Published February 16, 2026 | By Martina F, Collectors MD Community Member
If you are of a certain age, you will likely agree that collecting “the rainbow” once meant collecting 1989 Donruss baseball cards. Every package you opened was a colourful tribute to a magical time in baseball. You’d flip through a pack and find names like Dave Stieb, Jose Canseco, Barry Bonds, Don Mattingly, Cal Ripken Jr., Andrew Dawson, Ozzie Smith, Mark McGwire, Fred McGriff, and maybe even a couple of rookies named Ken Griffey Jr., Gary Sheffield, or Randy Johnson, among others. What a time to be alive!
The 1989 Donruss set consisted of 660 base cards, issued in one series, and included subsets like MVP, Diamond Kings, and the favorite Rated Rookies. Because of a variety of printing errors, there are some cards that have up to 4 different variations. I call those “unintentional rainbow parallels”, so that I come across as fancy and very knowledgeable to the young card dealers of today. (I’m kidding, but if you want to try it, let me know how it goes.)
All joking aside, the 1989 Donruss set suffered from many of the same printing debacles that 1980’s cards were known for: off-centered cards, miscut cards, errors with where a period or comma was placed, and misquoted stats. None of that mattered to me as a 10-year-old girl. I just wanted to collect the entire set – “the rainbow”!
My first Daily Reflection recounted how I chased after the Jose Canseco card all summer, and to this day, every time I see a package of 1989 Donruss, I am tempted to purchase it. We are used to so many shiny, sparkly, numbered/autographed/short printed cards these days, that when you open a box or pack of cards from the Junk Wax era, you can’t help but feel the magic in their simplicity.
The extent of the excitement or “chase cards” came from the Diamond Kings subset, and you felt like the Queen (or King) of the schoolyard if you managed to get all of them before the other kids did. Diamond Kings were so special. In fact, years later when they became more short-printed or inserts, I still really dug the design and Dick Perez’s iconic artwork that was featured on the cards.
Are there more valuable sets? Absolutely. Are you going to retire if you finally manage to get all the Diamond Kings in 1989 Donruss? Absolutely not. But are you going to have a great time assembling a colourful rainbow that won’t cost you a fortune in a set filled with Hall of Famers? Totally.
Do you have any favorite cards from the 1989 Donruss Set? Reach out and let me know!
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Not every collection needs to be valuable to be meaningful. Some just need to feel like home.
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