Set Appreciation Post #12 - 1988 Donruss

It has been a week.  I am doing a whole lot of nothing this weekend and it feels great.  Writing a blog post about the 1988 Donruss set seemed like a really huge time waster, so here I am.  Maybe I just hang out with the wrong people and follow the wrong accounts on social media, but the 1988 Donruss set seems wildly unpopular.  Is it just me, or does it often get lumped in with sets like 1991 Fleer?  

I am going to hold my opinion to the end of the post, but I will probably give away it's ranking somewhere around the top of the post.  

Special guest appearance by Aaron Boone via screen shots.  I learned this week that I attended his Major League debut.  He was ejected after being tagged out at home on a throw from right-fielder Brian Jordan.  

 

Actual screen shot of Aaron Boone after getting run from the game.  Deion Sanders homered off of Matt Morris.  The Reds won.  The Cardinals fans booed Deion Sanders and none of them could tell you why they booed him. 

Let's go.  

BASE CARD

 

Many of the cards in the post were actually opened by the 10 and 11 year old me.  Pack fresh.  You're going to find this hard to believe, but I have never gone back and worked on improving my 1988 Donruss set.  The first base card in the set is Mackey Sasser.  Actually, the first two dozen cards in Donruss sets were always the Diamond Kings cards.  I will get to those in a few minutes.  

The Rated Rookie cards were always great.  That little logo in the corner of the card is always a bonus in my book.  One of the great things that came out of 1980s baseball cards. 

Shall we talk about the border design? 

 

I never quite understood what was going on with the blue, red, and black lines.  I have looked at these cards from time to time over the last 33 years and I have no idea how this design was picked for a large baseball card set.  If this was the best design option at the time, what did it beat out?  

The back of the card. 

 There were always pros and cons to the card backs in the Donruss set.  The con was when you got a card of some player who had been around forever, but they only put five years worth of stats on the back of the card.  I like the highlight section better than Topps and I also like that they put down how the player was acquired.  You could find some really bad trades on the back of these cards. 

Diamond Kings 

I wanted to pick a Cardinals card for this spot, but the 1988 Donruss set had Jack Clark with a pink background.  I like the pink background, but 1988 was not a great year to be a Cardinals fan and see Jack Clark in a pack of cards. 

Why?  

I am going to slip in a screen shot of Mike Bush from NewsChannel 5. I think Mike is a news anchor now, or somebody serious.  Hopefully Zip Rzeppa is still doing sports in St. Louis. 

It also started the Bob Horner era in St. Louis.  

I decided to pick this Mark McGwire card instead.  Big Mac was coming off setting the Major League rookie home run record.  If you didn't know the year of the card, you can tell it's early in his career, because he looks to be a normal size in the picture.  I like the colored bars in the background too, very 1980s.  

Aaron Boone screen shot. 

There are probably better Diamond Kings cards in this set, but I am sticking with McGwire.  Solid design and he actually had a really good 1987.  

Cool Card of 1988 

I never got the whole idea of spending a ton of money on players with very little Major League experience.  Yes, it's been really bad the past two decades with Bowman, but it's not like that was the start of the trend.  Bowman just made it worse.  The 1988 Donruss set had one of those "hot" rookie cards way back in 1988.  

The 1988 Donruss Gregg Jefferies card was a really big deal back in the late 1980s.  People were pretty sure that he was going to be the next great hitter in the Majors, win a few batting titles, and be in the Hall of Very Good or the Hall of Fame.  

A lot of people spent a lot of money on this card. 

 

Other people just pulled the card from a $0.35 pack of cards from Ben Franklin.  

While we are here.  It really bothers me when people label Gregg Jefferies as a "flop" or a "bust".  He was a really good player who just happened not to live up to very lofty expectations.  I saw him play for the Cardinals for two years in the 1990s, excellent player.  Great hitter. 

Best Non-Cardinal Card 

I am a sucker for flip-down sunglasses.  

Why don't players wear these types of sunglasses anymore?  

I don't wear glasses.

I don't wear sunglasses.  

If I did wear glasses, they would be flip downs.  

Thank you, Aaron Boone.  Yes, Eric Davis is also a really good hitter.  

Best Cardinals Card 

 

Wrigley makes a good backdrop for baseball cards.  The Ozzie Smith card is a Spring Training picture.  The Vince Coleman card was also taken in Wrigley, but he is bunting.  Easy choice here. 

 Thanks, Aaron. 

Best Durham Bulls Card 

Let's wrap up this post.  I thought about going Brad Komminsk on the Brewers, but I am going to fly under the radar a bit here and go with Milt Thompson.  Really, there were not that many great choices.  The Bulls produced a lot of Braves players during the 1980s, but none of them have great cards in this set. 

 

Milt Thompson, if you did not watch baseball in the 1980s or 1990s.  Good player for the Braves, Phillies, Cardinals, and back to the Phillies for a second time.  I think there might have been a few years with the Astros at the very end of his career.  Good hitter, good defender.  I like the portrait style photo, just wish the photographer had backed up a little bit.  Milt had a really unique batting stance, but I cannot find a good picture of it.  His bat is actually too high in this photo.  Normally it was behind his back shoulder, he stood deep in the box, but stuck his front leg out straight in front of him. 

 Yes.  

How Does It Compare?  

You're probably thinking that this set is going to end up being in the last spot, but that's not going to happen.  I have no problem putting the 1988 Donruss set ahead of the bottom 3 sets.  It's not better than the 2017 Topps Heritage Minors set, so I am really trying to decide whether to put it above or below the Emotion XL set.  

The major flaw with 1988 is its design.  If Aaron Boone had been a design manager at Donruss during the late 1980s, this might be a conversation he had with his team.

Aaron Boone was in high school in 1988. 

Emotion XL has a good design, but some of it's cards are really dumb.  Let's remember that Dante Bichette's "emotion" was "The Heat".  Still think that the Emotion cards are better overall set than Donruss, especially when the quality of the cards is taken into consideration. 

I am going to go ahead and put the 1988 Donruss set in 9th place in my Set Appreciation rankings. 

11. 2000 Pacific Paramount Update 

10. 2010 Topps USA Baseball  

9. 2000 UD Ionix  

9. 1988 Donruss 

8. 1995 Emotion XL 

7. 2017 Topps Heritage Minor League

6. 1998 Topps TEK 

5. 1986 Topps Mini League Leaders 

4. 2001 Fleer EX 

3. 1979 Kellogg's 

2. 2002 Topps Super Teams

1. 1983 Topps 

Sorry, I am out of Aaron Boone screenshots. 

I Love The 90s Cardinals #1 - Milt Thompson

Why I am making this post?  

I have always tried to do themed posts on Mondays.  I think it started out two or three years ago when I did posts about a recently purchased/traded for card, but I quit doing those since I make those types of posts all of the time.  I still do, they just aren't forced into a theme.  Plus, I borrowed the idea from a group of local Raleigh-Durham collectors on Facebook who would make a similar post on Mondays.  I scratched that idea at some point a year and a half ago and went to the Venerable Old Card posts about cards pre-2000s.  These were fun posts, but the vast majority of them ended up being about Cardinals players from the 1980s and 1990s whom I grew up watching. 

My two main collecting interest at this point in my life are Durham Bulls and Cardinals cards.  I have been making some themed Durham Bulls posts for awhile now, I figured it would be fun to make a series of posts about some Cardinals cards.  More specifically I am going to go with the Cardinals players from the 1990s.  I know it was a really rough decade for the team, but those years in my life were the end of middle school through my college graduation.  I cannot even tell you how many Cardinals game I went to during that time, but it was a large number.  Excited to share out a few cards of the players I grew up watching, at least until I run out of players.  

For the first post I am going to kind of combine the whole Durham Bulls thing with the 1990s Cardinals.  There aren't too many players who have appeared for both teams, but this guy is one of them.  
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Milt Thompson was sort of the prototypical 1990s Cardinals player.  He had spent a few years with the Braves and Phillies before the Cardinals traded Steve Lake for him.  I'm not sure the Cardinals had intended to use him as starter since they also had Willie McGee, Vince Coleman, and Tom Brunansky.  However, Willie McGee ended up only playing 58 games in 1989 which meant that Milt Thompson ended up with almost 600 plate appearances.

The 1990 Cardinals were just terrible, not Milt's fault at all, but he ended up getting a little more than 450 plate appearances that summer.  The team had gone cheap around this time when Gussie Busch died and his son August IV took over.  So, they traded away Tom Brunansky in April and Willie McGee towards the end of the summer.

Willie McGee gave us Cardinals fans a batting title that year, which was something.  Except McGee was playing in Oakland when we won it.  Still kind of an odd little moment in baseball history.  Eddie Murray was leading the NL in batting when McGee got traded and then went cold at the end of the season.

I am pretty sure that Milt would have made the 600 number on plate appearances if he had not found the bench for chunks of time during August and September.  Remember cheap.  The Cardinals had three young outfielders, all making the Major League minimum, start games at the end of the season.  Cheap yes, but the trio of Ray Lankford, Bernard Gilkey, and Felix Jose were at least talented.

I always post Ray Lankford cards, so you get Bernard.  Plus Bernard was an all around talent since he was in Men In Black for all of 30 seconds getting hit in the head with a baseball.

Back to Milt.  He actually became a bat off the bench his last two years with the Cardinals.  Pretty sure that was supposed to be his original role on the team when they traded for him.  Maybe not, I was in seventh grade when this happened. What do I know?  He was basically between 200 and 300 plate appearances during those years.

Milt left after 1992 just in time to rejoin the Phillies in 1993.  Again, bat off the bench, but he helped that team a lot.  Like this.....

He also batted .294 in the World Series that year against the Blue Jays.  He hit a home run in Game 3 off of Duane Ward and ended the Series with 6 RBIs.  Not his fault that Joe Carter walked off Mitch Williams.  

A Milt Thompson card, or two, for my post.  I am going to go with my most recent card of him first.  You might be thinking, "Who knows their most recent Milt Thompson card?" Well, at some point back in April I made some posts about finishing off my 1990 Upper Deck set.  I was successful, at finishing the set, but opening 1990s wax (foil since it was Upper Deck) means lots of doubles.  In my doubles pile....

Typical Upper Deck from the time.  Nice picture on the front of the card, kind of looks like it was taken in Wrigley Field prior to a game.  The red pullovers were the Cardinals batting practice jerseys during the 1980s and 1990s.  The background looks like it's the ivy wall with the brick top.  Can't see the basket, but the back of the card confirms what the front of the card hints at in terms of location....

with the brick wall behind him in the picture.  

Surprisingly, Milt actually had some nice cards with the Cardinals.  At least I think so, especially a pair of his 1991 Topps issued cards.  His base Topps card, great photography that year, has a cool action shot of him ducking on inside pitch during a Spring Training game.....

Crooked scan, apologies.  His Stadium Club card from that same year also had an action shot of him.  On this card he's running in to catch a fly ball in Wrigley.  The ivy always makes for a nice background on baseball cards.  I approve of card photos there.  

Overall, Milt was a much better player for the Cardinals than I remembered.  He also played for the team during a real point in the franchise's history.  His final Cardinals line, in a little more than 500 games, was .274/.334/.387 with 20 home runs, 21 triples, and 67 doubles.  Milt also stole 86 bases and ended three of his four seasons with an OPS+ over 100 (average player is 100) with marks of 107 in 1989, 127 in 1991, and 116 in 1992.  His 1990 was a little rough with an OPS+ of 71, or a little bit lower than Jason Heyward. 

A random 1990 song from my Ipod.