SABR 50

To celebrate SABR’s fiftieth season the SABR Baseball Card Committee offers 50 cards for 50 years. This isn’t a ranking or even a list of the “best” card for each year but rather a look at the hobby as it’s changed over five decades and the way the history of baseball has been reflected in cards over that same time.

1971 Topps Curt Flood

With the nominal first SABR convention being held in Cooperstown in 1971, we start our list in 1971. Curt Flood’s card is the last year the Senators would appear on cardboard but more importantly captures the initial volley of the coming revolution in baseball’s labor market. That line of thirteen zeroes across his stats doesn’t come close to capturing the sacrifice Flood made by making a stand for Free Agency.

1972 Topps Traded Joe Morgan

Until 1972, trading cards didn’t really call out player movement on their fronts. Yes we saw airbrushed uniforms and awkward poses and got an occasional updated card, but the idea of explicitly mentioning that a player had changed teams was new. It’s like Topps saw the Free Agent writing on the wall and the upcoming deluge of player movement that would increase year after year. That one of the first Traded cards happens to feature a key player on the Big Red Machine falling into place is only the icing on the cake.

1973 Topps Tommy Agee

This is a watershed set for Topps. The last set released in multiple series (hereafter sets would be issued either complete or in just two series). The first set to go all-in on action photography. The result is a set that has one foot in the past and the other in the future. Lots of photos that feel comfortably retro. And just as many which share bloodlines with today’s all-action, all-exertion photos. Mix in a commitment to airbrushing anything and everything that needed to be updated and you have a singularly distinct look for the ages.

1974 Topps Ron Blomberg

On April 6, 1973 Ron Blomberg drew a bases-loaded walk and became the first Designated Hitter in Major League history. In 1974 Topps printed the first cards featuring this new position. In 2020 despite rules taking baseball to a universal DH, fans are still debating the merits of the original rule change in 1973.

1975 Topps Mini Hank Aaron

Hank Aaron as the Home Run King could really be any years in the mid-70s but in 1975 his mini-variant card captures a lot of what the hobby would become. The idea of releasing a variant set was new in 1975 but became the thing in the hobby decades later. Including highlights and record breakers in the body of the set itself is another innovation that spawned all kinds of products in the ensuing decades. What better highlight to kick things off with than the Home Run Record.

1976 SSPC Frank RObinson

While the copyright says 1975, the unlicensed SSPC set is really more of a 1976 issue with back information that indicates that the 1975 season has completed. This set, besides featuring a lot of fun photography, represents the first real challenge to the Topps monopoly that the hobby had seen in years. It also, by having dedicated manager cards, is able to commemorate Frank Robinson becoming the first African American manager in the Major Leagues.

1977 Topps Burger King Reggie Jackson

1977 is the year of Reggie Jackson. His first year in New York. His Mr. October heroics. It’s a good thing Topps managed to get him onto a card as a Yankee even if they had to airbrush the heck out of things to do so. Later that year they got the picture right when Burger King released some of the first licensed retail “oddball” cards. In addition to featuring updated photos of new players, these oddballs kicked off an oddball boom which permeated the hobby in the 1980s and early 1990s.

1978 Topps Glenn burke

While we can’t say if Burke was the first openly gay ballplayer or ex-ballplayer, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that it was an open secret and most of his teammates didn’t care. Sadly he still got pushed out of the game too soon and didn’t live long enough to receive proper recognition for the moment of joy he invented (with Dusty Baker) in 1977. Everyone gives high gives. Everyone loves high fives. What a wonderful legacy to be known for.

1979 Padres Family Fun RGB Chicken

What was that about oddballs? Mascots have existed forever but they weren’t a Baseball™ thing until the Chicken started his act in San Diego. He quickly showed up on cards, first oddball team releases, then regular releases such as the early Donruss sets. He also threw open the door to so many mascots following in his footsteps that today the few teams without them are the exceptions.

1980 Topps Rickey Henderson

Rickey may not have been the first big rookie craze but he was clearly a sensation who was driving card speculation by 1981. As much as we wanted to avoid a list naming just the popular big-name rookie cards, some of them are too important to leave off.

1981 Fleer “Fernand” Valenzuela

1981 brought us the end of the Topps monopoly as Fleer and Donruss released their first sets of cards. Fernandomania turned the Dodgers into a team that Mexican Americans could root for instead of remembering Chavez Ravine. All this occurred despite a strike and labor negotiations which ushered in modern free agency.

1982 Donruss Gorman Thomas Diamond King

In 1982 Donruss introduced its Diamond Kings subset and reintroduced cards that are intentionally supposed to look like Art to the hobby (it’s the position of this committee that 1977 Rick Jones and 1978 Greg Minton lacked the “intent” element). 1982 was also a good year for the Brewers in reaching that franchise’s only World Series.

1983 Donruss Action All Stars george Brett

Oversize sets have come and gone as one-off releases but Donruss’s Action All Stars set heralded a new era of competition where the multiple brands are going in all different directions to distinguish themselves. George Brett meanwhile provides the highlight of the season through the pine tar incident.

1984 Glenn HUbbard

Sometimes a great photo is a great photo. After decades of traditional baseball photos, Fleer realized that branching out into the weird and wonderful would be a way to distinguish itself. Not every photo can be like this but throughout the 1980s Fleer repeatedly demonstrates a willingness to go goofy in its photography and as a result, produces sets with a ton of intrinsic character.

1985 Donruss Box Bottom Dwight GOoden

In 1985 Donruss introduced box bottom cards to baseball cards. These were always a fun bonus for people who bought whole boxes or kids willing to chat up shop owners for the empty, beat up bottoms that would otherwise be destined for the trash. Dwight Gooden, at the peak of his powers and as one of the most-prominent players in the game, was a perfect subject for the first set. That his photo is better than his base Donruss card only adds to the allure of the box bottom.

1986 Sportflics Keith HErnandez

Sportflics entered the market in 1986 with magic motion cards featuring lenticular technology that produced short three-frame animations. While not a hit with the emerging investor/speculator market, they were something kids loved.  Those kids also got to turn their cards over and learn about a brand new statistic, the Game-Winnig RBI which, while flawed, was wonderfully evocative. They did not however learn about the Pittsburgh Drug Trials and so players like Keith Hernandez  would only be notable for their prowess in the 1986 World Series.

1987 Fleer Update Kevin Mitchell

One of the purest ideals of a a baseball card set is that it should be a record of the season. This is an impossible task with press lead times and player movements so it’s important to highlight when companies go the extra mile. While 1983 Fleer had a Joel Youngblood highlight, they took things even further in 1987 by releasing a card featuring Kevin Mitchell with both of the teams he actually played for that year.

1988 Score Jose Canseco

Another new company entered the market in 1988 and this time it was a game changer. Score featured action photography like no other set and encyclopedic backs with enough information for kids to read all summer. 1988 was also the year of Jose Canseco who created the 40-40 club, took the A’s to the World Series, and kicked off an awareness of steroids and performance enhancing drugs that would come to dominate the sport in the following decades.

1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr

We’re up to six brands in the market now. While Score raised the bar a bunch in 1988, Upper Deck raised it even further in 1989 with the first truly premium set. Pinning its hopes on Ken Griffey Jr., 1989 Upper Deck became the most-noteworthy set for a generation of collectors with the Griffey rookie as its centerpiece. And what a centerpiece. Not all bets pan out but in this case he became one of the stars of the game and the hobby.

1990 Upper Deck “Find the Reggie”

Where in 1989 the chase cards were base cards, in 1990 Upper Deck released premium autographed inserts that would drive purchasing and forever change the hobby. The following year Score and Donruss followed suit. By the end of the decade we were well into the hit-focused obsession we still find ourselves today.

1991 Stadium Club Nolan Ryan

The early 1990s were a weird time for cards as the trend toward full-bleed premium cards intersected with a trend showing players out of uniform. While Nolan Ryan isn’t featured in an Olan Mills shot like so many of the draft picks, his tuxedo does show him off as the king of the hobby. Stadium Club introduced foil stamping and full-bleed cards to the masses but in many ways the backs are noteworthy for showing some early SABRmetrics.

1992 Topps Gold Cal Ripken Jr.

While it wouldn’t happen for another few years, by 1992 Cal Ripken Jr.’s chase of Lou Gehrig’s record had become a part of the game’s zeitgeist. No card captures this better than Topps’s card of him this year in a set which replaced the gum in the packs with the chance of finding a special gold foil parallel card. Along with autographed inserts and relics, these parallels would also increasingly become the driving force of the hobby.

1993 Pacific David Nied

Pacific had been making tribute sets for a number of years but 1993 was their first foray into making flagship base sets. That they were only allowed to print in Spanish meant that they produced the first Spanish-language flagship release for US distribution—acknowledging both Major League Baseball’s appeal across Latinamerica as well as the extent that Spanish is a native language to many US citizens and residents. 1993 is also the first year of expansion in a decade and a half with David Nied being the first player taken in the expansion draft.

1994 Topps Finest Moises ALou

The mid-season strike and subsequent cancellation of the season and World Series ruins one of the most-promising Expos seasons ever and deals the franchise a blow from which it never recovers. It also deals a shock to the hobby which after a handful of years of phenomenal growth in marketshare and cardmaking technology—the most recent being Chrome technology which Topps introduced in 1993—gets sent into a period of increased competition over a much smaller martketshare.

1995 Collectors Choice Hideo Nomo

Hideo Nomo and his unorthodox but captivating windup does his best to rekindle some interest in baseball as he spawns Nomomania. After him the door to players from Japan and the rest of Asia remains open and the demographics of Major League baseball becomes increasingly international.

1996 Metal Universe Wade Boggs

With interest in the game still reeling from the strike the hobby tries increasingly creative ways to distinguish cards and brands from each other with different paper stocks, surfaces, die cuts, stamping, embossing, or in the case of Fleer Metal Universe, going as over the top as possible into cartoonland.

1997 Topps JAckie Robinson #42

Major League Baseball marks fifty years of the Color Line being broken by honoring Jackie Robinson and retiring his number across all of baseball. Card companies follow suit with special releases and commemoratives. Topps, appropriately, dedicated card number 42 to his honor.

1998 Fleer Tradition Vintage MArk McGwire

Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and their home run chase “saved” baseball and Fleer decided that it was time to start mining the past rather than make cards as futuristic as possible. Three years after Fleer started making these vintage-looking cards, Topps would launch its Heritage line.

1999 Bowman International Ntema Ndungidi

As baseball becomes increasing global cards start featuring players’ worldwide origins. In 1998 Bowman International featured cards in Spanish and Japanese but by 1999 they had cards in Korean and even, in the case of Ntema Ndungidi, Zulu.

2000 Topps ERA LEaders

In 1999 and 2000 baseball fans in each league got to watch two pitchers at the tops of their game. Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez were each having unreal seasons and it’s only fitting that they appeared on a number of League Leaders cards together.

2001 eTopps Barry Bonds

With the new millennium we see the hobby take its first steps into online releases.
eTopps cards are purchased and sold online while Topps holds on to the originals. In many ways the business model is basically the same as flipping on COMC where the assets are held by a third party through multiple sales and only shipped once a buyer requests the shipment. Stocks, not bonds. Though it is a good year to talk about Bonds as well as he becomes an unstoppable offensive force this year.

2002 Bowman Draft Mark Teahen

Michael Lewis’s Moneyball came out in 2003 and turned the 2002 Athletics, and players like Mark Teahen in particular, into a metonym for the SABRmetric revolution in baseball management. It’s easy to look at this era as the steroid era but the analytics era begins here as well.

2003 Topps Brandon Puffer / Jung Bong

Given the way that Topps has assiduously removed references to beer and cigarettes from modern cards, the fact that Bong Puffer not only made it all the way through production but was clearly done on purpose stands out as an exception to the sanitized modern market. Normally any potential controversy is to be avoided and sets are to be as vanilla and unoffensive as possible. A bit of anarchic fun like this is a breath of fresh air.

2004 Topps David Ortiz

Two years after Moneyball is all it took for OPS (though, interestingly, not On-Base Percentage) to make its first appearance on card backs as David Ortiz takes the Red Sox to their first World Series title since 1918.

2005 Topps Update Brad Wilkerson

The Expos relocation to Washington DC and rechristening as the Nationals occurred too late for many card companies to reflect the change in sets issued in the first half of the year. As the season went on though Nationals cards began to circulate and Brad Wilkerson’s highlights his status as the last player to wear an Expos jersey, first player to come to bat as a National, and the first player to get a hit as a National.

2006 Topps Alex Gordon

After almost two decades of a Rookie Card arms race that resulted in both Rookie inflation and increasing numbers of players who never played Major League ball showing up in sets, a new agreement with the Players Association limited who could appear in a flagship set. This wasn’t enough to prevent Topps from releasing a card that broke the new agreement—Alex Gordon had yet to appear in a Major League game and was not on the 25-an roster—and the subsequent scramble to track down and destroy his card resulted in the first trading card to be pulled from circulation in almost 50 years.

2007 Topps Home Run History Barry Bonds #756

Over multiple seasons Topps ran a Home Run history insert set featuring one card for every home run Barry Bonds hit. This is kind of a dire set with multiple cards featuring the same photo and a design where the only change card-to-card is the large bold number. It does however capture the degree that Bonds, his home run chase, and BALCO rumors had taken over both the hobby and baseball discourse in general (he has over 2700 different cards in both 2005 and 2006). When he finally broke Hank Aaron’s record in 2007 Topps was finally able to finish its set.

2008 Topps Moments & Milestones Roger Clemens

With its Bonds set complete, Topps proceeded to release Moments & Milestones to honor the careers of other players. This set continues the all-look-same philosophy but reflects an evolution in what a baseball set could be about. Rather than being a season’s-worth of players, it hearkened back to the 1959 Fleer Ted Williams set and told stories about careers. Upper Deck released its own all-look-same set with Documentary, whose substandard execution failed to live up to its ambition to create a card for each game of the season. In reality though, the dominant point of this season was the Mitchell Report, its allegations, the game’s reckoning with over a decade of steroid use, and Roger Clemens’s countersuit to the resulting tainting of his recent Cy Young Award seasons.

2009 Upper Deck O-Pee-Chee Joe Mauer

After years of releasing Toppsish-looking designs under the Vintage label, Upper Deck finally found itself in hot water in 2009 when its 1975-looking design triggered a lawsuit from Topps. Both companies eventually settled but only after Topps had acquired an exclusive license to be the sole producer of cards using Major League branding. On the field, Joe Mauer won the MVP with one of the best offensive seasons from a catcher.

2010 Upper Deck Roy Halladay

Upper Deck didn’t back down after Topps acquired an exclusive license and proceeded to make a 2010 set which did the bare minimum in trying to obscure team names and logos. Topps had to sue a second time to stop production of new cards and properly launch a new monopoly era. Roy Halladay shines on the field with a perfect game during the season a no hitter in the postseason, and a Cy Young award.

2011 Topps Update Mike Trout

It’s only fitting that in the first year of the new monopoly that Topps managed to mint the new definitive card for the modern generation of collectors. Mike Trout announced himself as the preëminent player of the era, Topps managed to get his rookie card into Update, and over the past decade the desirability of this card has not only grown but become the lighting that every collector and card release is trying to recapture.

2012 Topps Skip Schumaker Rally Squirrel Variant

Not the first of Topps’s somewhat-dubious variant cards but the Rally Squirrel and the resulting hype around it (including a lawsuit over who owned the trademark for Rally Squirrel) is kind of in a category of its own. Topps’s decision to commemorate the squirrel on cardboard makes sense. Their decision to do it via a short-printed variant image that ends up being “valuable” while being a horrible card of Skip Schumaker does not. It does however provide a perfect example of the nature of the modern hobby, how sets are constructed, and how the companies try to create value.

2013 Pinnacle Jose Altuve

After a couple years of Topps being the only real manufacturer of current-year player cards, Panini started to leverage its brand portfolio. When it brought Pinnacle out of retirement it discovered a certain amount of buzz and excitement around its potential as a Topps competitor. No logos or even team names are high hurdles to overcome but Panini has slowly grown ever since with various Donruss and Score inspired sets that satisfy collectors’ itches for something different and occasionally include players who Topps is unable to license. 2013 also marks the beginning of everyday interleague play as the Astros’ move to the American League creates two 15-team leagues.

2014 Topps Madison Bumgarner

2014 brought a new statistic to the backs of cards as SABRmetric influence continues to grow in the game. For the first time there’s a WAR column on the card backs and—for better or for worse—kids now have a single number which they can use to compare players across years and positions. What we don’t need WAR for though is to appreciate the dominance Madison Bumgarner demonstrates in the World Series.

2015 Topps Kris Bryant

Kris Bryant was the top 2015 rookie prospect but unexpectedly started the season in AAA. Nine games into the season—just enough to give the Cubs one more year of contractual control—he made his Major League Debut. Over the following five years his resulting grievance against the Cubs, the continued service-time manipulation by Major League clubs, and increased evidence of collusion against free agents fuels concerns about an upcoming work stoppage once the next collective bargaining agreement expires.

2016 Topps Now #1 Francisco Liriano

Topps went big-time into On-Demand, online releases with Topps Now. This is one of the most interesting and exciting card set concepts with the potential for releasing a card for any game and, through digital production, not requiring the same kind or print runs or lead times that traditionally-released cards require.

2017 Topps Francisco Lindor

While not an explicit choice from Topps, due to Major League Baseball and Cleveland demoting Chief Wahoo from being the primary Indians logo, he disappears from being featured on most of this years released cards. A bit of an end of an era but also something this committee endorses as progress. Now the social media handles that were added to the backs of the cards this year? Not something that feels like it’s going to age well.

2018 Topps Living #1 Aaron Judge

Topps continued to expand its online releases with more creative ideas about what sets can be. In this case, the concept of a Living Set which, rather than being tied to a specific year, reflects the current state of the league is one which captures the imagination of the hobby. The execution, as with Topps Now, doesn’t quite live up to the promise but it’s clear that online releases are not just here to stay but a dominant part of the hobby.

2019 Allen & Ginter Gary Vaynerchuk

A year in which the hobby became dominated by card flipping and speculation—much of it encouraged by Topps itself. Gary Vaynerchuk suddenly become the name of the year as he, and his followers jumped on the card collecting bandwagon and Topps gave him an imprimatur, first with an on-demand set paying homage to his life (complete with wine pairings cards that hearken back to his origins), then an insert set in Flagship, and finally a card of his own in Ginter. While this committee doesn’t doubt Vaynerchuk’s love and rediscovery of cards, the behavior of his followers has fueled what feels like a speculative bubble and worried many collectors about the long-term future of the hobby. This thing where every release is a landrush and every hot prospect gets flipped repeatedly on eBay is not something that can, or should, or will last.

2020 Topps Project 2020 JAckie RObinson by Efdot

It started off as something many in the hobby didn’t understand but after a month of releases Topps Project 2020 had become a sensation with print runs close to 100,000 and a secondary eBay market that was moving faster than cards could be shipped and priced. This was more than a baseball card thing, by collaborating with artists Topps had created a product that brought in all kinds of new collectors and took baseball cards out of its niche.

The on-demand nature of the product also allowed artists to respond to each other and tailor their creations to events going on in the larger world. Efdot’s Jackie Robinson released during the initial storm of Black Lives Matter protests and appropriately called out Jackie’s fight for justice. He stands out as not just the player who broke the color line but also a representative of the Negro Leagues, the decades of discrimination by MLB, and the amount of work that still needs to be done in baseball and in society in general.