Yankees Card of the Week: 1980 Reggie Jackson

1980 DONRUSS REGGIE JACKSON

I am excited and honored to be charged by our webmaster with the task of sharing some big news with our readers!

In an effort to encompass the whole of New York baseball, we will be relaunching this site to include more and more coverage of the Yankees, with the ultimate goal being a 50/50 content split between the two Big Apple teams.

As part of this transition, attentive readers might notice some new advertising initiatives, including banner ads for Zoo York clothing and Yokohama tires. We will also be incorporating more black-and-white elements into our page layout.

We have registered the domain metsyanks720.com, and hope to move to this new address by late next week. The old mets360.com URL will redirect automatically to metsyanks720.

This week, we kick off this bold new world by taking a quick look at the Donruss Reggie Jackson prototype card.

As the lawsuit challenging Topps’ monopoly of the baseball-card market wended its way through the courts in the late ’70s, Donruss began making plans to launch a new card line in the eventuality of a ruling against Topps.

In 1980, the Memphis-based company created a three-card prototype panel featuring Reggie Jackson, George Brett, and a blank template with a sky-blue background and pea-green border.

Some elements of this design were carried over into the inaugural 1981 Donruss set– the borders were reproduced pretty much as is, and the name/team banners were utilized on some of the special cards in the set. One of the three Jackson cards in the 1981 set even reused this same photo, with slightly different cropping.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this little sneak preview of the new metsyanks720.com, and that you can join us in this same space next week when we take an in-depth look at the 1986 Topps Sidd Finch card…