1985 Donruss Box Bottom Panel

In 1985 Donruss started a trend which the other card companies soon followed - putting bonus cards on the bottom of its boxes:

I always liked the Dwight Gooden card as its not often you see a picture of a player taken standing in the upper deck of the stadium. The nice thing about the box bottom cards was that the pictures were different from the regular cards. For example, here is Ryne Sandberg's 1985 Donruss card:


The card backs are numbered PC1 to PC3, with the Lou Gehrig puzzle instructing kids to carefully cut out the puzzle pieces to make their own puzzle (not like we didn't have enough of those puzzle pieces that were included in each pack already!)

Donruss was the only company to put cards on the bottom of its baseball card boxes in 1985, but as with nearly all innovations in the baseball card industry, once one manufacturer does something, the others quickly jump on the bandwagon.


Fleer and Topps would start doing the same thing with their baseball card boxes the following year.

In future posts, I'll be covering the various box bottom panels from Donruss, Fleer and Topps from the mid 1980's through the early 1990's. Get your scissors ready!