Baseball

Modern Era Rookie Chase: 1980 Topps Rickey Henderson vs. 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr.

What is the best card that would be the “face card” of modern baseball cards? Many great athletes and their rookie cards come to mind.  Rickey Henderson is a baseball player that needs little or no introduction. Baseball card collectors have literally countless of choices to put a Rickey Henderson baseball card in the collection. As with most stars and their cards, the rookie card is the key card for Henderson. In this case it’s the 1980 Topps #482 card.

Many card collectors treat the 1989 Upper Deck $1 card of Ken Griffey Jr. as the so called “face card” of modern sports cards. There is a very strong argument to make that perhaps the Rickey Henderson 1980 Topps rookie card from nearly a decade earlier should be the face of modern baseball card collecting.

After looking over the population of graded cards and the realized prices, Rickey Henderson’s rookie card trumps Ken Griffey, Jr.’s rookie card hands down. Both cards were listed in Joe Orland’s book The Top 200 Sportscards in The Hobby back in 2002. There are common issues here, but Henderson’s 1980 Topps card has some serious advantages for collectors over Griffey’s rookie. (Image below by Heritage Auctions)

1980 Topps Rickey Henderson

The modern/vintage line we are sticking with is that 1979 and earlier is vintage and the cards made in 1980 and thereafter are modern. There will be an exception in that Rickey Henderson has a pre-rookie card that dates to 1979, but it suffers from some of the same pre-rookie issues as exist for Ken Griffey Jr. pre-rookie cards. Most collectors treat pre-rookie cards as being not in the same light as the official rookie cards.

One other issue to consider is that 1980 is basically the last year that Topps’ card monopoly existed. The year 1981 was the first year that Fleer and Donruss were able to offer competition to Topps. Their cards produced are all basically the same size (and that remains true today). This marked the beginning of the printing press wars in sports cards. All of this ultimately led to the Junk Wax era, and Upper Deck’s first MLB set from 1989 also played a key role in defining one of the peaks of that Junk Wax era.

Even after 40 years, modern still applies if you want to dare do something like sticking to rules or standards. One interesting thing about the 1980 Topps rookie card of Rickey Henderson is that it has always been a valuable card for collectors since it was issued. Even in 1988, a year before the Griffey rookie card, Beckett’s 10th Baseball Card Price guide had Rickey Henderson’s 1980 Topps valued at $28.00 in Mint condition. For a comparison, that was more valuable than all but two cards (Rose and Garvey) from the prized 1971 Topps set that is so hard to find cards in stellar condition with its black borders.

PSA’s CardFact’s site basically gives the same accolades to the 1980 Topps Henderson and the 1989 Upper Deck Griffey (Jr.) cards as the key rookie card of each set. Still, there is a night and day difference when it comes to populations and prices.

On a stats basis, Henderson’s career went longer and was less interrupted by injuries. In fact, there was an old joke that Rickey would be an instant inductee into the Hall of Fame upon his first 5-year anniversary of retiring from baseball… “But he just won’t stop playing baseball!”

Henderson is the all-time stolen base leader with 1,406 steals (and a career and MLB high of 130 steals in a single season). He also tallied up 3,055 hits and he was the all-time leader with runs scored at 2,295 runs scored. Henderson was never touted as a candidate to break Hank Aaron’s home run record like Griffey was at one point earlier in his career, but he did hit 297 homers. Henderson is also shown to have led off a game with a home run a MLB high of 81 times. He also had 2,190 walks and a .401 on-base percentage.

By the time that 1989 rolled around for Ken Griffey’s rookie card, the foil and hologram were unique to Upper Deck. The card cutting and centering issues were generally better and given more detail by Upper Deck than Topps was considering a decade earlier. The card stocks are quite different between these two cards and those differences allow for Upper Deck cards to just look shinier and more pristine. Topps had a rougher paper stock in 1980. Here are additional issues that PSA’s CardFact’s site noted about the 1980 Topps card:

This card is fairly tough to find centered by modern standards and the 1980 Topps card was often cut in a manner that left the corners with a blunt appearance. In addition, print defects are found on this card from time to time but, since the image of Henderson was taken from a distance, the presence of such defects may not affect the eye-appeal quite as much as they would on a portrait-style image.

One additional warning does exist for the 1980 Topps Rickey Henderson card — it has been counterfeited. A recently launched book called ‘Spotting Fakes’ looks at the 50 most common fake cards and the 1980 Henderson is there. Two key issues that the book points out there is that the colors are darker on the fake and the signature tends to be seen. And if you see this card perfectly centered, that should also stand out because the 1980 Topps printings of Henderson often have issues being off-center.

TOO MANY GRIFFEY JR. ROOKIE CARDS EXIST

Collectors Dashboard has worried that Ken Griffey Jr.’s prominence in the hobby could be at risk. That is not anything to do with the great player nor his character. The risk is that there are countless numbers of graded cards that are his rookie card and pre-rookie card. That is outside of just the 1989 Upper Deck #1 card as many card brands have their own cards from that year. At the time we addressed this in November of 2021, PSA alone had graded more than 200,000 Ken Griffey Jr. rookie cards in total.

There is also a massive phantom population of Griffey Jr. rookie cards that will only add to the supply of graded cards in the future. At any card show there are countless numbers of dealers with ungraded 1989 Upper Deck Griffey cards. eBay and other destinations routinely offer “investment lots” of multiple 1989 Upper Deck Griffey cards (see Heritage Auctions image below).

1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr.

The ultimate count of Ken Griffey Jr. rookie cards may never have been tallied. It was estimated that the Upper Deck Griffey Jr, card had 1 million cards printed, and that figure may have been doubled (or more) because Upper Deck kept printing and distributing that inaugural set until the stores and hobby shops quit ordering them wholesale.

Even as of November of 2021, PSA’s total graded population from the entire 1989 Upper Deck baseball card set was 160,201 cards. Of that, there was a total graded population of 84,966 Ken Griffey Jr. #1. As of January 8, 2022, that total PSA graded population had only moved up to 161,523 for the entire set and 85,733 of the #1 Griffey cards. Look at how large that population of graded cards is in January 2022:

  • 3,988 graded PSA 10 Gem Mint
  • 26,947 graded PSA 9
  • 34,247 graded PSA 8 (excluding) half-grades and qualifiers.

As of January 2022, the entire PSA population report for the 1980 Topps baseball card set was 115,592 graded cards. And of that total graded population, there were 25,268 total graded examples of Henderson’s rookie including half-grades and qualifiers. The fact that there are only 25 of the PSA 10 examples should be a testament to relative scarcity (again, Griffey’s count was 3,988 in PSA 10). PSA then counts 2,064 PSA 9 examples and then 10,534 PSA 8 examples before half-grades and qualifiers.

PRICE COMPARISONS NOW AND MID-1990s

As for prices, let’s just say that the higher-end grades of the 1980 Topps Rickey Henderson are handily winning over the 1989 Upper Deck prices of the Ken Griffey Jr. rookie. The PSA card sales tracker showed only several sales of the prized PSA 10 in 2021 for the 1980 Topps Rickey Henderson. Most sold within a range of $105,000 to $132,000. The outlier sales were seen as $76,100.00 in July 2021 and two higher prices during the early 2021 mania were $180,100.00 and $168,000.00. Here are other recent PSA sales trends:

  • A PSA 9 sold on Jan. 10, 2022 for $1,959 after two prior sales at the start of 2022 of $2,250 and $2,000… with three other sales in a range of $1825 to $2200. Kicking out the highest ($2,499) and the lowest (1,125) in Q4-2021 looks very similar to what has been seen so far this year.
  • The PSA 8 grades, the “zone” of the grades at 10,534 PSA 8 examples for our indexing purposes, has seen most sales in the last 30 days with prices between $285 and $325 once you avoid the outlier prices.
  • Lastly, the PSA 7 sales (still with 6,155 PSA 7 graded examples before notation grades) have sales of $120 to $145 in the last 30 days without looking at higher outliers.

There is an interesting view to take looking backwards in time. We keep a whole slew of price guides dating back to the 1990s, 1980s and even the 1970s to see what has changed more. The grading scales have definitely changed now that PSA, SGC, BGS and others grade millions of cards each year. Here is a side-by-side look into history from the old books.

1995 Beckett Baseball Card Price Guide (#17) in Near Mint to Mint condition and Excellent:

  • 1980 Topps Henderson $70 NRMT/MT and $32 EXC
  • 1989 Upper Deck Griffey $75 NRMT/MT and $19 EXC

AND MORE RECENT SPECIFICS…

We recently highlighted how there was an “investor lot” being offered up as 10 cards of the 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. rookie. The reality is that if you tried your hardest today, you would not be able to round up 10 different PSA 10 cards of the 1980 Topps Rickey Henderson rookie with only 25 examples of the 10 grade.

There is actually a pre-rookie card of Rickey Henderson. This and the pre-rookie Griffey reviews should only support the notion that pre-rookie cards are not as good as the true rookie cards. The 1979 TCMA Ogden A’s is the minor league card of Henderson shows that PSA has graded 812 examples of this card. Some 39 were graded perfect PSA 10, another 374 were PSA 9 and 293 were PSA 8 before half-grades and qualifiers. SGC has a combined population of just 71 graded examples of the 1979 TCMA cards (with 2 different Henderson cards listed).

The last two PSA 9 sales were $347.00 (1/11/2022) and $331.00 (11/24/2021). These were the most recent PSA 8 sales by date for Henderson’s pre-rookie card:

  • $154.39 (12/27/2021)
  • $135.00 (12/13/2021)
  • $204.00 (12/13/2021)
  • $132.50 (12/06/2021)
  • $193.49 (11/29/2021)

PSA 9 graded examples of the 1980 Topps Rickey Henderson card are selling routinely in a range of $1,800.00 to $2.050.00 over the last 30 days. Here is a look at the last PSA 8 graded examples by date:

  • $321.00 (01/10/2022)
  • $315.00 (01/10/2022)
  • $297.00 (01/09/2022)
  • $445.00 (01/09/2022)
  • $260.00 (01/06/2022)

Here are the last 5 sales by date in auctions for the 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey #1 graded PSA 10 (without autograph):

  • $2,015.00 (01/08/2022)
  • $1,927.00 (01/08/2022)
  • $2,175.00 (01/07/2022)
  • $2,049.00 (01/06/2022)
  • $1,999.99 (01/01/2022

While the latest pricing data and comparisons may start to feel redundant, the verdict seems pretty clear that the face of modern baseball card collecting belongs to the 1980 Topps Rickey Henderson #482.