One of the special things a kid was able to enjoy in the past, but is lost to the current generation of youth is baseball card collecting. Sure, there are still baseball cards being produced every year, but after 1990 the industry hit an all-time low when cards became extremely mass produced. What made it even worse was that the industry was peaking so high with companies that were manufacturing cards, that adults were scrambling to collect every rookie card and every "limited edition" card they could, pricing kids out enjoying collecting for the fun of it.
Baseball cards pre-1990 had that cardboard feel to it that made it feel accessible to a kid who was looking to learn more about Major League Baseball. Afterward, various companies "glossed" up their cards, even producing limited edition cards that were made of real gold (gold leaf that is), and the price of a baseball card pack jumped from 49 cents a pack to several dollars a pack. Before 1988, there were only three companies producing baseball cards in the United States...Topps, Fleer, and Donruss. In 1988, Score began production on baseball cards and the prices for packs stayed low, but in 1989, Upper Deck started to make baseball cards too, creating a premium card that cost more to buy than its competitors. Topps also released Bowman in 1989, but at this point, Bowman really hadn't caught on with collectors.
Then the 90's hit. Leaf upped the ante, releasing a set of cards that jumped up so high that rookie cards of Frank Thomas and Sammy Sosa reached up into a couple of hundred dollars a card, while other popular cards in the set included Ken Griffey Jr.'s second year card (also reaching triple digits) and John Olerud's rookie card. Topps joined the premium market by creating Topps Stadium Club and creating insert cards called Topps Gold that became the "it" card to find in each of their boxes of packs. Then, Topps "topped" themselves with Topps Finest and creating another insert card called Topps Refractors that utilized a type of glossiness that gave the card a rainbow appearance. Upper Deck countered by creating their own subsets that cost even more.
While pack prices jumped up, Score unintentionally drove their baseball card prices the other way when they mass produced their cards so much that prices for their sets dropped to single digit range in dollars. Score not only boasted the most cards in a set (893), but the most extensive biographies of players on the back. While they did well in design, their mass production cheapened their reputation until 1991 when Score produced their own premium card set called Score Pinnacle.
At this point, if a kid were a fan of a player such as Craig Biggio, including the inserts, all-star cards, record breakers, and the regular card of the player, the kid would have to buy up to twenty cards per season of the individual star player. Maybe this would have been okay if the cards were as affordable to a kid as they were pre-1990, but insert cards priced kids out of collecting their own favorite players. Inserts could easily reach triple digit numbers, but even then, Upper Deck upped the ante even more when in 1997, they started to produce cards that had game used memorabilia attached to it. All of a sudden, fans could own a small patch of a player's jersey or a sliver of a bat.
The three big companies pre-1988 enjoyed humble beginnings and stumbled onto producing baseball cards. Topps formed in 1938, but had their roots tracing back further into American Leaf Tobacco which formed in 1890 as a tobacco importer that fell apart during the Great Depression. They rebranded themselves Topps and entered into the baseball card market. Fleer originally began in 1906 as a bubble gum manufacturer which manufactured Dubble Bubble which set the standard for bubble gum being stereotyped as a pink color product. Fleer had an earlier attempt into entering the sports card industry in 1923, but failed. In the 70's, they sued Topps for the rights to produce baseball cards and by 1981 they were granted rights to do so. That is when Donruss, originally a producer of candy and later on cards for entertainment and racing joined baseball card making too. It was the companies that followed that were created with the intentions of solely making baseball cards (and later other sports) and making as much of a profit as possible.
By the end of the century, most of the brands went bankrupt and/or were bought out by competitors. Donruss/Leaf ended up being bought out by Pinnacle Brands (Score), but then they too went bankrupt and now produce low level cards for the NFL and NHL. Upper Deck eventually acquired all of the Fleer line of cards and still holds the naming rights to this day. All that is left in the baseball card industry is Topps and Upper Deck. Unfortunately, the desire to collect cards on the scale of the 80's and before, have nearly all, but disappeared and the recent fad of collecting "online" cards has even started.
Kids will no longer enjoy baseball cards the way their parents once did. No longer will they look onto the back of a card to see a player's career statistics. They'll just got to Wikipedia, Baseball Reference, or ESPN for that now. The fun of ripping open a pack and checking out which players you got has nearly disappeared. Baseball cards are more of an after thought or a stocking stuffer type of gift now, instead of the main gift like they were for kids in 80's. It's depressing in a sense because it was one of the last great things a kid could collect that they could pass down to their kids when they got older. Holding a baseball card of your favorite baseball player in your hand was like having some sort of connection with them without ever even meeting them. Now that's gone.
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