He had reached Double-A and was injured the year before

It is the most graded card in history. Over a hundred thousand copies have been slabbed between PSA and Beckett. And it exists because several things went right that had no business going right together.

The company did not exist eighteen months earlier

In 1988 there were four card companies: Topps, Donruss, Fleer and Score, the last of which had only just completed its first year.

Upper Deck came out of a card shop. The founding group was Bill Hemrick, a shop owner who saw the opportunity, Richard McWilliam, an accountant who built the financial structure, and DeWayne Buice, a major league pitcher who brought the credibility and the contacts inside the sport.

Their idea was not better photography. It was a hologram, printed on every card, to make counterfeiting impractical. That was the pitch that got them a licence by the end of 1988.

First cases shipped in February 1989. They had months, not years.

What they actually made

Eight hundred cards across two series, and every specification was an argument with the industry.

Thick white cardstock. High-gloss UV coating on both sides. Full-bleed photography that looked like magazine work rather than card printing. Foil wrappers that could not be steamed open and resealed. A hologram on the back of every card.

And no gum, which had been in packs since the 1930s.

The price told you everything. Topps was 45 cents a pack and 14 to 16 dollars a box. Upper Deck was a dollar a pack and thirty-five dollars a box.

Dealers called it lunacy. Then it sold out in days.

The decision

Now the part that makes this a story rather than a product launch.

Topps had a convention: card number one, and multiples of a hundred, were reserved for the biggest stars in the game. It was a hierarchy printed into the numbering.

Tom Geideman, a Upper Deck employee still in his teens and by one account eighteen years old, thought the first card of a new company's first set should go to a prospect instead.

He went through Baseball America and cut the field to four names: Gregg Jefferies, Gary Sheffield, Sandy Alomar Jr and Ken Griffey Jr.

He was a Mariners fan. He picked Griffey. The decision was made in late 1988.

Geideman later founded SA-GE, a producer of football draft-pick cards, which suggests the instinct was not a fluke.

What the gamble actually was

Worth being clear about how exposed that choice was at the time.

Griffey had reached Double-A. He had been injured the previous year. He had never played a major league game and there was no guarantee he would play one that season.

There was not even a usable photograph of him in a Mariners uniform, because he had never worn one. So Upper Deck took a picture of him in his San Bernardino Spirits minor league kit and used a Scitex graphics machine to strip a Mariners logo over the hat and adjust the colour.

The most famous card of its era shows a player in a uniform he had not yet been issued.

And Topps left him out entirely

Here is the mistake that made the card what it is.

Topps did not include Griffey in its 1989 regular set. That was consistent with their long practice of not issuing cards for players who had not yet appeared in the majors, and it was defensible right up until it was not.

Donruss and Fleer both included him. So did Upper Deck, at number one.

Then Griffey hit .359 in spring training, made the opening day lineup, and debuted on 3 April 1989 at nineteen.

A new company with a premium product and a rookie sensation on card number one, while the market leader had no card of him at all.

What it did to the hobby

Three things followed, and we have written about the consequences of all of them.

It started rookie fever. The hobby's attention shifted from established players to prospects, and by 1992 Bowman was putting minor league draft picks in sets in street clothes. Players began acquiring rookie cards years before they debuted.

It made premium normal. Every manufacturer had to answer the gloss, the photography and the security features, and prices rose accordingly.

And it was printed in enormous quantity. Estimates put at least a million of the Griffey in circulation. Ungraded copies trade for twenty to fifty dollars today, which for the defining card of a generation is a lesson in what overproduction and careful storage do together.

The part nobody mentions

It is card number one.

Our non-sport index found that the first card in a set grades worse than the rest of it, across four different franchises and four decades, because it sits on the outside of every stack a child makes.

The 1989 Griffey should have suffered the same fate. It largely did not, and the reason is the era: this is the card that everybody sleeved. The generation that bought it had been told cards were investments, and treated them accordingly.

So the card carries both mechanisms at once. It is the most exposed position in the set, printed in the era that stopped punishing that position.

And the counter-example

Because it would be easy to conclude that card number one is magic.

The 1992 Upper Deck Football set opened with Dan McGwire.

Same company, same slot, same reasoning. He threw 745 passes in the NFL and the card is worth almost nothing.

Being number one did not make Griffey. Griffey made being number one.

The thing worth sitting with

A card shop owner, an accountant and a relief pitcher started a company on the idea that a hologram would stop counterfeiting.

A teenager on the staff read a prospect magazine, shortlisted four players, and gave the first card to a nineteen-year-old who had never batted in the major leagues and whose photograph had to be edited to put him in the right hat.

Then the market leader forgot to include him at all.

This index tracks Griffey's early cards in every grade they are listed in. You can read how we work the numbers out.

Sources