I have an ongoing fake feud with PreWarCards on X, mostly because he’s PreWarCards and I’m PostWarCards, and really that’s all the justification two adults need.
So this post is dedicated to him.
Because while he gets tobacco cards, caramel cards, obscure regional issues and all the other dignified cardboard of the early hobby, I get things like 1988 Score Baseball.
And you know what? I’m good with that.
Yes, 1988 Score was massively overproduced. Yes, you can still buy most of the cards for practically nothing. But cheap and plentiful doesn’t mean bad. Score’s first baseball set had fantastic photography, a surprisingly interesting group of variations and related issues, and at least one card that filled a strange hole in the hobby.
So, PreWarCards, this one’s for you: five reasons 1988 Score Baseball is awesome.
1. The Photography Might Be the Best of the 1980s
Start flipping through 1988 Score and the photography is what immediately jumps out.
Score used tight crops, unusual angles and lots of action shots. Batters are photographed in their recognizable stances and swings. Pitchers are shown in their deliveries and follow-throughs. And cards like Matt Nokes #15 (who ReggieCleveland highlighted on the Collectors Forums) look dramatically different from what collectors were accustomed to seeing in the middle of the 1980s.
A year before Upper Deck debuted and changed collectors’ expectations for baseball card photography, Score was already demonstrating just how good a baseball card could look when the photograph was allowed to be the star. The six different border colors may scream 1988, but the photography holds up remarkably well.
2. Score Gave Us Reggie Jackson as a Baltimore Oriole
One of my favorite cards in the entire set is #501 Reggie Jackson, part of a five-card tribute covering Jackson’s career.
The sequence takes collectors from Oakland to Baltimore to New York to California and finally back to Oakland. And that Baltimore card is particularly great because Jackson spent just one season with the Orioles, in 1976, making cards depicting him in an Orioles uniform surprisingly scarce.
It’s exactly the sort of card I love: not valuable, not particularly rare, but historically interesting, and a card that probably wouldn’t exist if Score hadn’t decided to devote five cards to Jackson’s career. Find copies for sale on eBay by clickig here.
3. The 1988 Score Samples Are Actually Pretty Tough
Regular 1988 Score cards may exist in approximately every attic in America, but 1988 Score Samples are another story.
Score produced a 12-card sample set to show dealers and prospective buyers what its new baseball cards would look like (click here to see if there are any examples on eBay right now). Because the samples were prepared early, the cards show a row of zeroes for the players’ 1987 statistics. Some also have different border colors from their eventual regular-issue counterparts (like Larkin).
The checklist includes players such as Barry Larkin, Wade Boggs and Mark Langston, and they make for a fun collecting challenge within a set most collectors otherwise assume contains nothing difficult to find.
4. There’s a Glossy Version—and Only 5,000 Sets Were Made
Here’s another 1988 Score issue that’s considerably scarcer than you might expect.
Score produced a complete 660-card 1988 Score Glossy set. The cards look like the regular issue but have a UV coating on the fronts and were distributed only as factory sets through Major League Marketing hobby accounts. You can find >100 graded copies for sale on eBay.
And Score reportedly made just 5,000 sets.
For some perspective, Beckett estimates that 40,000 to 60,000 1988 Fleer Glossy sets were produced. So while nobody is going to confuse regular 1988 Score with a scarce issue, its glossy counterpart is legitimately limited by junk-wax-era standards.
5. Score Packed a Lot Into Its First Baseball Set
The 660-card base set was only the beginning.
Packs included one of 56 lenticular “Magic Motion” trivia cards, boxes had four additional cards printed on the bottom, and Score produced two 40-card Young Superstars sets featuring players such as Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco, Will Clark, Matt Williams and Ken Caminiti. Series I Young Superstars cards (click here for PSA graded examples for sale on eBay) were also distributed through rack packs.
Add in the Samples, Glossy sets, Rookie/Traded set, Reggie Jackson tribute, Rookie Prospects and Highlights, and there’s actually a pretty deep little 1988 Score collecting universe hiding behind all those seemingly endless wax boxes.
1988 Score Is Awesome
None of this changes the fact that regular 1988 Score Baseball is incredibly common. You’re probably not funding your retirement with that stack of Tom Glavine rookies you’ve been holding onto since 1988.
But that might actually be part of what makes the set so good today.
For very little money, you get some of the best baseball card photography of the decade, Hall of Famers and stars everywhere, an excellent Reggie Jackson tribute and enough obscure samples, glossy cards and other related issues to give collectors something interesting to chase.
So enjoy your Old Judges, Turkey Reds and century-old cardboard, PreWarCards.
I’ve got 1988 Score.
Happy Collecting!
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