Friday, July 18, 2008

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.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

A few things:

A couple of old pics, especially with the Padres & Braves

The Steve Carlton card has some kind of downtown Philadephia mural on the outfield wall, I've only see that on This Week in Baseball footage and one photograph. Any more info on this design? I didn't see it in any pics of the '80 World Series.

Only one White Sox and its frickin' radio announcer Ed Farmer?? Where's Harold Baines??

Spike Glidden said...

Thanks for posting the whole set--the 1981 Fleer stickes always worked for me. Maybe it was the atypical blue borders and willingness to acknowledge their sticker-ness by putting removable corners on the card fronts. If only my Mariners had several players worth putting on a sticker, the '81s would be more fun to collect!

Anonymous said...

Eddie Murray might have some of the greatest cards out there. I might have to seek the featured one in this story out simply for the face/hair combo.

Unknown said...

I have an unopened wax box of 1981 fleer star stickers if anybody's interested!

Fuji said...

I picked up 4 of these boxes... but only busted about 15 of these packs. The gum damaged the back card and collation was terrible. Oh well... at least I have some 30 year old wax in my collection.