Is Alex Madrid’s Baseball Card Worth A Lot?

Nope. The Alex Madrid 1989 Donruss card – error or otherwise – is not worth much. There you go, simple answer. But, like the 1990 Fleer Jose Uribe phenomenon, a worthless baseball card has seemingly risen in value and popularity simply because someone listed one on eBay for an astronomically high selling price. Whether a joke, money laundering scheme, or attempted market manipulation, others saw it and the hoopla ensued.

While there are always more than a few listings with price tags in the thousands, or even tens of thousands, there are far more listings of the Alex Madrid 1989 Donruss ERROR card of around $2-$3. And that’s for a nickel card.

Here’s the deal about this “error” card that supposedly worth boatloads of cash. It’s not a true error, in the sense that the hobby has defined errors. The hobby has defined error cards – especially error cards that are significantly more valuable – as a card that went to production with an error of some sort (not printing flaw or condition issue, but printing error – missing information, incorrect information, etc.), but the error was found, that version pulled off the production line, and a corrected version continued into production. Error cards are only worth more if they are significantly rarer than the corrected versions. If there are no corrected versions – i.e., and error on the card went through the entire production run, or if the error version is not significantly more scarce than the corrected version, then there’s really nothing special about it. It’s just a card with an error on it.

The junk era of baseball cards (mid 1980s through mid-1990s or thereabouts) is jam packed with errors. If one were to take a stack of cards from 1989 Donruss and go through them with a fine-toothed comb, vetting the stats and information on the backs, I’d bet one would find errors on at least a quarter of the cards. Most of which were never corrected, so they are just the basic version of the card.

With the Madrid specifically, the “error” that is mostly being claimed is that on the back of the normal card, in the upper right, there’s a period after “Leaf Inc”, and that the error card omits this period. Others say the error is that it lists “Leaf” rather than “Donruss”. Leaf owned Donruss at the time, it’s not an error. And with a deep dive into it, there appear to be SIX DIFFERENT VARIATIONS of the Alex Madrid card. Major credit to Dave Farquhar for diving in and figuring out just how inconsistent 1989 Donruss cards are. So many variations (if that’s what you want to call them – better than errors), it’s a great read.

Now, 30 years after this particular card was produced, the Alex Madrid ERROR! card is all over eBay for exorbitant amounts. But this is happening a lot of junk era cards. No one really knows why, and I’m hoping to dive into the phenomenon more and try to figure out what is really happening here.

One thing is fairly certain though, while there are Alex Madrid baseball cards listed for thousands of dollars, the vast majority of cards are SELLING for $1 – $5. Still too high in my opinion, but there ya go. Similar to the Uribe card, I believe that these cards are taking on a cult status – which strangely may actually be raising the collectibility and desirability of the cards! People are buying them – not because they think they are worth a fortune, but because they know it’s a scam and ridiculous and they think it’s hilarious! I’m kinda there with them!

This certainly begs a question – are inflated values of Alex Madrid, Jose Uribe and others due to continued market manipulation? Or due to a rising popularity of the cards taking on a cult-like status? The answer is yes to both. Certainly market manipulation (intentional or otherwise) drove the interest in the cards to begin with. Certainly some of this is still happening – i.e., scammers (that’s what I’ll call them) who are legitimately trying to sell these cards for hundreds (or more) of dollars, using key words and phrases like “ERROR!” and “SUPER RARE!” and “HOTTEST ERROR CARD” and such. None of these things are really true and these guys are just trying to scam people. But there are people who may want to pick these cards up for a couple bucks each to have as part of their laugh-out-loud cult classic collection of cards.

So, don’t fall for the scam. I promise, more and more of these random junk era cards will continue to pop up with people claiming they are special in some way. They’re not. If you want to pick these up because of their seemingly cult status – go for it – heck, I’m even considering a new PC of PSA10 Cult Classics! – but don’t pay more than a couple bucks. Don’t be part of the continued manipulation of the market. Heck, if you want to spend more than that, buy a couple 1989 Donruss hobby boxes: you’re certain to pull a handful of the Madrid cards – pack fresh!