Recent Major League Performance

Most bloggers, myself included, make great use of Baseball-reference.com.  Its a tremendous resource, available for free at a moments notice.  It's hard to image how we got along before it became available.

I can imagine.  In the dark days before the internet, my #1 baseball resource was the back of baseball cards.  Before I started buying complete sets, I kept my all of my cards in alphabetical order.  When I was watching a game on TV and a question about a player came to me, I'd grab my shoeboxes and see if I had a card of the player.  Hopefully I did, and the back would usually answer the question.

Maybe that is why I never really liked what Donruss put out for baseball.  As far as I was concerned, they got off to a really bad start in 1981 with this...

....and only one year's worth of stats.  I need to see a player's entire career, not just one season.  The next year, things improved a bit, as Donruss started using the line "Recent Major League Performance."  Instead of one year, we get five years' worth.  But that's still not enough for me.  For Donruss, it was enough as they went with the same basic style on the back of the cards for the next ten years.  Boring!!

Change finally came in 1992 when Donruss switched to the glossy white cardstock like Upper Deck.  Unfortunately,  though a new design was used, the dreaded "Recent Major League Performance" tag was still there.

In 1994 the tag disappeared!!  But....Donruss didn't include complete year by year stats.  Instead, taking a giant step backwards, they went with just the '93 season

In 1995, Recent Major League Performance returned.

Finally, in 1996, after 15 years worth of inadequate stats, Donruss finally went to complete, season by season listings.  The complete stats remained through Donruss' final cards in 2005.  Of course, but the time they added the stats in 1996, the internet was growing and the need for the information wasn't as important as it was previously.