Ballstreet was in a gray area. No MLB license of the cards but they were part of a magazine so it sort of slid by as allowed editorial content just in card form.
Personally I like some of the unlicensed cards. I collect them when I find them cheap.
I think many of them were as good as the products from the licensed companies, at least one issuer -Pacific- eventually did get a license. And there was an actual Broder. There were a few sets he did that were unlicensed, and some that were a bit gray area like a japan baseball set mostly showing american players.
There was a big push by the companies to stop the production, sort of an early look at the whole rights management thing.
What I found silly was the ways they went after them.
Basically forcing Becketts to not list them was one tactic, then getting writers to denounce them as having no quality and no value since the issuer could just print more. Which is something Upper Deck got caught doing and last I looked they're still listed.
There were abuses, sets "limited" to 15,000, but available with red borders until they sold out then another color later. (Another thing that sounds familiar, like 8 different refractors for each set....)
The later ones took advantage of a loophole. Most league and player licensing groups decided that the minimum number of players they'd license was 8 or something like that. And that they wouldn't try to shut down the unlicensed stuff with fewer players.
And that's part of where Star company got into things, and when Pacific made the Ryan and Seaver sets. And the unlicensed stuff became basically groups of single cards rather than sets.
The licensing enforcement was pushed off onto the teams and individual players and their agents who usually didn't have time to chase down some guy selling a few thousand cards of a popular player out of his garage.
The publicity smearing them and lack of listing in most of the guides meant they died out quietly as demand faded.
Steve B
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