The first year that Upper Deck baseball cards were produced was 1989. Prior to Upper Deck entering the baseball card market, Topps had essentially monopolized the production of new baseball cards each year since the 1950s. In the late 1980s two entrepreneurs named Richard McWilliam and David Beckett saw an opportunity to challenge Topps’ dominance by producing a new brand of higher quality baseball cards.
McWilliam and Beckett had both worked for a toy and game company in the past and recognized that while Topps dominated the baseball card market, they felt the company had become complacent and were no longer innovating or improving the quality of their card designs and production process. McWilliam and Beckett believed that a new company could come in and produce cards that were of a higher graphical standard using newer printing technologies. They also wanted to market the cards more towards older collectors rather than just children.
In 1986, McWilliam and Beckett started working on their plan to launch Upper Deck as a new brand of baseball cards. They scouted out printing plants around the world to find one capable of supporting their vision for a higher quality card product. They eventually settled on a plant in Finland that could produce photo-quality, glossy cards on thicker cardstock. McWilliam and Beckett also hired graphic designers to develop innovative card designs that showed more vibrant colors and captured action shots of players.
They knew raising start-up capital to launch a new baseball card company would be challenging given Topps domination of the market. However, McWilliam was successful in attracting early financial backing from his contacts in the toy and game industry. With roughly $1 million in initial funding, Upper Deck was incorporated in 1988 and began preparations for their highly anticipated first set of cards to be released in 1989.
For their debut 1989 set, Upper Deck signed multi-year exclusive contracts with several star players like Ken Griffey Jr., Mark McGwire, and Nolan Ryan to only appear in Upper Deck cards. This gave them huge marketing appeal and cache among collectors. Their cards featured state-of-the-art graphical designs printed on a high quality, thicker cardstock not seen before in the industry. Each pack contained only 12 cards yet cost $1, double the price of a Topps pack, but collectors didn’t seem to mind paying more for the upgraded product.
The 1989 Upper Deck release was a massive success, vastly exceeding even McWilliam and Beckett’s most optimistic projections. While Topps sold around 3.5 billion cards that year, Upper Deck produced only 110 million cards yet captured over 10% of the entire baseball card market. The brand attracted many lapsed adult collectors back to the hobby who were wowed by Upper Deck’s graphical innovations and premium feel. Star rookie cards like Ken Griffey Jr.’s skyrocketed in value, becoming some of the most coveted modern cards ever made.
This sudden success changed the landscape of the baseball card industry overnight. After decades of complacency, Topps was spurred to action to improve it’s own product to better compete. In subsequent years both companies engaged in intense bidding wars over player contracts. By the early 1990s, most star players had shifted to exclusive Upper Deck deals. Meanwhile, a slew of smaller competitors also jumped into the market trying to emulate Upper Deck’s formula.
While McWilliam had envisioned Upper Deck as a boutique brand operating on smaller sales volumes than Topps, their early dominance stunned even him. The company grew rapidly throughout the 1990s as demand remained high. Maintaining quality control on a vastly larger volume scale proved challenging. After a decade of leading innovation in the baseball card industry, Upper Deck’s market share began declining in the late 1990s and early 2000s amid quality and production issues.
Still, Upper Deck left an indelible mark. Their 1989 debut reignited collector passion and changed baseball card design, quality standards, and business practices forever. The brand attracted a whole generation of new collectors and keeps the hobby vibrant to this day. So while its glory years may have passed, Upper Deck deserves the distinction of revolutionizing the baseball card industry when it released its trailblazing inaugural set back in 1989, the first year Upper Deck baseball cards graced the collectibles market.
