BY JOEY SHIVER
JUNK WAX ERA
In 1989, I was still a little new to the baseball card hobby. I had picked up a few cards here and there through middle school but I would say that my interest was reaching a peak that year as a 12 year-old. I was playing baseball every day, watching it on TV, and beginning to get a grasp on stats, divisional breakdowns, and strategy. Before that, cards were cool. But by 1989, I had reached a point where “I got it.”
During the mid-‘80s when I was piecing together a small collection of players that I had seen play on TBS or WGN, I didn’t really pay much attention to design. It was more about the player and team than what the card looked like. By 1988, Score made designs a little flashier. And then, in 1989, Upper Deck made cards look classy. So it is fair to say that my heavy interest in collecting coincided withthe design battles that marked the “Junk Wax Era.”
Before 1988, we had three choices of cards; Topps, Donruss, and Fleer. And while the designs were unique to each brand, only the wood-grain of 1987 Topps stood out to me at the time. For one, I just wasn’t collecting enough to compare brands. But also, every friend and family member who had cards at their house had a ton of those ’87 gems and that had become all I recognized for a while.