1985 Topps Tiffany Mark McGwire ROOKIE #401 PSA 10 GEM MINT

Eight countries banded together for a 16-game Olympic baseball tournament at Dodger Stadium in 1984, putting the sport under that international spotlight for the first time in 20 years. More than 3,000 amateur players from America tried out for Team USA, and naturally, the best of the best won out—including a gargantuan first baseman named Mark McGwire, who highlights the Team USA subset in the 1985 Topps set and its Tiffany parallel. Sixteen players and coaches from Team USA appear in the 1985 Topps set. Some players, such as Barry Larkin and Will Clark, could not appear due to NCAA regulations. But McGwire, a first-round draft pick of the Oakland Athletics in 1984, had no such barriers. So, when Topps set up a photo shoot at Shea Stadium on a pre-Olympic exhibition tour that June, McGwire wanted to make sure he portrayed the part of a major leaguer—not a collegian or Olympian using an aluminum bat. “As a young kid, playing baseball, you think someday I might have a baseball card, right?” McGwire recalled in 2014. “I remember thinking, if that’s my first baseball card, I’m going to get a wood bat. I didn’t want to have an aluminum bat in my hand. I want to say it was a Louisville (Slugger). Even though I used Rawlings my whole life.” In addition to the base set, Topps produced a limited-edition, high-gloss Tiffany parallel in factory set form. Topps sent 5,000 Tiffany sets to dealers around the country, and only about 2% of McGwire’s Tiffany rookie cards have survived in PSA 10 condition—an exceptional rate considering how times those cards changed hands in the late 1990s. Thirteen years after its initial release, McGwire’s 1985 Topps card saw a rapid spike in popularity like few cards in the industry had ever experienced. According to dealers at the time, McGwire’s base rookie card routinely sold for around $25-$40 before the 1998 season, with the Tiffany version about double in price. But as “Big Mac” kept pace with Roger Maris’ single-season home run record, his Olympics rookie card became increasingly popular with collectors. By the end of the year, hobby shops and dealers could not keep the cards in stock, even as prices soared to ten times more than their preseason values. In one weekend edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper in September 1998, the classified listings featured upward of 30 advertisements from individuals looking to buy or sell McGwire’s rookie card. On the same weekend one year earlier, only two general sports card-related classified advertisements appeared in the paper. McGwire broke into the majors in 1987, slugging a rookie-record 49 home runs on the way to American League Rookie of the Year honors, and over his first ten full seasons, he hit more homers than any player in baseball—including a league-leading 52 in 1996. Over the next three seasons, he hit at least 58 home runs each year to become the first player to hit 50+ homers in four straight seasons. That included 70 in 1998, a single-season record that stood until 2001, and another 65 in ’99, the fourth-highest single-season total of all-time. Also, in ’99, he reached 500 career home runs faster than any player in history, getting there in 314 fewer at-bats than Babe Ruth needed. His ‘85 Topps Tiffany rookie card offers collectors a chance to remember an eager young player who hoped to leave his mark on the game—and on hundreds of baseballs that flew into the stands. The certification number on this card has been checked against the third-party grader's online database and is active as of 11/14/2023.