Boy, these were bad. I always pictured a couple of guys sitting around drinking beer and messing with some kind of press, deciding on the spur of the moment to put out some baseball cards.
These were first offered in 1981 with the 1980 stats on the back. This was before there were umpteen card companies and Topps was the only other brand out there, at least on a national level. I'm actually surprised Donreuss made it past their first year. They did have some interesting ideas, like coming out with more than one card for the bigger stars like Reggie Jackson and the Diamond King inserts. As Oscar mentioned, the shipping errors were plentiful. I remember buying one pack that offered nothing but Chris Chambliss and Glenn Hubbard cards and another that was full of Phil Garner. Speaking of Phil Garner, his 1982 series card was printed backwards. At first I thought I got lucky and got something that might be worth some money. Not so much. They made a lot of errors that year, and I don't know it it's true or not, but I've heard they did it on purpose with the hopes of raising interest in the cards.
All that said, by 1983 the quality of the cards and the shipping had improved, but Fleer had also started to produce more by then and quickly became the preferred alternative to Topps. Donreuss had a bad reputation already and eventually got lost in the flood of cards that would come out in the next few years.
