1989 Upper Deck Baseball Card Unopened Box: A Relic of the Junk Wax Era
The 1989 baseball season was one that card collectors had been eagerly anticipating for years. It marked the arrival of the highly anticipated Upper Deck brand, the first serious competitor to Topps in decades. Upper Deck had made a big splash with its innovative manufacturing and design upon entering the baseball card market in 1989. Everyone wanted to get their hands on these shiny new cards that seemed to promise a higher quality product.
While Upper Deck caught the interest of collectors initially, the late 1980s are now remembered as the “junk wax era.” This was a time period where the baseball card market became oversaturated with mass-produced cards from numerous manufacturers. With seemingly unlimited supplies, the scarcity and value of individual cards plummeted. An unopened box of 1989 Upper Deck baseball cards, while coveted by collectors at the time, is now mostly a relic of this boom-and-bust period in the hobby.
Many attribute the start of the “junk wax era” to Donruss’ entrance into the baseball card marketplace in 1987. Donruss printed cards in much higher quantities than ever before seen. This prompted Topps, the long-time monopoly holder, to mass produce cards as well to compete. Fleer also joined the bidding war by 1987. With four major manufacturers all trying one-up each other by offering collectors more and more per pack/box, demand was artificially inflated for a few years. By the late 1980s, there were too many cards in circulation relative to collector interest. Prices began crashing across the board.
This glut of available cardboard gives the 1989 Upper Deck unopened box particular historical significance. While still hugely popular upon release, Upper Deck’s initial run would prove to be one of the most printed baseball card sets of all-time. Most estimates put the print run of the ’89 Upper Deck set north of 600 million total cards. To put that astronomical number in context, the much smaller Topps sets of the 1950s and 1960s are now wildly valuable precisely because they were produced in the millions rather than hundreds of millions.
Within the 1989 Upper Deck unopened box itself are 216 total cards. That’s 12 packs with 18 cards per pack. The designs and photo quality demonstrated a leap forward relative to competitors at the time. But upon closer inspection, most of the cards feature rather plain white borders and basic action shots. The production techniques, while advanced for 1989, seem somewhat low-fi by today’s standards. Still, Upper Deck cards possessed that superior semi-gloss sheen and were protected by the novel wax wrappers that collectors found so alluring in the beginning.
In addition to a complete base set that included rookie cards of future Hall of Famers like Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine, the ’89 Upper Deck box also offered multiple inserts with various parallel formats. These included “Diamond Kings”, “Field Generals”, and subject-themed subsets focusing on things like stolen bases, rookie Home Runs, etc. Overall set checklist varieties like serial numbered parallels or “Cooperstown” ultra-rare issues had not yet been conceptualized. But for its time, Upper Deck provided layers of complexity that collectors enjoyed exploring.
Perhaps most notoriously, the 1989 Upper Deck box contained what is considered by most to be the true all-time “holy grail” error card – the Ken Griffey Jr. rookie depicting him in a backwards hat. Only about 100 of these “backwards Griffey” cards are believed to exist in mint condition today. Due to the immense print run, even major mistakes like this are not nearly as valuable as they would be in a smaller era set. A PSA 10 “backwards” Griffey currently values around $15,000-20,000 on today’s market. By comparison, similar errors from the 1950s would fetch millions.
While an unopened 1989 Upper Deck baseball card wax box retains a high degree of cool vintage factor, its cash value as an investment remains depressed due to the immense amount printed during the junk wax era. A sealed box in pristine condition might reasonably expect to sell in the $300-500 range given today’s softening hobby market conditions. Its historical importance as a dividing line product between the hobby’s Golden Age and modern boom-bust cycles gives this particular unopened wax box enduring significance for collectors and students of the baseball card industry alike. For sheer scarcity and condition, specimens from prior decades still outpace late 1980s cardboard in terms of long-term collectible appreciation.
In walking the line between the old and new guard, the 1989 Upper Deck box captures perfectly both the euphoria and excess of a transitional period that changed the baseball card marketplace forever. Carefully preserved in its originally factory-sealed packaging, this timepiece from the junk wax age serves as a reminder of both the promise and peril that accompanied unprecedented printing runs. While monetarily depressed, its resonance as a emblem of an era ensures this once coveted unopened wax box will continue to fascinate chroniclers of the sporting collectibles industry for generations to come.
