1989 TOPPS DOUBLE HEADERS TIM TEUFEL
Topps spent the better part of the ’80s in a panic. By 1989, they were facing competition from Donruss, Fleer, Score, Upper Deck, Sportsflics, and, I don’t know, you and your baby sister.
No doubt this was a shock to the system for a company that had enjoyed an essential monopoly for 25 years.
So Topps passed the decade spinning out every configuration of card you could imagine. Big cards, little cards, coins, stamps, tattoos, rub downs, scratch offs, pewter, bronze, silver, 3D, suction cups. And in 1989, Double Headers.
These cards came packaged one per paper envelope. What you got for your retail coin was a mini two-sided card encased in a plastic stand-up display. The card contained a reproduction of the player’s 1989 issue on one side and a reproduction of their rookie card on the other.
Topps made an “all-star” version of the set, which was pretty easy to find. They also created a considerably rarer Mets/Yankees set, from whence springs this Teufel.
And that leads us to one of the more curious aspects of the Mets/Yankees set: the two “star” players (Strawberry and Mattingly) are much cheaper than the commons. For example, Teufel books for $10, while Strawberry lists for 50 cents and Mattingly for $3.
Why? Well, because Topps used the same exact version of the Strawberry and Mattingly cards in both the all-star set and the Mets/Yankees collection.
And in a strange way, I kind of like spending time in a world where Tim Teufel is 20 times more valuable than Darryl Strawberry…
I was vaguely aware of this set but did not know the Teufel was this valuable. Good stuff!
Topps’ problem in the 1980s was that everything they did was a repeat of what they did earlier. All of those things you listed in the third graph they had done before. Well, maybe not suction cups. Regardless, they needed to be innovative and instead they just kept going back to the old well…
Thanks for including the Baseball-Reference.com direct links.