Sunday, March 2, 2008

Fleer Baseball Cloth Patches - Atlanta Braves

First up on our review of the Fleer Cloth Patch variations is the Atlanta Braves.

For each series of Cloth Patches, Fleer produced 2 sets of patches per team (for a total of 4 patches - 2 on each sticker). One sticker contained patches with the city name on top and team logo underneath and the other sticker contained a patch of the cap monogram / logo on the top and the team's name as it appeared on their uniform on the bottom.

For the Braves, the City/Logo patches can be found with 2 variations: the first has the Braves logo in an all white circle and the other has a 2 tone background of white and blue. The all white background is the earlier of the 2 patches.

For the cap / team name patches, there are 3 variations:

I believe that the patch on the top left of the picture is the earliest patch given that the red outline around Braves matches the design on the all white logo sticker. The sticker on the bottom was the last variation given it corresponds to the caps that the Braves wore in the mid-'70s.

I am going to refrain from trying to put exact dates on when certain stickers were issued. Since the patches aren't dated and were released over a 9 year timeframe, its difficult in most cases to say when one design ended and another began. In some cases where logos were completely redesigned or when a team moved its possible to identify when the stickers likely changed, but otherwise short of breaking open packs from each year, I can't say for certain which years certain stickers were produced.

I've got a pretty good idea of the order in which the variations would have been released, but I just can't say for certain the exact years a given sticker was produced.

My goal with these posts is to present the known variations so that anyone interested in collecting these either as full sets or for a particular team has an idea of what is available and what to be looking for.

2 comments:

Barn Owl said...

great lil blog ~ keep up the great archiving work ~

Fleerfan said...

Thanks for the note! I'm glad to see that my efforts to catalog these various releases is being enjoyed.