Time to jump into another Bat Around. This one was perpetuated by three of the all-time top bloggers. DimeBox Nick started it in 2023 with a post called Junk Is Junk, then Night Owl put a more positive spin on it, and just this month, San Jose Fuji contributed his take. And that's where I saw it.
All three guys set their lists at six or seven choices. I've only collected around 15 sets from that era in total. I've (over)stated many times that I wasn't active with cards back then ('87-'94), and actually skipped everything from '85 to '03. (Including '84 Fleer update, which I regret now.) So I have really no nostalgia to go back to when ranking these products. Instead, I made two lists of the sets that appeal to me (and I completed). The first was in order of the most to least graphically appealing design. The other was in order of how memorable it was building the set (many years later), and/or how much of it I still deal with it as far as trading, buying and selling. Like how some sets I still handle all the time, and others were forgotten once I finished them. I then combined the two lists to get the rankings you'll see here. I'll do my Top Ten and a few Honorable Mentions in reverse order.
I could do a supplemental post about how the complete/factory sets have sold on eBay for me in the last year on top of all this. I'm shocked any of it sold at all, but let me know if you want to hear about how they moved out.
So here we go.
Honorable Mentions - just outside the Top Ten are these sets that I liked but didn't make the cut. All the rest that aren't shown here somewhere have never had much of any appeal to me. You'll notice some omissions that are popular elsewhere. Leave a comment with the ones you expected to see.
1990 & 1994 Leaf
'90 Leaf is one of the more simple but elegant designs. I didn't own a set until a couple years ago when I bought one at a shop. Singles of this set are scarce in the wild in my experience. Again, the history of this set and it's "eliteness" is lost on me.
'94 Leaf is a nice visual with the marble swoosh and foil logo, but it's the opposite of it's '90 counterpart in that singles are all over the place. It's probably the default set that makes me think "Don't need any of those" the quickest.
1990 Fleer
I like the look of this one a lot too. Simple but colorful enough (frames are several different colors), easily readable, with team logos. I think this was one of my Summer/National week projects in the 2010's where I'd build a set from the OVP era for cheap with Stuart from SR75's help. Either way, I got the bulk of it from him, so it didn't take long. The Canadian flavor would be interesting, but I don't think there are any radical differences from the regular one like '77 OPC vs. Topps.
1994 Triple Play
Yep, I'm going outside the Big Six with this list. Since I'm coming from such a late perspective, everything from this era is basically the same for me. The Fire Red premiere of TP is over the top, but I like the other two incarnations a lot. Distinctive logo, nice treatment of the name, and prominent team logos. Maybe a thin line on top of the name with the postition would have been nice, but these are still cool. I have no memory of how I built this one, so it falls short.
1988 Topps
Simple graphics with overlapping photos - always a plus. The minus - everyone's got six tons of this in their extra stuff. Love the variations. There's not much more to them when you think about it though. One of the least represented in the Heritage/Archives/Flagship tribute cycles.
Now the winners:
#10 - 1994 Pacific
I am the King of 1994 Pacific. SR75 convinced me to buy a huge box of packs back in the summer of 2008. I opened them all up and sorted them into a few sets. Still searching for some of the inserts and very elusive checklists. My extras box has finally shrunk to two rows instead of three. Quite often I'll trade someone a whole team set at a time.
#9 - 1990 Donruss
Yep, that's right. I LIKE 1990 Donruss. The speckle and line design isn't the most fantastic, but it's more about the error quest and all the other peripheral sets that go with these - Aqueous Tests, Bonus MVPs, Grand Slammers, Best of AL & NL, Learning Series, and The Rookies, and Pack border vs. Set borders. Not to mention the quasi-nostalgia of 2016 Donruss football, that improves the look. I'm casually after the Master Set - but that doesn't include the "INC" vs. "INC." variants.
#8 - 1993 Stadium Club
I'm not sure which of the first few SC sets I actually have right off the top of my head, but I chose this one to represent the brand in general, really. The red bar behind the name gives just a little more presence to the text than in the other sets.
#7 - 1994 Pinnacle
Another fairly simple design, it's just the name badge - cool use of gold on black - and the team in a half circle underneath, that can go unnoticed. I have memories of building this one for a while. This set exemplifies the move to more sophisticated designs beyond the junk period.
#6 - 1993 Studio
Love the use of logos for the backgrounds. Brings the graphical elements to another level. Making them hat logos is cool too. Studio is one of those secondary star-only sets, but I think they are consistently more elegant than regular cards. Portraits can be lame, but Studio makes it classy.
#5 - 1989 Topps
As I mentioned before, I stopped building sets after 1984 until 2003, but I bought two boxes of '89 when they were out just to see what cards were like right then. (Ironically, I have four wax boxes of '89 in the sale lot that could recreate the experience.) Surprised these calculated out to be so high on the list since of the ten sets I had for sale, four of
them weren't actually complete. So now I have to trade for some
singles, including Pete Rose. That's points off, but I almost have them all now.
#4 - 1991 Studio
Yep, going there again. This was the premeire issue of this portrait product. The black & white gives it more sophistication, and the border color is neutral enough not to draw attention away from the image, but rich enough to be distinctive.
#3 - 1993 Triple Play
This product combines a few of my favorite elements in one. Black borders, overlapping photos & graphics à la '88, distinctive team logos, and specialty cards (most of which you had to read the back to understand, though). It's not the most beautiful design, or the most memorable, but there's just something I really like about '93 Triple Play.
#2 - 1987 Donruss
Black borders and big team logos again, and this time, a very balanced design. I like the gray band of baseballs with the yellow edges, and the varied colors in the name strip. Even the company logo looks good. (And kudos to Donruss for consistently putting the year on the front so you don't have to check the back for copyright date.) I bought my set for like $3 at the LCS that I frequented for decades. I've finished the matching Leaf set too. The Opening Day set is even nicer in dark red.
#1 - 1988 Score
It's not because I'm still trading for the remainder of my original damaged set, or that I had 48 factory sets for sale at the beginning of the year (now down to half that). But all that contributes. The color choices are great, and there's six of them. These just stand out over and above anything else in that year, much less that time period in general. They're simple enough to blend in with the other sets, but appealing enough to me to set them apart. '89 was decent, but a downgrade, and Score went to hell after that until 1996.
Don't flame me for the ones I left off (and don't especially like), but do leave me comments so I can tally up the votes for those I suspect you'll say. Let's see if floating letters beats woodgrain, if you know what I mean...
