overall condition.
• A set of 40 glossy “send-ins,” obtainable by (yes) sending in a certain number of game cards pulled from base packs. Each mailing netted you eight cards.
• Topps Supers — huge (4-7/8″ x 6-7/8″) exact replicas of 30 base cards from the 1984 Topps issue — one of my favorite “special” sets of all time.
• Gallery of Immortals — 12 metal replicas of regular-issue cards at 1/12 scale.
• The standard and ubiquitous sticker set (386 in all).
• An exact 792-card parallel issued for candy maker Nestlé to hawk as a send-in premium, and sporting the Nestlé logo.
• A 396-card O-Pee-Chee parallel issued in Canada.
• The usual 132-card Traded set — it appears lackluster now but was absolutely loaded when it was issued, thanks to rookie cards of Dwight Gooden, Bret Saberhagen, and Mark Langston, and popular new-uniform cards of Pete Rose and Tom Seaver.

All in all, it was a Herculean, Olympic-level effort by Topps in 1984, and Team Gum could rightly be proud of themselves.

But, as happens so often in sports and in life, change was in the air.

Of course …

SOME THINGS (ALMOST) NEVER CHANGE

By October of 1984, the US had romped through a dominant performance at the LA Olympics.

President Ronald Reagan was a clear favorite to win re-election and would in fact score a historic landslide victory the next month.

And on the diamond, the Detroit Tigers marched fearlessly toward their destiny as one of the great teams of the latter part of the 20th century.

Meanwhile, Cubs fans clutched to an uneasy optimism, bolstered by the Cubbies’ ability to recover from a mid-season swoon that saw them fall to third place to outdistance the rest of the NL East. They’d face the surprising San Diego Padres in the NLCS, so … maybe 1984 was the year? Finally?

Chicago’s supporters need not have wasted their energies, because the Cubs ended up where they always did — at home on their couches during the World Series. Oh, they gave everyone a good rise by winning the first two games in the best-of-five series, but the Padres swept three in San Diego for the right to be eaten by the Tigers.

And eaten they were, four games to one.

Funny thing about those playoffs was that the weak team among the four final contenders was the Kansas City Royals, the only club among them who had any recent post-season experience. But, in today’s parlance, their “window was closing” and they were lucky to have toiled in baseball’s weakest division, the AL West.

How shocking, then, that those same Royals would win the whole ball of wax the next year while the other three champs from 1984 got an early start on their winter bellies. And, in fact, KC would secure two titles before any of the other three won even one (the Cubs in 2016).

In many ways, Topps found themselves in the same place as the Royals in 1984.

The Old Gum Company was fighting off the wolves at the door, and they issued what many consider to be the weakest set of the year. But they went all in and kept fighting, even when everyone said they were outclassed.

And then they came back in 1985. And 1986. And 1987.

And every season since, just like they had in every season before, stretching back to well before most of us were born.

Love them or hate them, Topps has always been there, and they’ll probably be there in another 30 years.

Just like the game itself, Topps sets provide an almost invariant backdrop against which to mark the summers of our lives and the journeys of our Wax Pack Gods.

Do you remember how it felt to root for your favorite team as a kid? Thumb through a stack of 1984 Topps baseball cards, and you will.

(For more classic cardboard, check out our Complete Guide to the Golden Era of Baseball Cards.)