I too would be interested in hearing of any production numbers that people have found. Specifically for Topps in the junk era '87-'94. Someone mentioned the population figure of a billion cards for Topps in the mid-80's. Would love to see a source for this.
According to the novel "Card Sharks" UD made 125,000 cases, which is approx. 1.4 billion cards, in the inaugural 1989 set. I'm not sure how accurate that is, but it was referenced in the book. As some may remember, there were rumors of extra press runs of star players and Griffey going straight to the dealers.
But let's say Topps made a billion cards of say, '90 topps. After you divide by 792, that makes 1.25 million of each card in the set. My guess is that the actual population was closer to 5-10 million of each card. That would make the total print run somewhere between 4-8 billion cards. That seems like an absurd number, yet just from what I see for unopened availability I feel like the production continued to grow each year from 1987-1992. I know the production figures were quite heavily guarded but does anyone have any info we could use to sort of indirectly piece this together?
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