1991 Donruss

The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round, the wheels on the bus go.....ah, screw it. Donruss hit rock bottom in '91 with these turds. They hijacked the '86 design and released these in two series with two different color schemes so we could swear at them twice. This is one of those cases where the cards themselves say more than I ever could. The Cecil Fielder Diamond King card is not even worth showing.

The 1991 Donruss Detroit Tigers:

3 Cecil Fielder Diamond King

40 Milt Cuyler

65 Mark Salas

76 Mike Henneman

118 Alan Trammell

133 Lance McCullers

174 Lou Whitaker

188 Lloyd Moseby

230 Mike Heath

245 Jeff Robinson

286 Tony Phillips

301 Chet Lemon

342 Dave Bergman

353 Paul Gibson

397 Cecil Fielder MVP

422 Scott Aldred

451 Cecil Fielder

492 Jack Morris

508 Frank Tanana

549 Steve Searcy

563 John Shelby

605 Clay Parker

620 Edwin Nunez

661 Jerry Don Gleaton

675 Dan Petry

717 Walt Terrell

728 Gary Ward

729 Rob Deer

768 Travis Fryman

Donruss added their MVP insert cards to the base set in '91, and replaced them with Highlights insert cards, which weren't really insert cards either. They were just numbered like they were.

BC-5 Cecil Fielder

They continued with their Rookies box set, this time fooling us by making them red instead of green. Which makes me wonder. Series 1 had blue fronts and blue backs. Series 2 had green fronts and green backs. The Rookies had red fronts and......slightly different green backs? I don't know, and I don't care. Hell, we didn't even get the good Leiter brother.

6 Milt Cuyler

29 Mark Leiter

53 Rusty Meacham

The one saving grace is that this would be the end of the crappy era for Donruss. They would come up with some nicer cards in the years to follow, but good god are these awful.

EDIT: Thanks to my new friend and Tiger collector Jon for telling me about one I have missed.

1991 Donruss Grand Slammers:

7 Cecil Fielder

1986 Donruss

As usual, Donruss' photography was heads and shoulders above the competition. Year after year they had vibrant, colorful, and crisp pictures. But as would become a Donruss tradition, this was one ugly looking set. 

I remember buying these packs at Grand City by the bushel trying to pull a Jose Canseco RC. At one point I think I had 4-5 cards of each player in the whole set and only one Canseco card. Let me say now that I have hated that bastard a looooong time....

The 1986 Donruss Detroit Tigers:

1 Kirk Gibson Diamond King

49 Lou Whitaker

90 Chet Lemon

105 Jack Morris

125 Kirk Gibson

150 Chris Pittaro

171 Alan Trammell

212 Dan Petry

227 Willie Hernandez

247 Walt Terrell

272 Nelson Simmons

293 Aurelio Lopez

334 Lance Parrish

349 Barbaro Garbey

369 Darrell Evans

394 Randy O'Neal

415 Alejandro Sanchez

456 Bob Melvin

471 Dave Bergman

491 Frank Tanana

516 Bill Scherrer

537 Tom Brookens

578 Mike Laga

593 Larry Herndon

615 John Grubb

Donruss decided to jump into the mid-season boxed set frenzy in 1986 by issuing two different sets. The first was a short lived Highlights set (issued in 1986 an 1987 only) that contained a Jack Morris card. (With a picture obviously taken some time during his rookie year...) The second would become a Donruss staple for years to come, The Rookies, which contained an Eric King card. (Who we got in the deal that brought us Matt Nokes, and who we traded four years later for future White Sox GM Kenny Williams.)

Do not adjust your computer monitor. Yes, Donruss used even crappier colors than the blue they used for the base set.

1986 Donruss Highlights Detroit Tigers:

27 Jack Morris

1986 Donruss "The Rookies" Detroit Tigers:

27 Eric King

1986 was also the first year that box bottom cards made their debut. Donruss was the only company to feature any Tigers though. Your guess is as good as mine as to what "PC" stands for. 

PC4 Kirk Gibson

PC5 Willie Hernandez

The astute observer will have noticed that I have featured Aurelio Lopez as the top of all three 1986 checklists. This was the last year that he would appear as a Tiger on any baseball cards, and this past Sunday would've been his 60th birthday.

RIP Señor Smoke.