How many of each 1992 Donruss Elites still exist?

[SearchPatrol]

My Oh my. It's hard to believe that was 30 years ago. But I was wondering what some of you think. Of the 10,000 of each card produced, how many do you think still exist?

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

With natural disasters, moving, just cards getting ruined and throw out. What do you think? Even on COMC, the cards are very limited for such a high print run.

[Giancarlo27]

With how many cases they made a lot are still sitting in wax packs. And coming from the junk era I’m sure a good were probably lost/tossed. Seems reasonable to guess that maybe 40% of the print run has survived outside the packaging?

[DioBrando]

Originally Posted by SearchPatrol

With natural disasters, moving, just cards getting ruined and throw out. What do you think? Even on COMC, the cards are very limited for such a high print run.

I wonder how many modern rare cards period have been lost for those above reasons.

[JWBlue]

What is the story of these cards? Why are they significant?

[SearchPatrol]

First set that was numbered (individually numbered cards) from a MLB LICENSE pack.

Started in 1991 but it was a running set

1991 1-8
1992 9-18

[ThoseBackPages]

Originally Posted by JWBlue

What is the story of these cards? Why are they significant?

[marinofan1958]

The only autograph I pulled was a Cal Ripken Jr. I still have over 30 years later!

[Archangel1775]

Originally Posted by JWBlue

What is the story of these cards? Why are they significant?

Think Panini "Downtown" cards but individually serial numbered. During the junk era, they were extremely limited and a huge hit. The first serial numbered major insert set....eva....

[inceptus]

I can state with confidence that there are a maximum of 9,999 1992 Dwight Gooden Elites in existence, on account of I washed one in a shirt pocket last year. [Plays Taps]


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[Canthardlymiss1]

Originally Posted by ThoseBackPages

The print run of Donruss produced through the junk era made it even harder to find these serial numbered Elite Series cards. The 10000 number might seem high for todays standards but just think of the massive amounts of packs you would have to go through to find one. The print run back then was beyond the normality we think today.


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[soey10]

Originally Posted by inceptus

I can state with confidence that there are a maximum of 9,999 1992 Dwight Gooden Elites in existence, on account of I washed one in a shirt pocket last year. [Plays Taps]


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Why was it in your shirt pocket? Were you reliving a day in your 8 year old self and getting ready to put it in your bicycle spokes. Lol. May it Rest In Peace.


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[soey10]

Originally Posted by JWBlue

What is the story of these cards? Why are they significant?

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.


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[Minelayer]

Originally Posted by soey10

but back then these were super hard to pull.


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Still super hard to pull...

[thewild3]

I started collecting in 1990 and have never seen these cards until the internet was mainstream.

[TimBuckTwo]

Originally Posted by JWBlue

What is the story of these cards? Why are they significant?

Yes why? Curious minds want to know.

[88horsepower]

One of baseball's first true chase inserts. I remember how insanely expensive these were when the set was first released and never once saw someone ever pull one. I think nostalgia certainly plays a role in the current value. They aren't "rare" by today's standards, but they were a needle in a haystack as far as junk-era pulls go. I have to imagine about half to a third of the print run is still languishing in packs because of the sheer volume of the Donruss print runs in the early 90s. Regardless, there must be thousands of each card out there already pulled from packs. This set sort of reminds me of the 1989 Pro Set Lombardi Hologram in the sense that thousands exist but finding one in a pack was impossible.

[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.

[vinnieb]

Originally Posted by Minelayer

Still super hard to pull...

I got back into collecting right before COVID and remembered how much I loved the Donruss Diamond Kings inserts as a kid, so I thought it would be fun to try to pack pull all of them and complete the sets. In doing this I bought about 30 boxes in total from 1987 - 1993. I pulled 6 elite cards from those 30 boxes. I know the odds of doing that are somewhere between 0 and 0, but it happened.

[byronscott4ever]

There’s more pulled than not I bet…after people knew how to find them

[Archangel1775]

Originally Posted by 88horsepower

This set sort of reminds me of the 1989 Pro Set Lombardi Hologram in the sense that thousands exist but finding one in a pack was impossible.

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.

[TimBuckTwo]

Originally Posted by brewtown107

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.

Nice summation Brewtown. Reggie Jackson was the one to pull and the inscribed ones with "Mr October" even more so.

[Minelayer]

Originally Posted by byronscott4ever

There’s more pulled than not I bet…after people knew how to find them

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

[Minelayer]

Originally Posted by vinnieb

I got back into collecting right before COVID and remembered how much I loved the Donruss Diamond Kings inserts as a kid, so I thought it would be fun to try to pack pull all of them and complete the sets. In doing this I bought about 30 boxes in total from 1987 - 1993. I pulled 6 elite cards from those 30 boxes. I know the odds of doing that are somewhere between 0 and 0, but it happened.

Congrats. You certainly bucked the odds hitting 6. I've opened many cases over the years and never hit one.

[OhioLawyerF5]

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.

This is exactly how I remember it back then.

The only Elite card I ever saw in person was the 1993 Fred McGriff. A firend of mine had it and I gave him a TON of value in cards to trade it to me. And I didn't collect McGriff at all. I would have given anything for that card when I saw it because we just never saw them.

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[Termie]

My grandma bought me a box of 91 donruss for my birthday back in the day. I knew there wasn't much value in the box. So I decided to sit on it, surely it would be worth more unopened one day right? Finally after a year or two I decided to open the box. I was only a couple packs in when I seen a copper color card in the pack. I ended up pulling a George Brett elite. I almost had a heart attack pulling that. "Book value" was $120 for a long time...something that was hard to pull back in those days. I don't sell many cards, but even if I did, I doubt I'd ever sell that one