Why Is the 1991 Topps Don Zimmer Baseball Card Selling For So Much?

Why is the 1991 Topps Don Zimmer baseball card selling for $10 to $20 on eBay? A card featuring a manager from one of the most over produced baseball card sets of all time? Most collectors wouldn’t pay a penny for this card. For the record, my rate on cards like this is a half penny.

Here we are in 2021, and just like that another head scratching surge on pricing from a random trading card. The Allen & Ginter Egg card is so yesterday, what’s today’s hot seller? It’s a 1991 Topps Don Zimmer, apparently.

How did we get here? That’s what I am trying to find out, and it seems nobody really knows. We’ve seen this in the past most famously with the 1990 Fleer Jose Uribe. The sales are true, and in the past I’ve sold about a dozen of them for $5 to $10 each. The 1989 Donruss Alex Madrid is another random favorite that often catches a couple bucks on eBay.

Why Is the 1991 Topps Don Zimmer Selling?

So, why is this 1991 Topps Don Zimmer selling for $10 to $20? It’s a hobby mystery with only rumors, speculation, and potentially tall tales….until now. There were two comments possibly explaining the mystery behind the 1991 Topps Don Zimmer baseball card surge.

First, somebody mentioned a 1991 Topps Desert Shield card recently sold for around $15, which is market rate for one of these rare cards. Maybe others, not knowing what they had, thought any and all 1991 Topps Don Zimmer cards were worth $15. With the massive amount of new collectors in the hobby this could be plausible.

The second rumor mentioned is that a “cook group” or a Reddit thread randomly pumped this card akin to the Game Stop stock explosion, or Dogecoin, or a number of players and rookie cards that suddenly take off. This seemed pretty logical. This is 2021 and it’s a really weird place in the hobby.

And then when I originally published this blog post, some comments dropped some information that might explain the mystery. It’s origin story comes from a popular podcast. It’s called the F**KFACE Podcast.

“We need to pick a (expletive) baseball card that is going to be the object of our focus,” The F**KFACE podcast said in a February episode. As podcast hosts Geoff, Gavin, and Andrew discussed picking a particular Don Zimmer card they wanted to find a manager common. The Desert Shield Don Zimmer card is also mentioned in the episode.

Essentially, the goal of the F**KFACE podcast is to get the 1991 Topps Don Zimmer baseball card to the top of the Ebay watch lists and Cardboard Connection hot list.