While not so prevelent these days, the period from 1986-1993 (the boom years of baseball card collecting) saw a proliferation of unlicensed sets of baseball, basketball and football cards focusing mainly on the top stars and rookies of the period.  Widely known as "Broders" after a few early sets that were produced by sports photographer Rob Broder (which may even be a pseudonym, no one seems to know who he actually is or was), these sets were produced without the approval or license or either the major sports leagues or the related players associations.

       Legalities aside, for the most part, there were some very nice sets with great photograph and vivid colors.  Most were full bleed with minimal text on the front and usually little more than the card number and possibly set series listed on the back.  Those produced by Pacific Cards & Comics often had a single season's worth of statistics on the back.   Only the first couple of issues actually referenced the Broder name, and after 1987 there were typically no indicators of who actually produced the sets aside from cryptic set titles like the 1987 Indiana Blue Sox set or the 1987 Press Box sets.

       Since these sets were unlicensed and therefore the publication was in violation of copyright and trademark laws relating to the players likenesses and team logos.  Some sets used to be listed in older copies of the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards, but those have since been removed to make room for the endless parallel sets of recent sets from Topps and Upper Deck.  The goal of this particular project is to document the checklists for the baseball sets from the 1986-93 time period and attempt to track down how these sets were distributed and if possible, in what quantities.  They do show up from time to time on eBay, but beyond the occasional player collector dedicated websites, there is very little information about these sets on the web.  I hope to remedy that.

       I'll begin by posting everything I can find regarding these sets, but I can definitely use the assistance of all of you out there in TV Land!  If you have any of these sets and would be willing to share any information (or even some scans), I would greatly appreciate it.  My ultimate goal is to see if Sportlots.com would be willing to include these in their system so they could be made more readily available to the collecting public instead of just sitting idle in collectors and dealers storage boxes.  If you have any information to share, please shoot me an email at daclyde at gmail dot com.

       And as Don Mattingly was very much the darling of MLB and the baseball card collecting world around 1987-88, it's tough to find a set in which he wasn't prominently featured.

NOTE:  I'm not claiming all of these checklists are 100% accurate, the only way to do so would be actually to see each card to verify it falls into the correct set.  This data has been gathered from many sources to include old newsgroup postings, collector and dealer websites, auction listings and with the help of several great traders at TheBenchTrading.com.