The Brief, Memorable Reign Of The Diamond King, Baseball Cards’ Most Iconic

Elementary school ends, and the Harlem kid heads right to the candy store. The baseball cards are out. The kid opens a pack of Topps, is greeted by the intoxicating aroma of cardboard and gum. (Yes, he eats the gum.) Flipping through, everything stops. He’s stunned by the drawings, a breathtaking departure from the normal, staid shots. These cards move him. It’s 1952. 

“Years go by, and then I’m into the field,” Dick Perez recalled nearly 70 years later. “And I said, “Why not bring that thing that excited me? Why not bring that back?”

From 1982 to 1996, Perez painted an astounding 400 ballplayer portraits for Donruss’s Diamond Kings subset. Those cards, evocative watercolor portraits of ballplayers hand-picked by Perez and his longtime friend and business partner, Frank Steele, glowed among the posed shots of weary men with frozen smiles or standard game action pics that made up the rest of those sets, and every other set of the era. The cards balanced an unusual visual grandness with the randomness that defines the experience of opening a pack of cards. Yes, you might get a superstar, but also every team was represented in the set, and not every team had a superstar, and Perez hated to repeat himself. And so you might pull a luminous and stylized portrait of, say, Ivan Calderon or Glenn Hubbard. During a time when sports coverage was largely limited to a fan’s part of the country and the odd national game, Diamond Kings elevated unfamiliar players and recognizable all-stars alike to something very much like art.

Those cards could only have existed at that moment in the industry, when a number of new companies were trying new things—not always wisely, or well—in what had become a staid business. At a moment in the trading card business defined by a headlong glut of tossed-off cards, Perez and Donruss somehow managed to make something memorable.

“There’s always some guy who’s the bridge between the old and the new,” says illustrator Tom La Padula, “That’s an argument you can have over a lot of beers. But he was. Perez was that bridge.” 

In 1980, Fleer, a struggling card manufacturer, won an antitrust suit against Topps. For years, Topps had been the only player in the industry. With that ruling, the field for baseball cards was wide open. 

Back then, Bill Madden, the longtime baseball columnist for the New York Daily News, wrote a baseball cards column for The Sporting News. He recognized that the ruling was huge and called Marvin Miller, the longtime executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, who died in 2012. Here’s how Madden remembers the conversation:

“We’re giving out our first license in a few weeks,” Miller said.

“That’s for Fleer, right?

“No, it’s for Donruss.”

“Donruss? What is that?” 

Donruss was a subsidiary of General Mills. It did have experience in non-sports cards and decided to get into the baseball…