How Baseball America Helped Upper Deck Make The Famous Ken Griffey Jr. 1989 Rookie Card

The year was 1988. The sports card industry was booming, led by Topps, Donruss and Fleer. A new company called Score had just put out their first major set, and a new brand called Upper Deck—named both for upper-deck stadium seating and the company’s goal to be the top “deck” in the card world—was preparing for a 1989 launch.

Upper Deck wanted to be different. Although many of the baseball card designs leading up to that time would prove to be iconic, cards themselves were not yet the sleek, visceral experience they would become in later years.

And so, part of Upper Deck’s mission statement was to try new things. Bolder photography. Sleeker packaging. Unique approaches to the stock and gloss of their cards. Scarcer quantities than the immense number of prints being pushed by the competition during the so-called “junk wax” era.

Also on Upper Deck’s to-do list to make a splash? Making a rookie card No. 1 on the checklist for their first-ever set.

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It was a risk. Oftentimes, the card No. 1 in previous sets was an established veteran. What if this rookie never panned out? It could potentially taint the new brand forever.

Still, the bold decision was made. As 1988 went on, a young Upper Deck employee named Tom Geideman was tasked with putting together the preliminary checklist for the initial 1989 set, including finding just the right prospect to feature as the first card in the history of the brand.

And that’s where Baseball America came in.

To help make his check list decisions, Geideman looked through a copy of the BA print magazine. He came away with a list of our top four prospects at the time: Gregg Jefferies, Gary Sheffield, Sandy Alomar Jr. and Ken Griffey Jr.

This was a big deal for Baseball America. In the late ’80s, prospecting wasn’t really a mainstream “thing” yet. Though BA is a trusted stalwart in the prospect industry today, the publication was just eight years old at the time. Still, it was a valuable resource for Geideman as he was helping to shape the future of Upper Deck.

In 1988, Jefferies was already a two-time BA Minor League Player of the Year, and his ’88 cards were heating up the market. Alomar and Sheffield were also massively talented prospects who would go on to have standout MLB careers. But as the story goes, Geideman—a Seattle native and Mariners fan—instead took a calculated risk and went with the Griffey Jr. who, at the time, was not even yet guaranteed a spot on the Opening Day roster.

Ken Griffey Jr retook his 89 Upper Deck photo – and it’s the best thing ever pic.twitter.com/e86HpHZQPJ

— BaseballHistoryNut (@nut_history) November 19, 2024

The rest, as they say, is history. Griffey, of course, did wind up making Seattle’s Opening Day roster in 1989 and went on to have a Hall of Fame career. The card, featuring Griffey wearing an old blue and yellow Mariners hat and necklace, became iconic and helped instantly launch Upper Deck as a key player in the card collecting space. It also worked out for Geideman, who went on to have a hugely successful career for in the collectibles world.

Three more quick tidbits to know about the Upper Deck Griffey card:

1. Yes, it’s true, Griffey’s hat is in the photo was altered for the card. In the original photo, Griffey was wearing a cap of the Single-A San Bernardino Spirit. It was changed to a Mariners cap for the release.

2. Because the Griffey rookie card was No. 1 in the set, many copies were damaged during production because of its placement on the card sheets. So, Upper Deck had to print thousands of extra copies to send out for returned damaged cards. Even during the “junk wax” era of baseball cards when Upper Deck was strategically trying not to overproduce their cards, this famous card’s numbers still top them all.

3. Despite the overproduction, the Griffey rookie card remains hugely popular on the card market to this day. One popular hobby trend for collectors is try to “collect the Griffey rainbow.” While “collecting the rainbow” normally means collecting all parallel colors of a card—something not applicable for a 1989 set—in this case, it refers to collecting 10 versions of the Griffey card, each graded from a PSA 1 to a PSA 10.

Credit to the book Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession,” by Dave Jamieson for some of the information in this story