The 1989 Fleer baseball card set holds a significant place in baseball card history as one of the most sought after unopened wax packs and boxes from the modern era. The 1989 Fleer set was the third entry in Fleer’s challenge to the dominance that Topps had long held in the baseball card market. While Fleer inserts had been included in many previous sets, the 1989 version took the insert chase to another level with the inclusion of special parallel “Traded” cards that pictured players in the uniforms of their new teams from offseason trades. This innovative idea caught on with collectors and helped drive interest in the 1989 Fleer set.
What has really cemented the 1989 Fleer cards’ status as one of the all-time great modern baseball card sets are the unopened wax boxes and packs that are incredibly scarce to find nowadays in pristine, sealed condition over 30 years later. When Fleer produced the 1989 set, they printed far fewer wax boxes than usual – some estimates put it at around one-third of a normal production year. Whether this was intentional to aid artificial scarcity or due to business issues at Fleer is not definitively known. But the low print run has had massive impacts on availability decades later.
Finding an unsearched, sealed wax box of 1989 Fleer baseball cards today would be an extremely rare occurrence. Most surviving sealed boxes have likely been cracked open and searched through by now. As years passed after 1989 and collectors began to realize how the low supply was creating high demand for unopened product, even loose packs were snatched up when found on hobby store shelves or in collecting memorabilia stores.
Within sealed 1989 Fleer wax boxes, collectors would find 360 total cards. This includes 36 packs with 10 cards per pack in a wax wrapper. The design of the 1989 Fleer set is considered bold and colorful for its time. The enlarged action photos bleeding off the edges of the cards helped make the players “pop” in an appealing way. The Traded insert set, which featured 34 total cards, was a huge success and collectors voraciously pursued finding players like Frank Viola, Rickey Henderson, and Willie Randolph in their new uniforms pictured on the special parallel cards.
Other key rookie cards and short printed variations that would excite collectors opening a wax box in 1989 include Ken Griffey Jr., Ben McDonald, Gregg Olson, and Tom Glavine rookies as well as a Sandy Alomar Jr. Traded insert card with a print run estimated around 1 in 6,000 packs. With modern grading services like PSA and BGS giving Ultra-Rare gem mint 10 grades to perfectly centered and surface versions of such scarce and significant rookie cards, the rewards for finding pristine examples in an unsearched wax box are immense.
There are 17 short printed Team USA cards in the base set that featured players who had recently competed in the 1988 Summer Olympics. These scarce variations can be found around 1 in every 10 boxes or even less frequently. The massively popular Ken Griffey Jr. was also inked much lighter in error on some of his base cards, making those remarkably rare as well. With skill and luck, finding multiple keys like this in one single wax box could result in a true treasure trove for any collector.
The holy grail for 1989 Fleer wax box breakers would be getting their hands on one of the elusive “Winner” inserts which rewarded owners with cash or prizes. Only 50 of these were inserted at astonishingly low odds estimated around 1 in every 350,000 packs. Any surviving unredeemed Winners would be worth a small fortune on their own today. To potentially pull one of these from an unsearched wax box would be a truly historical find.
As a result of the pristine supply and high-end nature of the cards inside, uncracked wax boxes of 1989 Fleer baseball cards can fetch astronomical prices when they very rarely come up for auction. In today’s boom market, a sealed 24-pack box has sold for over $10,000. A full, unsearched wax box in blister wrap could command awinning bid in the $25,000-50,000 range or potentially higher from certain elite collectors. At collector shows, you may not see another wax box change hands for years after one sells.
The 1989 Fleer baseball card set has become assuredly one of the most coveted of modern issues due to the business factors that led to low print numbers and years of depletion from collections. For patient collectors with means, hoping to discover what treasures an unsearched wax box from 30+ years ago could still hold within the sealed wrapping and untouched packs is a dream that likely keeps the set in such high demand. As the hobby market continues to evolve, chances are the 1989 Fleer’s collectible legends will only be further cemented for new generations of sportscard aficionados.
