If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen last weekend that I picked up a couple of 1989 Donruss cell packs and would post the results here. Your long wait has finally ended!
I felt that $3.25 for a 10% chance at a pack-fresh Ken Griffey Jr. rookie was well worth it. I still believe it was, but I can say that many of the cards in the two packs came out with bad corners and edges.
I wonder how many people sent in for the "Large Size Diamond Kings."
The top card in the pack came out with a white chip on the right side and a bad upper left corner. Thankfully, it's just Sid Fernandez.
The backs in 1989 are the typical, boring, "Recent Major League Performance backs." I don't believe it was possible for Donruss to put less effort into the card backs. The one thing I recall liking as a kid was the "How Acquired" blurb on the cards. I will give some credit for that.
Well, it's not Junior Griffey, but it is a rookie card of a Hall-of-Famer. Unfortunately, this card is worth about a quarter. Thanks for the overproduction, Donruss!
I had close to ten sets of the Hall-of-Famer puzzles from 1988-1991. What I never did was pop out the pieces and put the puzzles together. I mean, those were going to be worth some serious money down the road!
I always loved Diamond Kings. As a kid still relatively new to baseball and card collecting, I didn't know a ton about the past. Baseball didn't exist before 1986. The years that a player was a "Diamond King" inside the crown was a nice, under-appreciated touch.
The dreaded Diamond Kings checklist! The only good thing about this card was that it was #27, meaning that the Rated Rookies started right at the beginning of page four in your binder.
Welp, no Griffey rookie. On the bright side there's one more pack and I know that y'all want to see it as well. BONUS PACK!
Just look at those 1984-86 stats compared to the next two years. How does that happen for a pitcher that's already 30 years old?
All I could think seeing this card was that he looks like one of the "other" Indians in Major League. It must be the satin jacket.
Calling BWTP!
No Griffey, but it was worth a shot.
You can follow APTBNL on twitter at @namedlater and me at @beansbcardblog. Please take a look at and follow my personal blog, I Feel Like a Collector Again. Happy collecting!
No Griffey, but the Randy Johnson, Puckett, Brett and Bo are still pretty nice. (Even if they aren't worth much due to overproduction.)
ReplyDeleteI was given a whole bunch of these a while back, making it the most populous set in my baseball collection, including some of the same cards you got. Nice to see the packs for them.
ReplyDeleteI don't know how many people sent in for the large size DK's, but I sure want one of those sets.
ReplyDeleteNot a bad design by Donruss standards, but it would look so much better if they'd bothered to match the top and bottom border colors to the team colors. Where the colors do correspond, like on the Dave Stewart card, the results are pretty nice.
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