You’re an old baseball card collector … or you’re an old collector of baseball cards … or both … or you have one in your life.
Point is, you need some ideas about what to buy a baseball card collector who has everything but wants more, and you don’t want to break the bank.
Well … you’ve come to the right place, Skippy!
Welcome to this list of ten great 1980s collectibles that any hobbyist will love … and they all check in under $50 most of the time. Usually a way under. And that’s for complete sets.
Oh, and there’s one entry for each year of the decade, because we do stuff like that around here.
Let’s dig in …
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1980 TCMA Baseball Immortals
In case you’re not of a certain age, you should know some context for this one …
See, before 1981, the new-card landscape was pretty barren.
That is, before Fleer and Donruss hit the scene, you had … Topps, pretty much.
And then a few oddball sets here and there, mostly also produced by Topps.
But there were also some minor league sets produced by, often, TCMA. And every once in awhile, that company would branch out a bit.
In 1980, that meant firing up their 1975 Topps Machine to produce this colorful set of “Baseball Immortals” that included every Hall of Famer there was — 173 at the time.
Thing is, this set didn’t stop there, as TCMA added to the role every year (starting in 1984) when a new Cooperstown class was minted.
By 1987, the count stood at 199, and that’s where it still stands today, with Billy Williams, Catfish Hunter, and Ray Dandridge putting a cap on the set forever.
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1981 Kellogg’s 3D Baseball Cards
If you were a collector in the 1970s and early 1980s, chances are pretty good you downed a lot of Kellogg’s cereal during the baseball season in your chase for more cards.
Who could resist these plastic, ridgy, 3-D beauties, anyway?
Not anyone I know of, no matter how much they cracked!
A lot of those cards, especially early on, are fairly scarce and kind of expensive these days.
By comparison, though, the 1981 set is plenty plentiful, maybe owing to the overall proliferation of cards as manufacturers not named “Topps” burst onto the scene.
These babies are super colorful, too, and just may have inspired Fleer’s “awesome” 1991 set … like a scratch-and-sniff banana sticker, that one was!
Regardless of that dubious legacy, the 1981 Kellogg’s pasteboards look good, and they’re loaded with Hall of Famers like Rickey Henderson, Reggie Jackson, Johnny Bench, Tom Seaver, Nolan Ryan, Pete Rose, and Bob Horner.
Right, I know. But he’s there, and he looks pretty good, too. Not even all that fat yet.
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1982 Topps Kmart 20th Anniversary
I have an unnatural, maybe unhealthy love of this set, as you might know if you’ve read any of my stuff on the matter, either here or on Twitter or YouTube (watched, in that case, not read).
So for now, in this space, I’ll just say that the 1982 Topps Kmart 20th Anniversary set was a wealth of historical information for a newly-minted baseball fan in 1983 (when I first got my mitts on some).
It was also a great source of information and card-recognition practice for a new collector … and good for confusion, too.
What do I mean by that?
Go ahead and try to find a 1962 Topps Maury Wills rookie card, or a single 1975 Topps Fred Lynn rookie card.
I’ll wait right here for you to report back.
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1983 Topps Foldouts
And speaking of learning the game through cardboard, nothing ramped me up on the then-current greats faster than this set did.
There were five foldouts in this issue, each sold in its own cellophane package, and each showing Ben Oglivie on the front — which of course led me to believe that B.O. must have been the greatest player ever since he was in the top tier all across the board.
But he wasn’t.
Anyway, each foldout folded out (duh) to reveal 17 leaders in each of five categories … career wins, home runs, batting average (“batting leaders”), saves (“Relief Aces”), and stolen bases.
And I was thus introduced to the likes of Mike Schmidt and Tommy John and Al Oliver, but also Ron Cey and Rick Monday and Jerry Reuss.
Priceless.
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