Pinnacle Brands was once one of the five major baseball card companies. The brand went bankrupt in 1998, selling their baseball card business operations and properties to Donruss who in turn folded the baseball cards portion of brand. Originally the group was known as Major League Marketing and their first set was 1986 Sportflics. Sportflics utilized lenticular printing techniques to show a magic motion using three different pictures of the same player.
The next major set released by MLM was the 1988 Score set. It was the first set to feature full color photos on both the card front and back.
In 1992, the Pinnacle set was added as a high end set duplicating the concept they had originally utilized in their football cards. In 1993, the Select set was also added as a product in between Pinnacle and Score.
Over the years the company would become known as Score and then Pinnacle Brands. By 1997, the company was throwing every idea at the market and by 1998 they were dire financial straits. The last set that Pinnacle Brands had planned to release was 1998 Rookies and Stars, that turned out to be quite a hit for Donruss. After 1998, Donruss Playoff would continue to use Score and Pinnacle for football releases, but they did not reintroduce any of the Pinnacle Brands sets when they started producing baseball cards again in 2001.
Main Baseball Card Sets[]
- Sportflics Baseball
- Score Baseball
- Pinnacle
- Select Baseball