Mets COTW: 1987 Topps Tiffany Ron Darling

Awhile ago, a popular meme-type thing was to list three steps to success, where the first item was very basic and easy, the third line was “success!” and the second step was left blank. It seems that’s the idea that card companies were following in the mid-80’s to mid-90’s. The first item was “crank up the production numbers.” The cards in this 10-14-year period – few agree when it either started or ended – were massively overproduced. Today this period is known as the “Junk Wax Era,” where it’s tough to give most of these cards away.

In the early and perhaps middle part of the Junk Wax Era, many people didn’t even know it was going on. But by the early 90s, most people knew that those cards just a few years earlier were essentially worthless. In the late 90s, Pinnacle and Upper Deck released cards in a baseball can – no, really, they did – and of course collectors didn’t open the cans. The joke became if they did open them, all they would find would be 1988 Donruss cards.

This over-production of cards, combined with the 1994-95 strike, essentially killed baseball card collecting as a hobby for kids, at least on a wide scale. I feel fortunate that my card collecting started in the early 1970s and it’s hard not to feel sorry for those kids who started around the time these 1987s originally came out.

While the complete 1987 set is part of my collection, this Ron Darling card came to me just recently, earlier this year. Someone had up for sale the complete Mets team set from ‘87 but not the base set but rather from the upscale – unofficially known as Topps Tiffany – set that Topps released. Topps released these Tiffany sets from 1984-1991.

Now, these came out during a period where collecting wasn’t anywhere close to the front of my mind or top of the ways that my money was spent. Honestly, I don’t believe I knew they even existed until the mid-90s, when they had long ceased production. Nor did it occur to me to get them, even in the late 90s when a fair amount of my disposable income was spent on cards.

Anyway, these Tiffany cards are produced on better card stock than their base counterparts and the fronts have a glossy feel to them. From a collector’s standpoint, the real appeal is the limited print run. Some years there were only 5,000 sets produced. This 1987 set had 30,000 produced. No one knows how many of the base set of 1987 cards were produced but speculation is that it was seven figures, with estimates as high as seven million.

The best advice anyone can give you with baseball cards is to collect what you like, without any regards to value. But the reality is we all want our collections to be worth something when our heirs sell them one day. So, if you like the way these ‘87s look – and I don’t because it was an homage to the 1962 set, the only Topps set in the 60s that I never collected, because they were ugly – go out and buy the complete Tiffany set.