30 Year Top 50: 1993 SP

#6- This set makes my top ten as the home to an important rookie card of the past 30 years and also as a key innovative set.  The rookie card is the second Derek Jeter rookie to make my countdown, along with the Stadium Club Murphy, and is a hotly pursued card on the secondary market.  The 1993 SP set also made a key contribution to the style element of modern baseball cards.  Search Ebay, or any secondary card market site for die cut baseball cards from 1992 or earlier and you will get nothing.  Search die cut cards from 1993 and later and you will see how many card companies, sets, and cards have used this design feature.

1993 SP Derek Jeter

I'll start with the simple part.  The 1993 SP set is home to one of the most important Derek Jeter cards.  Personally, I am big fan of the Stadium Club Murphy card, but this one always seems to get a little bit more attention from collectors.  Raw copies of this card actually are cheaper and easier to find than the Stadium Club Murphy card, but it seems like there are a ton of graded copies of this card that are floating around that always sell for hundreds of dollars.  The 1993 SP Derek Jeter card is also one of those safe bets in baseball cards.  Jeter is always going to be a popular player, and unlike some other modern players like Ken Griffey Jr., there doesn't seem to be a downward trend on the value of his cards as he gets late in his career.  

1993 SP Platinum Power Mark McGwire

The 1993 SP set also featured one insert set, Platinum Power, which was a twenty card set.  Collectors would usually see about two or three of these cards per box and were pretty popular at the time of the sets release.  They are still fairly popular, but they don't enjoy the level of popularity that some of the other dried up mid 90s chase cards enjoy, such as the 1993 Topps Finest refractors.  All of the cards in the set generally sell for less than $5 and are easy to find on the secondary market.  

1993 SP Platinum Power Ken Griffey Jr. 

The most important aspect of the Platinum Power set was that it was the first die cut card produced by a major card company.  The concept of die cut cards is pretty commonplace now and there are new die cut cards available every year.  However, this insert set in the 1993 SP set kicked off the whole fad.  If you are a modern collector take a few minutes at some point during the next week, flip through a few boxes of your cards and see how many cards you have in your collection that are die cut.  Or if you are a vintage collector, take a trip over to Ebay and type in 2012 die cut and see how many different Topps products last year used die cutting.