For many, nostalgia remains the driving force behind baseball card collecting, and that’s how we arrived at the idea of One-Sheet Collections.
It’s a simple concept with infi nite possibilities.
Take a single nine-pocket sheet and a reasonable $50 budget, and build a nine-card collection with a unifying theme.
This time around, we focus on the famed “Rated Rookie” subset and its humble beginnings.
Recent NBA and NFL products have brought the Rated Rookie logo back into the spotlight, but its origins can be traced back to Junk Wax Era baseball.
The concept was fi rst introduced in the 1983 Donruss set,. In 1984, with Bill Madden of the New York Daily News selecting the 20 promising rookies for the upcoming season, the ribbon of text above the rookie’s name was introduced. The following year, the now legendary blue logo was used for the fi rst time, and that’s where we’ll begin this week’s collection.
From the 1985 release through the 1993 release, the blue Rated Rookie logo was a prominent part of each Donruss set. In honor of that, we’ve selected one Rated Rookie from each of those nine sets to show the progression of the subset leading up to the team’s pivot to premium in 1994.
Enjoy!
Pocket 1: 1985