Even now, 35 years later, opening a pack of 1987 Topps feels like home.
The wood-grain borders welcome you with open arms, like the memory of wedging yourself into the corner of the comfortable but kinda-scratchy couch in your grandparents’ wood-paneled basement. The smell of the gum and the powdery residue on your fingers remind you of a time when all that mattered was the instant sugar rush from something you’d spit into a trash can two minutes later. Four minutes if you were feeling stubborn.
The players’ names were on the front in a bold, happy, whimsical font as if the cards loved to be read as much as we loved reading them, with backdrops perfectly color-coordinated to that team’s colors; the Brewers’ yellow was different from the Pirates’ yellow, as if the baseball gods themselves had chosen Topps’ color palattes. The rush of seeing the color-spectrum Future Stars logo splashed across the front of Bo Jackson’s rookie card in a pack was — still is, to be honest — better than walking into whatever room had the tree on Christmas morning.
Yes, 1987 Topps just might be the most nostalgic baseball card set of all time.
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Opening a pack is plopping down in front of the fireplace, hot cocoa in hand, with your feet as close to the flickering flames as possible after a sledding adventure with friends from school, or parking yourself next to the window air conditioning unit after a few hours of backyard baseball on a hot summer day, holding a glass of lemonade that’s as much ice as anything. It’s home. It’s safe.
It’s happy.
The 1987 Topps set is iconic, for its design and eternal adoration from collectors, sure, but also because of what it represents. The 1987 set is a primary line of demarcation in hobby history, the transition from B.C. to A.D., the boundary between what card collecting was and what it would become. From the time Topps set a concrete block on the “print” button on the presses and just walked away, nothing about collecting would ever be quite the same.
“There were a lot of new people, a lot of kids coming into the industry, a lot of card shops were opening up. Our magazine was just doing great,” said James Beckett, who founded the Beckett Price Guide magazines that revolutionized the industry. “We were really trying to help collectors understand what, in those days, didn’t have to be a complicated hobby. There weren’t parallels and inserts and obscure kinds of things to look up, or ultra-valuable things. With ’87 Topps, when you open up those packs you’re mainly just looking for a really good player. Maybe some rookies, too, but it was still pretty superstar-oriented in those days.”
And now, with the release of Series 1 of Topps’ 2022 flagship set on Feb. 16, the 1987 design will be back in the spotlight again as the primary insert. For the past several years, Topps has been honoring previous releases, on a 35th anniversary basis. Last year, the 1986 Topps design was included, before that 1985 in 2020 and before that 1984 in 2019 and so on.
“To be able to include ’87 in our flagship product this year is definitely a treat for the Topps team and for collectors,” said Emily Kless, the communications manager for Topps. “It’ll get the full flagship treatment. I think what we’re all really excited about is the autos that will be on the cards. There are some heavy hitters who will appear on the ’87 design.”
One of the goals for this story was to trace the origins of the iconic 1987 design. That’s proven tougher than you would think.
“We don’t have any knowledge of how they came up with it,” said Rich Klein, a longtime collector who had his first card-show table in 1979 and owned a card store when the 1987 sets were released. “But it touched a nerve in those days, and it’s such a nice design that collectors just stayed with it for 35 years now.”
Klein would know. Few people have a better grasp of the industry than he does; he worked for Beckett for 19 years starting in 1990, in what many collectors would consider a dream job — he was in the technical services division, and his job was to collect the information that determined the prices published each month. Yep, he helped control the arrows.
I asked Topps for background info on the 1987 design process, but Kless said there aren’t any people with the company now who were there in 1987, and the brand team didn’t have information available. Kless did confirm one nugget we were hoping to get, the font name for player names on front. It’s Dom Casual STD Bold.
Here’s one other thing we know: The wood-grain border look of the 1987 set was modeled after the 1962 offering. “It was essentially an homage to that set, on the 25-year anniversary of that set,” said Susan Lulgjuraj, who is well-known in the hobby as “Sooz;” she has worked for Topps and Beckett and now is head of editorial for Goldin Auctions. “They gave it this updated look. Of course, it’s updated for the 1980s, which for us now doesn’t feel so updated.”
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The other homage set is the 1983 Topps design, modeled after the 1963 set.
“They really don’t do it that often; that is what is so interesting,” Klein said. “All through the ’90s, they don’t go back and do sets from the ’70s because otherwise they would have done the ’75 set at some point. Now they use the designs in the archives, but they haven’t gone back to the well for the base sets in a long time, which is fascinating.”
What’s also fascinating is the seemingly eternal fascination with the 1987 set.
As it was for so many collectors, the 1987 Topps set was my original entry into the hobby. I’ve written about my love for the set — easily my No. 1 of all time — often, both on my Twitter feed and at SportingNews.com. So many of my childhood memories revolved around opening packs or going to card shops and shows. I had stepped away from the hobby for a long time, but bought a few boxes of 1987 Topps in 2014. Then, a few months before the pandemic hit, I jumped back into the old-school cards — I will live my whole life and refuse to call 1987 Topps “vintage" — with both feet. I am not alone.
Starting in February 2020, I’ve opened packs from the junk wax era and posted them on Twitter pretty much every day (first @ryanfagan, then I started a new account just for the cards for 2022, @myjunkwax). The response is always good, but the love for 1987 Topps is unmistakable. More comments, more engagement, more impressions. Every single time.
And more than any other packs I post, the comments are about the actual set, and not the players on the cards: “It’s what we traded in the halls of middle school.” And “If this wasn’t your first set you weren’t a true collector.” And “87 Topps was my first ever hobby box.” And “Can’t you just still smell the gum?”
Ah, the smell. If you know, you know.
But if you didn’t collect Topps cards in 1987, you might ask, “Um … what’s the big deal?”
Why does this set have such a hold on so many collectors? The design is great, but it’s not mind-blowing. There are so many of them out there that they’re not worth a ton. We’ll get back to that point, but let’s start here: The checklist, a behemoth at 792 cards, is amazing.
We already talked about the Future Stars Bo Jackson rookie, and the gold cup Topps All-Star Rookies — back for the first time since 1978 — shine like a beacon of light as you thumb through a pack: Jose Canseco! Wally Joyner! Danny Tartabull! Cory Snyder! Todd Worrell! The All-Stars, the Record Breakers and the manager cards — a who’s who list, with legends like Whitey Herzog, Jim Leyland, Sparky Anderson, Pete Rose and Tony La Russa — all commanded respect, even if you had no idea who George Bamberger was.
The Turn Back the Clock cards were the first cards some of us ever owned of legends such as Roberto Clemente, Carl Yastrzemski and Maury Wills. And the team leader cards? Most showed the types of interactions you didn’t get with “regular” cards — such as Von Hayes, Juan Samuel and Glenn Wilson chatting at the batting cage — and the stats on back were trivia gold.
The subsets were essential, every single one.
And the rookies! Oh, the rookies. The crop of youngsters who didn’t make Future Stars or Rookie Cup status was mind-boggling: Mark McGwire, Will Clark, Barry Bonds and Barry Larkin, to name a few. And every pack had Hall of Famers, plural: George Brett, Reggie Jackson, Mike Schmidt, Rickey Henderson, Dave Winfield, Kirby Puckett and Wade Boggs; according to the TCDB.com list, there are 63 cards featuring Hall of Famers. And that doesn’t even count the superstars of the day who didn’t wind up in Cooperstown: Don Mattingly, Dale Murphy, Fernando Valenzuela, Keith Hernandez.
(Hold on, hopping on eBay to buy another box real quick.)
For real, though, it’s not just about the checklist or the design. It’s about that moment in collecting.
“You look back at the 1987 time frame and nine out of 10 kids were buying 1987 Topps baseball,” Beckett said. “You could have gotten ’86 football or ’86-’87 Fleer basketball, or hockey, I guess, but for most kids it was mainly a baseball-oriented hobby.”
The truth is, 1987 was probably the last “simple” year of collecting. Score joined the party in 1988, then Upper Deck and Bowman in 1989 and then Leaf in 1990. Starting in 1991, the hobby really got complicated, with Stadium Club, Fleer Ultra, Studio and even O-Pee-Chee.
In 1987, you basically had the same three as you’d had since 1981: Topps, Fleer and Donruss. Sporflics had entered the arena in 1986, but they were, well, strange and far from the mainstream. Topps was everywhere: card shops and card shows, of course, but grocery stores, gas stations, dollar stores.
Pretty much any place that had candy for sale also had 1987 Topps baseball cards available for 40 cents a pack. If you were a kid — I was 11 most of that year — you almost never found Fleer or Donruss in the wild, and if you did they were more expensive.
Every kid who loved baseball loved the same set of cards.
“One of the common themes is what I call ‘shared experiences.’ We all traded our cards with our friends, and it was all affordable,” Klein said. “We listened to the same music. We watched the same TV shows. Now, you can watch so many different streaming services. So your reality now is totally different than my reality. In 1987, when it came to cards, all our realities were the same reality.”
And that reality was a set of baseball cards with wood-grain borders.
pack of the day: 1987 Topps
tell me your favorite story about one of these players or these cards #RFpod pic.twitter.com/ny0f65TGfn
— Ryan Fagan (@ryanfagan) December 17, 2021
So when the pandemic set in during the spring of 2020 and realities were once again the same — stay home — it was only natural for the 1987 Topps bug to bite again, as former collectors cleaned out basements and attics and found their old baseball cards.
There’s another reason offered by Beckett, one I hadn’t thought of before our conversation: “If somebody was collecting in the 1950s and their mom threw out their cards, they’d be pretty ticked off, thinking their mom should go to jail,” he said with a laugh.
“I have people my age saying, ‘Yeah, I had those ’52 Topps Mantles! I had several.’ And some of that can be apocryphal, but if even one person’s right about that, that’s almost criminal.”
But let’s say you’re a 40-something locked at home at the beginning of the pandemic and you realize your mom threw away all your 1987 Topps cards a few decades ago.
“You’d think, ‘I’m really ticked off, my cards got thrown away,’” Beckett said. “But then you’d go to a card show or card shop and you’d say, ‘Oh, wait a minute. What was thrown away was not a felony, it was a misdemeanor’ because those cards, if they were handled like kids did, weren’t really worth that much. You can get them back for maybe $100, get everything I had from back in the day and jump back in like I never missed a beat. There’s less angst because of that.”
The truth is, those 1987 Topps cards you had as a kid? They were not grading out at a 10. I can speak from experience. My parents didn’t throw away my cards — at least, not most of them, though some did wind up in a garage sale once — but the cards I had in my binders all had dinged corners or surface issues from my grubby hands touching them.
The idea of taking a card from a pack to a toploader with a penny sleeve just wasn’t a thing. Best-case scenario was putting the card in a binder page later that day, and good luck putting them in there without dinging one of the two bottom corners — because they didn’t stay in those pages. They went in and out whenever you wanted a closer look.
And the quality control wasn’t always the best, either.
“You see that a lot with 1980s cards, just because of the way they were manufactured, the way they were cut, so many things led to jagged edges or rough corners,” Lulgjuraj said. “Even the printing, how you could get white dots. If you’re opening a pack of cards now, half of it could be bricked with gum stains. There’s more opportunities for cards to be damaged, as opposed to the cards of today. You can look at the population reports on PSA or BGS, and for essentially all the cards from the 1980s, the 10s are few and far between.”
That really is kind of amazing, considering how many were made. Not that anyone knows — or is telling — an exact number.
“I know that historically we’ve never really released print runs or production numbers of our flagship set,” Kless said. “We do that for our on-demand stuff, a lot of our Topps.com or e-commerce on-demand products, but I don’t know if we traditionally do that for Series I. I can’t imagine that number would really exist anywhere, unless it’s one of the blogs that has done a lot of mathematical work. I wouldn’t put it past them because they’re dedicated.”
Finding unopened packs is not a challenge, even after 35 years.
“I think the number of sheer cards they produced in 1987 would floor you,” Klein said. “I think it would floor you with the hundreds of millions, maybe 200 or 300 million cards. There’s still no shortage of 1987 Topps. There’s no shortage of 1988 Topps. There’s no shortage of 1999 Topps. I remember in 1989 I saw a sales list, and you could get 800 copies of any 1989 Topps card you wanted.
“That’s one of the big differences. Everybody could afford to play in the game. Everybody. That’s a huge difference. Nowadays, if it’s a product everybody can afford, nobody wants it. That’s an exaggeration, but it’s not far off.”
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And that’s one of the beautiful things about 1987 Topps. Back then, if you had a handful of quarters, you could get a couple of packs. Now, you can still get a full 36-pack box — 612 cards — for around $35, much less than the cost of one 2021 Topps Chrome Mega Box with 40 cards. And, sure, the chances of getting a high-dollar card are much better with the new cards, but what if finding a lottery ticket isn’t the point?
What if the point is opening a lot of packs and seeing a lot of your favorite players?
“The ’87 Topps set is one of the sets that makes it so this can be a hobby for anybody who loves baseball,” Beckett said. “All the headlines are for the million-dollar cards, but there are no million-dollar cards for 1987 Topps. You can just enjoy, and no one is priced out.
By this point, we’d talked nearly an hour.
“Actually, what I’m coming around to, Ryan, is that maybe it’s a better entry point than going to the local card shop right now and buying a box that’s at least $100, for most decent boxes, and way more in some cases,” he said. “So getting back into the hobby with 1987 Topps is maybe a preferred way to ease into it.”
Speaking from experience, I couldn’t agree more.
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