How many of each 1992 Donruss Elites still exist?

[byronscott4ever]

Originally Posted by Minelayer

There's a way to find them other than randomly ripping open packs?

I recall reading a post in a hobby magazine that metal detectors were used, not sure it was ever proven

[OhioLawyerF5]

Originally Posted by byronscott4ever

I recall reading a post in a hobby magazine that metal detectors were used, not sure it was ever proven

It's been completely debunked.

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[thenwhatjk]

There was also a rumor that the color of the pack was slightly different

[magicpapa]

i pulled a Griffey back in 1992 prolly took less than 10 boxes

[OhioLawyerF5]

Originally Posted by magicpapa

i pulled a Griffey back in 1992 prolly took less than 10 boxes

You got lucky. They tend to fall around one every 3 to 4 cases.

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[sthoemke]

1992 Donruss Baseball Card Commercial

[Bambino22]

Great post brewtown!

[jdandns]

I pulled an Eddie Murray from a discounted box of '93 I got from Pic n Save around '95 or so. Still have it, and also one of those green foil Elite Dominators of Piazza from the Don & Eddie Home Shopping Network show (Gang, get on the phone!). That version came in a green envelope as a bonus item and some were signed.

[hermanotarjeta]

Originally Posted by brewtown107

It's been stated above, but I can see how it's almost impossible to really explain it to someone born and raised in the age of internet. But I'm going to try.

Card collecting was pretty boring, by today's standards, when I started collecting as a pre-teen the late 80s. There were no parallels. No insert cards. No autos. Nothing to chase, really. Everything was base.

You bought cards a few packs at a time, and hoped to get the base cards of the players you wanted. That was the whole chase. Rookie cards of significant players added to the chase, but they were base cards too. They were produced in the same high quantities as any other card.

The junkiest junk wax of the junk wax era is the baseball product from 1988. Why? Because there are no rookies of note in that year, so there's absolutely nothing at all to chase. Just base cards of star players, many of whom did not stand the test of time.

The odds of hitting any particular base card was about 2 per three boxes. So at least in the circles I ran in, nobody ever bought a whole box of any product. You would buy a handful of packs, and then buy a few more packs, and then a few more. Then trade with someone, or maybe buy singles and lots at a flea market or card shop, to get your favorite player's cards or to fill a set. Like I said, pretty boring!

The latter aspect is key. Pre-internet, the way to find singles was to trade with someone, or go to a local card shop or flea market. Or maybe go to a card show if you were lucky enough to have that option. Your options were limited to what was available locally. You would miss out on certain cards or even an entire product if nobody had it locally.

Sure, there were some bigger outfits that sold cards by mail order. They advertised in the back pages of Beckett and Tuff Stuff magazines. You would send a check or money order for the singles you wanted, sight unseen, and a few weeks later you'd get some nice poorly-centered and/or fuzzy-cornered copies of the cards you picked out from the list. I got most of my Ken Griffey, Jr. RCs this way, along with some Joey Belle RCs (lol).

Anyway, since buying sight unseen sucked, buying was limited to whatever was available locally. And for kids, operating on an allowance budget, and whose parents weren't about to spend money and precious weekend time at a card show, the options were even more limited.

Against this backdrop, we started to see chase cards in product.

When you could get any card you wanted in 2 or 3 boxes of a product, maximum, there was no reason for anybody to buy more than that amount of product. The card companies figured this out, and started adding cards that were produced in smaller quantities than base, to make people want to buy more product.

One could argue they had done this already in prior decades by short printing some base cards. But that seemed to happen on an ad-hoc basis, and seemed to happen more by happenstance than by design. I'm no expert on vintage, but that's my impression.

In the late 80s, error cards became a big thing. In a vast and growing sea of not-rare cards, a card with an error version and a corrected version created some semblance of scarcity. Especially when one or the other was released in a much smaller quantity, and also when the error involved a big name player.

This had been going on for years, of course, with error cards and corrected cards existing in sets going way back. The Heritage sets pay homage to some of these errors with their intentional "error" subsets, like flip stock, color swap, etc. This is a gimmick I personally don't care for, but some like it, and to each their own.

In the late 80s, however, with skyrocketing production runs, anything that had even a whiff of scarcity was special, and error cards were that thing. I remember putting aside my Keith Comstock 1988 Topps card because there was some error in the color of the team name. Scarcity! 1989 Fleer Billy Ripken FF card, with all of its various corrections, was a big thing.

By 1990, we started to see more and more error cards, including error cards of key rookies and stars (Donruss with the Juan Gonzalez reverse negative; Upper Deck with the Ben McDonald (#1 overall pick in the draft) team logo error; Frank Thomas with the NNOF error; Upper Deck High # Nolan Ryan error). People started to believe the "errors" were being made intentionally. The error gimmick was starting to become overdone.

At this point--with production runs seeming to be in the millions per base card--we started to see more interest in "insert" chase cards that weren't just the usual intentional "error" cards.

The big one was from Upper Deck in 1990. They released the Reggie Jackson "Heroes of Baseball" insert set, which included a nine card base insert set plus an autograph with "only" 2,500 copies. That seems like a lot of copies, but when spread across a production run of a hundred thousand cases or more, it was very hard to come by. Especially when many of us were conditioned to buy no more than a handful of packs at a time of any given product. No more than a box or two, for sure. I never saw one of these Reggie Jackson autos back then, and still to this day I haven't seen one in person. Of course, I still don't go to card shows. Maybe I'd see one if I did.

Anyway, the Heroes of Baseball set was very interesting, but it suffered from the problem of being a single player chase. I grew up in the Midwest, and no one I knew gave two sh*ts about Reggie Jackson. He was retired; his prime was many years earlier; he was a coastal player with no local connection; and he held no significant all time records. So even though his auto was "rare," the demand was limited. A copy of this card was impossible for us to find, but we didn't care because we didn't want one.

1991 saw even more production than the year before, and a huge influx of insert and parallel cards in the major company releases. Upper Deck continued the Heroes of Baseball set with much more popular players--Nolan Ryan and Hank Aaron. These were still old guys with limited appeal to kids, but at least Ryan was breaking all time records at that time and Aaron was the Home Run King. Fleer had a very popular insert set in "Pro-visions" that wasn't rare (multiple per box) but featured cool artwork of current, popular players. And Donruss made the Elites.

The Elites were next level. They combined the rarity (relative to overall production and the amount of product people generally purchased) of the Heroes auto with the current star power of the Pro-vision set. The 10-card checklist was a list of MVPs, home run champions, batting champions (back when that still mattered) and record breakers who had current interest at that time. And they were really cool looking. Foil stock and lots of shine! They were refractors before there were refractors.

People wanted these cards, and almost no one could pull them. If you wanted to even just see one, you had to know someone who pulled one (fat chance!) or your local card shop or flea market had to have one in stock (also pretty uncommon in my neck of the woods). Again, this is speaking from the perspective of a kid who did not go to card shows, and rarely even went into card shops, as you could get all the packs you wanted at local grocery stores, drug stores, variety stores, etc. And this was before the age of the internet. Again, everything was local.

The only minor complaint about the 1991 Elite set, if there could be one, was that it didn't contain the players who were at the absolute peak of the collecting world at that time. Jose Canseco, Barry Bonds, Rickey Henderson, and Ryne Sandberg were top players, to be sure. But Canseco was a couple years' removed from his 40-40 MVP season, Bonds and Henderson were not very fan friendly, and thus were underappreciated, and Sandberg... I dunno really. Just didn't seem to be that revered outside of Chicago. Not saying these players weren't popular and collected, but they were not who I remember to be the Tier 1 players of the day. Canseco and Henderson might have been borderline Tier 1- Tier 2 players, and the others were largely Tier 2 and 3. Nolan Ryan was probably the most popular player in the set among the people I knew, and he was old and was a pitcher.

The biggest chase players of the day, as I recall it, were Ken Griffey, Jr., Frank Thomas, and Bo Jackson. Of those three, two of them (Griffey and Thomas) were in the 1992 Elite set. Cal Ripken, Jr. was another borderline Tier 1-Tier 2 player, and he was the autograph in the 1992 set. I would venture a guess that the 1992 Elite set--as a follow up to the 1991 set--is what really cemented Donruss Elite as such a memorable and beloved issue.

And they were even harder to pull in 1992, because that was the year Donruss decided to make their brand a little more high end. They used nicer card stock and fancier packaging, and they charged a corresponding higher price. Instead of packs being 50 cents each, like for the 1991 Donruss set (marked down to a quarter each on clearance!), Donruss packs in 1992 were a dollar each or more. Maybe kids like me bought a box worth of Donruss packs in 1991, but surely we bought far less of the 1992 product.

For the folks who asked, I hope this gives some perspective about why the Donruss Elite set is so highly regarded. It was really hard to find in its day, visually appealing (shine!), and contained--in its first 2 years--almost all the big stars of the day.

Nowadays we are inundated with refractors and artificial rarity and chase cards of every player you could want, but this set was really the first to bring those things to the hobby. I never owned one or even held one until I picked up a '92 Frank Thomas in a deal on here in the B/S/T section. That was a really cool mail day for me.

GREAT summary. Remembered like yesterday.

[bavariancream]

I still have an Elite Will Clark card I pulled the week of the release. LCS owner couldn’t believe it, and was the first one he had ever seen. Prob still my longest odds pull.

Bought the Ripken Elite auto when I was older. No plans to sell either one. Great looking cards!


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[soey10]

Originally Posted by brewtown107

It's been stated above, but I can see how it's almost impossible to really explain it to someone born and raised in the age of internet. But I'm going to try.

Card collecting was pretty boring, by today's standards, when I started collecting as a pre-teen the late 80s. There were no parallels. No insert cards. No autos. Nothing to chase, really. Everything was base.

You bought cards a few packs at a time, and hoped to get the base cards of the players you wanted. That was the whole chase. Rookie cards of significant players added to the chase, but they were base cards too. They were produced in the same high quantities as any other card.

The junkiest junk wax of the junk wax era is the baseball product from 1988. Why? Because there are no rookies of note in that year, so there's absolutely nothing at all to chase. Just base cards of star players, many of whom did not stand the test of time.

The odds of hitting any particular base card was about 2 per three boxes. So at least in the circles I ran in, nobody ever bought a whole box of any product. You would buy a handful of packs, and then buy a few more packs, and then a few more. Then trade with someone, or maybe buy singles and lots at a flea market or card shop, to get your favorite player's cards or to fill a set. Like I said, pretty boring!

The latter aspect is key. Pre-internet, the way to find singles was to trade with someone, or go to a local card shop or flea market. Or maybe go to a card show if you were lucky enough to have that option. Your options were limited to what was available locally. You would miss out on certain cards or even an entire product if nobody had it locally.

Sure, there were some bigger outfits that sold cards by mail order. They advertised in the back pages of Beckett and Tuff Stuff magazines. You would send a check or money order for the singles you wanted, sight unseen, and a few weeks later you'd get some nice poorly-centered and/or fuzzy-cornered copies of the cards you picked out from the list. I got most of my Ken Griffey, Jr. RCs this way, along with some Joey Belle RCs (lol).

Anyway, since buying sight unseen sucked, buying was limited to whatever was available locally. And for kids, operating on an allowance budget, and whose parents weren't about to spend money and precious weekend time at a card show, the options were even more limited.

Against this backdrop, we started to see chase cards in product.

When you could get any card you wanted in 2 or 3 boxes of a product, maximum, there was no reason for anybody to buy more than that amount of product. The card companies figured this out, and started adding cards that were produced in smaller quantities than base, to make people want to buy more product.

One could argue they had done this already in prior decades by short printing some base cards. But that seemed to happen on an ad-hoc basis, and seemed to happen more by happenstance than by design. I'm no expert on vintage, but that's my impression.

In the late 80s, error cards became a big thing. In a vast and growing sea of not-rare cards, a card with an error version and a corrected version created some semblance of scarcity. Especially when one or the other was released in a much smaller quantity, and also when the error involved a big name player.

This had been going on for years, of course, with error cards and corrected cards existing in sets going way back. The Heritage sets pay homage to some of these errors with their intentional "error" subsets, like flip stock, color swap, etc. This is a gimmick I personally don't care for, but some like it, and to each their own.

In the late 80s, however, with skyrocketing production runs, anything that had even a whiff of scarcity was special, and error cards were that thing. I remember putting aside my Keith Comstock 1988 Topps card because there was some error in the color of the team name. Scarcity! 1989 Fleer Billy Ripken FF card, with all of its various corrections, was a big thing.

By 1990, we started to see more and more error cards, including error cards of key rookies and stars (Donruss with the Juan Gonzalez reverse negative; Upper Deck with the Ben McDonald (#1 overall pick in the draft) team logo error; Frank Thomas with the NNOF error; Upper Deck High # Nolan Ryan error). People started to believe the "errors" were being made intentionally. The error gimmick was starting to become overdone.

At this point--with production runs seeming to be in the millions per base card--we started to see more interest in "insert" chase cards that weren't just the usual intentional "error" cards.

The big one was from Upper Deck in 1990. They released the Reggie Jackson "Heroes of Baseball" insert set, which included a nine card base insert set plus an autograph with "only" 2,500 copies. That seems like a lot of copies, but when spread across a production run of a hundred thousand cases or more, it was very hard to come by. Especially when many of us were conditioned to buy no more than a handful of packs at a time of any given product. No more than a box or two, for sure. I never saw one of these Reggie Jackson autos back then, and still to this day I haven't seen one in person. Of course, I still don't go to card shows. Maybe I'd see one if I did.

Anyway, the Heroes of Baseball set was very interesting, but it suffered from the problem of being a single player chase. I grew up in the Midwest, and no one I knew gave two sh*ts about Reggie Jackson. He was retired; his prime was many years earlier; he was a coastal player with no local connection; and he held no significant all time records. So even though his auto was "rare," the demand was limited. A copy of this card was impossible for us to find, but we didn't care because we didn't want one.

1991 saw even more production than the year before, and a huge influx of insert and parallel cards in the major company releases. Upper Deck continued the Heroes of Baseball set with much more popular players--Nolan Ryan and Hank Aaron. These were still old guys with limited appeal to kids, but at least Ryan was breaking all time records at that time and Aaron was the Home Run King. Fleer had a very popular insert set in "Pro-visions" that wasn't rare (multiple per box) but featured cool artwork of current, popular players. And Donruss made the Elites.

The Elites were next level. They combined the rarity (relative to overall production and the amount of product people generally purchased) of the Heroes auto with the current star power of the Pro-vision set. The 10-card checklist was a list of MVPs, home run champions, batting champions (back when that still mattered) and record breakers who had current interest at that time. And they were really cool looking. Foil stock and lots of shine! They were refractors before there were refractors.

People wanted these cards, and almost no one could pull them. If you wanted to even just see one, you had to know someone who pulled one (fat chance!) or your local card shop or flea market had to have one in stock (also pretty uncommon in my neck of the woods). Again, this is speaking from the perspective of a kid who did not go to card shows, and rarely even went into card shops, as you could get all the packs you wanted at local grocery stores, drug stores, variety stores, etc. And this was before the age of the internet. Again, everything was local.

The only minor complaint about the 1991 Elite set, if there could be one, was that it didn't contain the players who were at the absolute peak of the collecting world at that time. Jose Canseco, Barry Bonds, Rickey Henderson, and Ryne Sandberg were top players, to be sure. But Canseco was a couple years' removed from his 40-40 MVP season, Bonds and Henderson were not very fan friendly, and thus were underappreciated, and Sandberg... I dunno really. Just didn't seem to be that revered outside of Chicago. Not saying these players weren't popular and collected, but they were not who I remember to be the Tier 1 players of the day. Canseco and Henderson might have been borderline Tier 1- Tier 2 players, and the others were largely Tier 2 and 3. Nolan Ryan was probably the most popular player in the set among the people I knew, and he was old and was a pitcher.

The biggest chase players of the day, as I recall it, were Ken Griffey, Jr., Frank Thomas, and Bo Jackson. Of those three, two of them (Griffey and Thomas) were in the 1992 Elite set. Cal Ripken, Jr. was another borderline Tier 1-Tier 2 player, and he was the autograph in the 1992 set. I would venture a guess that the 1992 Elite set--as a follow up to the 1991 set--is what really cemented Donruss Elite as such a memorable and beloved issue.

And they were even harder to pull in 1992, because that was the year Donruss decided to make their brand a little more high end. They used nicer card stock and fancier packaging, and they charged a corresponding higher price. Instead of packs being 50 cents each, like for the 1991 Donruss set (marked down to a quarter each on clearance!), Donruss packs in 1992 were a dollar each or more. Maybe kids like me bought a box worth of Donruss packs in 1991, but surely we bought far less of the 1992 product.

For the folks who asked, I hope this gives some perspective about why the Donruss Elite set is so highly regarded. It was really hard to find in its day, visually appealing (shine!), and contained--in its first 2 years--almost all the big stars of the day.

Nowadays we are inundated with refractors and artificial rarity and chase cards of every player you could want, but this set was really the first to bring those things to the hobby. I never owned one or even held one until I picked up a '92 Frank Thomas in a deal on here in the B/S/T section. That was a really cool mail day for me.

Great write up. It’s true if you didn’t collect before the internet you really won’t understand.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[brewtown107]

A common theme I'm seeing in the comments here is that these tend to be in the "never gonna sell" part of our collections.

Makes sense, given how momentous a pull they were for the lucky ones back in the day. Combine that with how much they're valued at today (not much!), and it's a recipe for them to remain locked up in collections. Why sell such a great memory if that's all you're going to get?

So maybe there are a lot more of these surviving than we think. I hope so!

[dawgsdt90]

back in 1991, I pulled 2 from the same drug store over a couple month period. Doug Drabek and Matt Williams. My luck has been downhill ever since then.

[88horsepower]

Originally Posted by Archangel1775

Yes, if you've been buying 1989 Pro Set for the Lombardi Holo, it was impossible since the card was inserted in 1990 Pro Set. At least you got HOF rookie cards as a consolation prize all these years of breaking.

Ha! I stand corrected.

[magicpapa]

Originally Posted by jdandns

I pulled an Eddie Murray from a discounted box of '93 I got from Pic n Save around '95 or so. Still have it, and also one of those green foil Elite Dominators of Piazza from the Don & Eddie Home Shopping Network show (Gang, get on the phone!). That version came in a green envelope as a bonus item and some were signed.

[blaze]

Originally Posted by SearchPatrol

I'm going to guess anywhere between 3,000 - 6,500. Too low?

You think up to 7,000 Elites of a (each) player could have been lost or destroyed since then? That's out there, for sure.

I'd say if 100 were lost or destroyed, that'd be quite a bit.

[magicpapa]

[OhioLawyerF5]

Originally Posted by magicpapa

Yes, Let's see 'em!

[actionbryan]

if you want to set the game on easy, 1994 donruss was about 1 in 6 boxes.

[OhioLawyerF5]

Originally Posted by actionbryan

if you want to set the game on easy, 1994 donruss was about 1 in 6 boxes.

Yeah, I actually pulled one of those (the Griffey no less). The 94s didn't have nearly the mystique around my neighborhood as the 91-93s did. No one cared that I had a Griffey 94, but were enamored with my McGriff 93.

[SearchPatrol]

Originally Posted by blaze

You think up to 7,000 Elites of a (each) player could have been lost or destroyed since then? That's out there, for sure.

I'd say if 100 were lost or destroyed, that'd be quite a bit.

100??

I would guess Hurricane Sandy took out 100 all by it's self. People who had unopened cases of this - gone - destroyed. While evacuating they didn't grab a case of junk wax. On COMC 6 or so might be on sale right now. Out of 100,00 cards 10*10,000. I'm going to say a lot less than you think.

[SaltyCracker]

Couple away from finishing the 92 set.

[blaze]

Originally Posted by SearchPatrol

100??

I would guess Hurricane Sanny took out 100 all by it's self. People who had unopened cases of this - gone - destroyed. While evacuating they didn't grab a case of junk wax. On COMC 6 or so might be on sale right now. Out of 100,00 cards 10*10,000. I'm going to say a lot less than you think.

Disagree. And we were talking per card, not for the entire print run. Just because cards aren't actively for sale, doesn't mean they are destroyed. I know a guy that has thousands of 90/91 Elite. He just buys and buys them to try and corner the market... you don't see those cards, you just assume they are destroyed.

I'd be willing to be the currently available vs. printed copies of like a 1989 Griffey is actually worse than the 90/91 Elites.

[yodastories]

Originally Posted by soey10

If you were around when these came out then you already know but if you were not let me explain. I was 12 in 1993 when I pulled a Dennis Eckersley 1993 Donruss Elite card and I was the talk of the playground. This was pre internet and if you knew someone who had one you would talk about it, but if you had one you could almost charge other kids to take a look at yours. These were rare which is hard to believe now because people see the 10,000 serial number but back then these were super hard to pull.

A friend of mine pulled a Reggie Jackson auto from 1990 Upper Deck, the first auto insert ever. It was huge news back in the day; the local paper even did a story on it.

[magicpapa]

Originally Posted by OhioLawyerF5

Yes, Let's see 'em!

no 91 or 93 for Griffey, but heres the other s from the 90's wish the pic was bigger