Fancy Boys Club

If there was a list for “most controversial cards of all time” then this might be at the top. While legendary players with bat and jersey cards are commonplace now, this was considered sacrilege back in the day. There was an outcry in the industry when this card came out, after Upper Deck purchased a Babe Ruth bat at auction, and started slicing it up to put on cards.
There are two schools of thoughts on this card. The first is that by cutting up the pieces of history, it gives much more people the ability to own a relic they would never have the ability to do otherwise, and baseball is a sport of the people, and this allows the people to have their piece of baseball history.
The other school of thought is that these are rare pieces of history that there will never be more of. You can’t replace a Babe Ruth bat. You can’t replace a Babe Ruth jersey. Once they are gone, they are lost to history. They shouldn’t be broken down because they can never be enjoyed for what they are ever again.
Either way, this card is one of the linchpins of this debate, which carries on to this day.

Random Babe Ruth Fact: By Baseball Reference WAR, Ruth is considered one of the two greatest baseball players of all time. Yet, when he was up for election in the inagurual baseball Hall of Fame class, 11 people didn’t vote for him!

1933 Goudey is influential and iconic because it was the moment that baseball card collecting went from an adult activity to a childrens activity. Before this point, baseball cards were released with cigarettes. Goudey Gum released the 240 card set in packs that came with a piece of their gum. The cards didn’t look cheap like so many other doppelgangers of the era.
Babe Ruth is the most iconic player of the era and was the choice for this spot, but some hardcore collectors would correctly point out that it might not be the most important card in it’s own set. When the set was released, there was no card # 106 in the set. People who sent letters in the mail to Goudey ended up receiving a Nap Lajoie card as the final card of the set. Because of the way it was distributed, this card exists in far lower numbers and is considered one of the holy grails of the collecting industry.

Random Babe Ruth Fact: While many baseball fans might be aware of this, average fans probably don’t know that Babe Ruth hit his called shot home run at Wrigley Field off of Charlie Root during the 1932 World Series. Debate remains to this day whether he was actually calling his shot, pointing at the pitcher, or at the Cubs bench players, who had spent the entirety of the World Series heckling him.

Topps Finest might be the most important set to be released of the 1990’s. Topps was trying to compete with Fleer Flair and Upper Deck SP in the high end baseball card market. This release was unlike anything that had been seen on the market before. The colors were bright and vibrant. They were printed on a high end gloss stock.
The refractors were a parallel set that came one per box. They immediately grew in popularity based on their rarity. While print runs weren’t officially released initially, it is believed that there were only 241 of each refractor made. Much like the last entry, I could have chosen a number of players to be this entry, but Ryan is one of the most consistently high sellers in the secondary market to this day.
This set ended up paving the way for the parallel sets that are so recognizable with today’s baseball product.

Random Nolan Ryan Fact: Over his 27 year career, Ryan averaged 246 strikeouts per season. In 2019, only six pitchers were able to throw for more strikeouts.

In the years of companies adding autographs to their sets, there was always a limit to the people that they could include. You needed to be alive to sign the card. In 2001, Upper Deck completely changed the concept of what could be put into packs in a few different ways. This was one of them. I put Jackie Robinson into this spot, but it could have been any number of legendary players in the set. What Upper Deck did was give collectors the ability to chase autographs they could never dream of having before this point.
Upper Deck dipped their toes into the concept of cut autos with a 2000 set dedicated to the Yankees, but this was the set that blew the doors off of the cut autograph industry. Cut autos came one per case in this high end set, which had a retail price of 180 dollars per box. This set gave you the ability for the first time to collect autographs from everyone from Babe Ruth and Satchel Paige to Branch Rickey and Roger Peckinpaugh. For the first time, the autographs industry became an infinite adventure.

Random Jackie Robinson Facts: While it would never be in question now, Jackie Robinson nearly didn’t make the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. He ended up getting 77.5 percent of the votes, with 75% being the number you needed to get in. It should be noted that his first time being eligible was only 15 years after Robinson broke the color barrier, and had to fight the very same stereotypes while trying to make the Hall of Fame.

Now this is some iconic prospecting right here. It’s not to say that Albert Pujols came out of nowhere, but he was already in the middle of his 37 home run, 130 RBI rookie season when this card camae out. Needles to say, this card hit the ground running and never looked back. Bowman had always been known as the prospect set. It is where you sent if you were looking for cards from your favorite team of players that hadn’t made the majors yet.
In 1997, then released Bowman Chrome, with high end prospects on a glossy stock. Autographs were added as a chase element. In 2001, this became the card that everyone needed to have. It had a print run of 500, which was still considered a small run at that point. If Pujols had washed out after a couple seasons, this card would never be on the list. Instead, Pujols has had a Hall of Fame career, cementing this card’s legacy, and turning every Bowman Chrome release into a prospectors’ holiday. Now if only this damn Brandon Wood chrome auto would finally regain it’s value…

Random Albert Pujols Fact: For his career, Pujols has grounded into the most double plays of all time. In fact, as a still active player, Pujols is already 45 ahead of Cal Ripken, who is in second. The next closest active player is Miguel Cabrera, who is currently 77 GIDP’s behind.

Just look at that card for a minute. It is such a perfect card. Everything about it is amazing. It also helps that Ted Williams has one of the cleanest autographs in baseball history. In 1991, Upper Deck decided to add a chase element to their sets. It was a similar card of Hank Aaron. The Williams just hits different, though. It’s a cleaner card looks wise and showed that Upper Deck was willing to promote themselves as the high end brand of the time. This card was also susceptible to forgeries, with people taking the unsigned version and hand numbering and signing them. Pre-internet, it was much harder to track who had what, and it led to a number of forgeries within the industry.

Random Ted Williams Fact: By the Baseball Reference WAR metric, Williams is the 14th best player of all time. This includes the fact that he missed three full seasons while enlisted in the military during World War II. Those three seasons were during his prime. In 1942, he had a 10.4 WAR. In 1946, his first year back, he had a 10.6 WAR. If he had batted that consistently in those three years, he would be in the discussion with Ty Cobb to be one of the 5-6 best players in Major League history.

Between 1962 and 1966, Sandy Koufax put up one of the greatest five years stretches in pitching history. He won three Cy Young awards and an MVP. He was also runner up for MVP twice. He was an MVP every one of these seasons. Then…his career was over. In 1965, he started experiencing extreme discomfort in his throwing elbow, and had to resort to using pain killers every day and even in the middle of starts. In 1966, he was told his arm simply couldn’t handle pitching anymore. He played the entire season, anyway. His final game was Game Two of the 1966 World Series. After the season he would retire and in the collecting world, that was it. There would be no new cards of Koufax made. Where as Roberto Clemente played 18 seasons, and Willie Mays and Hank Aaron each played over 20, Koufax had a 12 year career, with only five being remarkable in the way we tend to remember him.
The lack of longevity in his career compared to others of his era make all of his cards more collectible. His rookie, which of course has the same continuity and wear and tear issues as other cards of the day, is incredibly desirable and can be found in only very rare instances in a high grade.

Random Sandy Koufax Fact: In 1963, Sandy Koufax threw 11 complete game shut outs on the season. Only one person ever topped this mark, Bob Gibson in 1968 with 13.

The Mike Trout Topps Update card is ten years younger than the next newest card on the entire list. There is a reason for this. Trout is the best player of his generation and if he continues on his current trajectory, he will be considered one of the greatest players in MLB history. It’s not big secret that players like this tend to have their rookie cards become very valuable. This card, which could have been purchased less than a decade ago for a dollar, is now worth many hundred times more than that.
This card is the catalyst for the Topps boom that has been seen recently with people prospecting the normally less popular update sets to get rookies of players like Vladimir Guerrero Jr, Pete Alonso, and Eloy Jimenez. Topps owes much of it’s current success to this card and the collecting habit it cultivated among a new generation of collectors that had become more focused on autographs and jersey cards in their collections.

Random Mike Trout Fact: Trout has been so good, that his Baseball Reference similarity score to this point in his career echoes some of the greatest players of all time, with the four most similar people in terms of production to this point are: Micky Mantle, Frank Robinson, Ken Griffey Jr, and Hank Aaron.

It took a lot to look at this objectively and not simply put this card in at number 3 or 4. Within the baseball card collecting community, this is one of, or possibly THE most infamous card in baseball history. For those not familiar with the history of this card, on the day that photographers were coming to shoot photos for their cards that season, someone played a trick on Ripken by writing “F*** Face” on the knob of his bat. Somehow, nobody noticed this until AFTER a lot of them had been put in packs and shipped out.
Fleer would end up sending out four different variations in later packs: the white scribble out, the white box out, the black scribble, and the black box. All have varying degrees of collectibilty, but there is no denying that this card has mainstream appeal far beyond most cards to make this list.

Random Billy Ripken fact: While the baseball draft sometimes seems very random, you can find value all over. Ripken was drafted in the 11th round of the 1982 draft, and ended up being gone of five players to play in the major leagues from that round. The fourth round of the same draft only produced six major leaguers.