After more than a decade of Topps Heritage sets, not to mention various other vintage-themed sets, baseball cards featuring current ballplayers on classic designs almost seems overdone.
In 1984, it was a novelty. Baseball Cards Magazine included a Dale Murphy card in the style of Topps’ classic 1953 set with its August issue that year, starting a trend that continued through 1993.
I say “baseball card,” but the “repli-cards” you got in the magazine weren’t exactly the same as the cards you’d find inside a wax pack made by Topps, Donruss or Fleer. Instead of the poly-bagged promo cards you might find bundled with some current magazines, Baseball Cards Magazine included an insert stapled (or glued) into the spine that was printed on thin cardboard. If you wanted your new collectibles to look like baseball cards, you had to be pretty good with the scissors when you cut them out from the panel.
Despite the New York Mets’ popularity in the mid-1980s, no Mets player appeared on a Baseball Cards Magazine card until 1989, when the set was expanded to 72 cards (six per issue). That year’s set was inspired by the 1959 Topps design. Six Mets were included:
- 1 Keith Hernandez
- 10 Gregg Jefferies
- 26 Darryl Strawberry
- 38 Kevin McReynolds
- 43 Dwight Gooden
- 71 Dinger Duo (Howard Johnson, Kevin Mitchell)
(I think I have the panel with the “Dinger Duo” card, but I wasn’t able to locate my partial set from 1989. I will have to scan it once I do find it or see if I can get a cut-out copy to put with the rest of my multi-year Mets team set.)
PaulHadsall.com 
I bought a few issues of Baseball Cards here and there, and I subscribed to it for a year or so at the end. I’ve got a bunch of these cards still in sheet form and, naturally, only one Met… The 1993 Eddie Murray. Even though they’re not really worth anything, I’d still like to pick up the rest some day.
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I think I subscribed in 1990 and 1991 after buying the magazine on the newsstand when possible in 1989. I found my panels of the 1990 & 1991 cards, but the ones I have from 1989 must have gotten put away somewhere else.
These are the type of boom-era cards I still enjoy – they were common enough that I remember them, but not so common that I’ve seen a million of them in the years since then. 🙂
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