1981 Fleer Baseball Star Stickers

In addition to releasing their first baseball card set in nearly 20 years and producing their annual baseball logo stickers in 1981, Fleer also produced a sticker set featuring players which was entitled Fleer Baseball Star Stickers.

The fronts have a blue border while the backs have the same design as the 1981 Fleer Baseball cards, except for a different card number and the fact that the player's name, team, and position are printed in light blue instead of yellow:


The box says there are 125 top stars, but the set also includes 3 checklist cards (with an additional picture of Jackson, Brett & Schmidt), making the total set size 128 cards.


The wrapper is amusing in that it indicates that the packs contain "live" color photos (as opposed to an alternative other than live). I guess since Fleer had produced sticker sets with cartoons on the back of the stickers the previous 2 years, they wanted to make it clear these were photos of current players.

Since Fleer was allowed to sell baseball cards with gum at this point, these packs also contained gum like the 1981 baseball card set, and did not include logo stickers.

At the time this set was released, these were considered to be a somewhat exclusive item and somewhat hard to find - much more so than the 1981 Topps Baseball Stickers which seemed to be very plentiful:




Unlike the Topps set, there was no sticker album for the Fleer stickers.

Here is a look at the complete 1981 Fleer Star Sticker Set:





Fleer would experiment with a few different formats (stamps, sticker strips, mini stickers) for a few years before returning to standard baseball card sized player stickers in the mid 1980s.