Ranking the 80's Part Three: Donruss Base

 

Donruss baseball cards in the 80s were the “other” brand to me.

It didn’t start out like that.

I had a ton of 1981 Donruss cards.

Then they disappeared until around 1987.

Most of the stores around my neighborhood didn’t carry them. The few that did were a bit too far away, or across some dangerous roads; rounds too dangerous for me to get to them.  And I was a kid always on foot. I was never handy with bicycles. I crashed bicycles all of the time. Probably wouldn’t be here now if I continued to ride bicycles.

We have a convenient bicycle program here in New York City.

Sometimes I think about taking a bicycle.

My wife knows my history with bicycles.

Because of that, I remain a middle-aged man on foot.

I guess, if one really tried, like I’m going to do here, you could say my relationship to Donruss cards were a bit like my relationship to bicycles. Fraught and estranged. True, prior to 1987 (more likely 1988), I did see Donruss cards. Phineas had them. The American Coin sold them. But it didn’t make sense to buy Donruss. Any little bit of cash that I had was already going to Topps cards. To a lesser extent Fleer. When I came across Donruss, it didn’t make sense to just buy a pack or two, when they didn’t seem to jell with what I was collecting overall.

Donruss was probably the first brand that I bought primarily in single-card format.

Until 1988…when that shit was everywhere.

That is to say, all these years later, I’m still a little wowed by 1980s Donruss. Designs that have been in circulation for almost forty-years (some not all, but especially 1984-1985 Donruss), still feel new or exotic to me. I’d been wondering if I should even rank Donruss cards because of this fact. But I’m going to because even if something still feels a touch odd to you, you can still have a visceral reaction to it.

Case in point.

I listened to Ryan Adams’ cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989 exactly once.

And I knew enough about it in one listen.

That’s not a dig on Taylor Swift.

That’s a dig on Ryan Adams.

So I’m going to go ahead and rank 1980s Donruss Baseball from my favorite to least favorite. Why not? It’s just an opinion. Everyone has an opinion.

And you know what they say about opinions, right?

Let’s get into this, shall we?

1987 Donruss:

Yeah…I know…me and my 1987 fixation.

I’m doomed to never escape that thirteen-year-old boy.

But 1987 Donruss is truly a grand card. First of all, there’s the black border. A black border on baseball cards! Topps did black border in 1971 and, unless you really want to count 1986, they wouldn’t touch black borders again until 2007. Donruss did black borders twice in the same decade, mofo. And, yes, I know a black border makes it harder to keep the card in mint condition, but black borders are the shit. 

I think it’s worth to take the chance on black borders in some instances.

1987 Donruss is one of those instances.

It’s a classic and classy design from the company. Aside from the border, I always loved those two golden baseball bars bookended by bold yellow. That simple red bar for the players name and position. The Bo Jackson card is one of my favorites in the set. The blue of his Royals uniform really makes everything else about the card stand-out. 

It has that classic Rated-Rookie stamp on it.

If the 1987 Topps Bo Jackson card didn’t exist, this would be my favorite of his rookie cards.

Just a damn fine design for the company.

I might like 1987 Topps and Fleer better, but 1987 Donruss is breathing down their necks.

1984 Donruss:

        I sometimes take this Pete Rose card out just to look at it. Charlie Hustle has a lot of iconic cards, and I think this is Donruss entry into that lore. And they picked one hell of a design to do it with. Most would say 1984 Donruss is their first great design, after being bogged down in mediocrity or a lack of inspiration since their debut in 1981. The 1984 design is given over almost entirely to the photograph. There’s just a thin white border, and a small band of red at the bottom of the card for the player’s name and position.

It’s not 1987.

But it doesn’t have to be.

It’s 1984 Donruss.

The first year of the Rated Rookie, if I’m correct.

Honestly, if I were exposed more to 1984 Donruss as a kid, this design would be my favorite. But sentimentality and connection play a park in my rankings. And I don’t think I opened a single pack of 1984 Donruss back then. Never held the Don Mattingly rookie in my hands. Phineas had 1984 Donruss. I don’t know where he got them from, but he never disclosed the location to me. Very Phineas. The only 1984 Donruss that I had was a Pirates team set that I got at the American Coin.

I have very few 1984 Donruss now.

I’d like more.

1989 Donruss:

No one asked for my opinion, but if you’re reading this you must at least care about it a little bit; but if we’re picking our favorite Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card then 1989 Donruss is mine. You can keep the Score update and Topps traded. And the 1989 Bowman too. 1989 Upper Deck is iconic. But so what? The 1989 Donruss Ken Griffey Jr. is gorgeous. As a fifteen-year-old kid I didn’t know I needed all of that blue, black and purple bleeding into my life, until I got that Griffey card.. In fact, 1989 Donruss in general are just gorgeous cards.

Don’t believe me?

How about this?

I’ll forever think that orange, green, yellow, and black are workable colors together.

Or else Eddie Murray just has me thinking back to Halloween.

Eddie Murray doesn’t make a bad baseball card.

Find a bad Eddie Murray baseball card, and I’ll still tell you why its cool.

Regardless, 1989 Donruss could’ve been a mess. Cards with multiple colors can sometimes be a mess. Especially colors that continuously fade into each other. Had we even seen a design similar to what Donruss was doing in 1989?  1989 Donruss was on the forefront of something. The colors bleed perfectly into one another. The photography is great. I have so many favorites from this set.

1989 Donruss make 1990 Donruss all the more tragic.

Want an interesting fact about me and 1989 Donruss.

Back in 1989, I got the Griffey card in the very first pack of Donruss that I opened. I was on an escalator in the Monroeville Mall. I’d bought my packs at the G.C. Murphy’s on the first floor. Even though 1988 Donruss were a ubiquitous presence in my life, in 1989 the excitement of seeing Donruss in the wild was still embedded in my collecting psyche. But…it was stupid of me to open a pack while I was out, with nothing on me to keep a star card safe. But, in my defense, I wasn’t expecting to get The Kid in my very first pack.

At fifteen I was more than familiar with my luck.

Flash forward thirty years. It’s the fall of 2019 and I bought myself a wax box of 1989 Donruss online. I’m new back into The Hobby. I have this grand design to hand collate every single base set from every single brand of my youth. Screw writing novels. Screw writing poetry. Collecting my youth was going to become my life’s work. 1989 Donruss would soon be mine!

So, I open up the first pack in the box. 

Guess who was in that pack?

1985 Donruss:

Donruss’ first foray into a black border is a pretty solid card. And while it’s not 1984, at least the company didn’t backslide after making such progress. Again, Donruss lets the photography speak for itself. The black border isn’t as thick as 1987. There’s not a bar of gold on each side. There are these unnecessary red stripes on the bottom of each side of the border, that take away more than add to the card design. But I feel like the 1980s had a lot of unnecessary splashes of color. Also, Donruss seems to really love using a simple red bar to give you player/position information.

1985 would be the last year Donruss would use its original logo.

Like 1984, I don’t recall opening any packs of 1985 Donruss. I can’t find an honest to goodness connection 1985 Donruss. At best I had another Pirates team set, but I don’t really even recall that. 1985 Donruss is the Donruss I was talking about in the beginning as still being strange and/or exotic to me. Just really the one design that completely passed me by as a collector in my youth. When I see it, or when I buy a card from my PC, I’m always like, oh, yeah, 1985 Donruss! 

Al Oliver is one of those players I PC.

Scoop should be in the Hall of Fame.

And Eddie Murray was still the shit in 1985.

*This is going to get tougher now*

1988 Donruss:

Matt Sammon, on his Wax Ecstatic Podcast (which I still miss the shit out of) called 1988 Donruss the red-headed stepchild of Junk Wax…and that’s saying a lot because of how ubiquitous Junk Wax Era cards were…and still are. But that statement is not incorrect. If I had a hard time finding Donruss prior to 1988; I found 1988 Donruss everywhere I went.

I think my church even had them.

I kid.

I think.

But 1988 Donruss really seemed to be anywhere and everywhere. And, I guess, if you can point to one design and immediately think “junk wax,” it might as well be 1988 Donruss. But, for guys like me, back then it was exciting to come across 1988 Donruss. And because I’d had such a hard time finding Donruss before, I made sure I bought a ton of of them. 

And the design? It’s not…bad? I actually kind of like it. I like the cool-feeling blue borders, although I’m not too certain about the Kerouacian flannel prints. Simplicity never seems to be enough for the Donruss company. They seem to have a habit of taking a simple border and adding a splash of something, a line here, a patch of color there, that just makes you shake your head, and wonder why.

Check 1991 Donruss for reference.

I think the availability of 1988 Donruss lowers its esteem a little bit. I’ve said it a few times in these rankings, but for everything Topps, Fleer and Donruss did right in 1987, they did the exact opposite in 1988. Do I think 1988 Donruss is better than 1988 Topps or Fleer? No. But it’s just as uninspired.

And the pictures are kind of fuzzy.

1986 Donruss:

I was debating flip-flopping 1986 and 1988 Donruss. The only reason 1988 stands above 1986 for me is the fact that 1986 Donruss, like 1985 and 1984 before it, was very hard for me to get. Again, I do not recall opening a single pack of 1986 Donruss. But like any hot-blooded twelve-year-old, I wanted 1986 Donruss. I wanted 1986 Donruss cards so badly. 

And I think you all know why. 

Let’s just say the only way I saw the Canseco rookie card was either on the cover of a baseball card magazine, or under a glass showcase at a card show, being sold for an astronomical amount.

Canseco’s shared Fleer rookie, with fucking Eric Plunk, was just never gonna cut it.

And what’s to say about the 1986 design itself? Like 1985 Topps, I feel that 1986 Donruss is very of its time and place. It’s very 80s. Check out those jazzy tilted photos. I feel so MTV looking at 1986 Donruss. Donruss also decided, screw it, instead of adding splashes of pattern to the border, let’s just muck the whole thing up with lines. The card border looks like an old snowy TV set. I want to grab my antennae when I see 1986 Donruss.

I’m really showing my age here, aren’t I?

I actually have a few stacks of 1986 Donruss. Found them very cheap at an antique store earlier this year. I thought maybe it would be a fun set to casually try to put together, and give myself an actual reason to buy the Canseco rookie for reasons other than trying to fill the void left by an unquelled desire. Also, I seem to be leaning back toward my original collecting goal of putting together all of the sets of my youth. 

Because I have this bottomless Jay Gatsby fixation on repeating my past.

But considering what I said above.

Is 1986 Donruss really OF my past?

        Also....Andre Dawson doesn't make a bad card either.

1982 and 1983 Donruss:

I’m lumping these two designs together. They’re essentially the same design. Take away the angled borders and round them out, turn the Donruss logo from a rectangle to a square, make the ball into a bat, reverse said bat and, Walla, 1982 Donruss morphs right into 1983 Donruss. 

And truth be told, I probably like these designs better than 1986 and 1988. The Johnny Ray rookie here is my favorite of his rookie card. Granted, his Topps card is shared with two other players, including Vance Law, who seemed to show up in every single pack of cards that I bought from 1982-1989. And Ray’s other rookie card is, well, 1982 Fleer. But I think Donruss had something going with their photography in 1982 and 1983. The photos seem crisper than Topps. Brighter than Fleer. In essence, 1982 and 1983 Donruss showed that the fledgling company could do good things if they wanted to.

But I can’t get over the laziness.

I get up to write every weekday morning at 4:45.

You lose points on this blog for laziness.

You were being lazy Donruss.

        And add The Cobra to the list of guys who make baseball cards look cool.

1981 Donruss:

I feel like I’m supposed to put 1981 Donruss last. With the haphazard and quickly collected photos and the error cards, the duplicate cards of players (case in point, these Willie Stargell cards. For years I only knew of the tired, trucker-hat Stargell card. I didn’t know there was a Willie in his Pittsburgh-gold uniform playing first base version of a card),1981 Donruss needs to be last. Hey, you wanted to put out a product with little time to do it, and I, as the demanding consumer, get to judge. 

That’s how capitalism works, right? 

But, point of fact, I don’t mind 1981 Donruss all that much. Yeah, it’s the template for the next two years of basically the same design. But I still think they’re kind of sharp.

Or maybe 1981 Donruss plays on my emotions. I’ve talked a lot about having trouble finding Donruss cards in the early to mid-80s. But I had a TON of 1981 Donruss. I’ve mentioned it here before, but in May of 1981 my family moved from Pittsburgh to Wellsburg, West Virginia. Wellsburg is maybe an hour away from Pittsburgh, but to seven-year-old me, it might as well have been across the country. I was pulled out of school weeks before the year ended. I left the only home I knew. The only friends I knew.

I was sad.

To make up for the sadness, my grandma bought me a ton of packs of cards to open on the drive to my new home, my new life.

Something to make me happy.

Something to make me smile.

She bought me 1981 Donruss cards.

And, yeah, the design sucks. The backs suck. There are errors. The cards were rushed.

But 1981 Donruss will always have a special place in my heart.

Thanks for reading! Happy collecting!

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