[Bigdaddy]

It certainly was a unique time in the spring of 1981 as boys around the country had their choice of three different companies offering full sets of baseball cards.

From my experience, the Donruss cards were by far and away the worst cards I had ever seen. Blurry pictures, funky design, thin cardstock and the aforementioned packaging problems. Sometimes you'd get 3-4 of the same cards in a single pack, or maybe 10-15 in a box. And what was with multiple cards of the same players??? Just very poor execution, though they made great strides in 1982.

The Topps cards were mostly uninspiring except for the All-Star cards and the multi-player rookie cards, notably Fernando and Rock.

I personally thought Fleer produced a nice product and had the single player RC of Fernando (but no Raines). Some of the photos were really nice and the cards seemed to have a bit more gloss than Topps or Donruss. But Topps was the reigning champ, and you have to convincingly beat the champ to take the belt.