Sunday, September 3, 2017

1967 Fleer Baseball Emblems Cards & Cloth Patches

Since I first wrote about the 1967 Fleer Baseball Emblems Cards & Cloth Patches almost 10 years ago, I have slowly been making progress on finding images for this extremely rare set.  That process was helped greatly when John recently contacted me looking for some Emblem cards to complete his set, and was kind enough to share the cards in his collection:



 




John has done a great job in tracking down these rare cards, and is now only looking for the Senators and the Giants to complete the set. Even though there were 20 MLB teams at the time, there are only 19 team emblem cards and team cloth patches as the Houston Astros did not have an Emblem Card or Cloth Patch for either the 1967 or 1968 sets, as there were licensing issues that impacted not only Fleer, but Topps as well.

The main things that distinguish the 1967 team Emblem cards from the 1968 cards are 1) the fact that the card has the 1966 won - loss record on it (the 1968 card does not have a W/L record), 2) it says "SAVE ALL 19 CARDS" in Red (while the 1968 card has this printed in Black), and 3) the 1968 card contains a "Baseball Fact" while the 1967 card does not:

From the scans that John sent, it appears that the only team with a different logo in the 1967 set is the Reds, as they are the "Redlegs" with a head shot of Mr. Red on the 1967 card, and are the "Reds" with a full body shot of Mr. Red in 1968:


The other team with a significant change is the A's, who are in Kansas City in 1967, but in Oakland in 1968, although the logo remains the same.

For a more detailed look at the 1968 set, please see my review of the set here.

As for the Cloth Patches, the 1967 patches are almost impossible to find.  In the nearly 10 years since I first wrote about these, I've only been able to find pictures of 8 of the 19 teams.

The 1967 Cloth Patches are nearly identical to the 1968's except for the fact that the 1968's include the directions "PEEL OFF HERE" and dotted lines around the logos while the 1967's do not.

Here is a comparison showing the differences on the cloth patches between 1967 and 1968:



In addition to the Orioles, I've only been able to find pictures of the following 1967 cloth patches:




 


In addition to one large team sticker with 3 cloth patches (sometimes referred to as tallboys), packs also contained a smaller sticker that included 3 patches of the names of teams (sometimes referred to as trio patches):

I have no idea of how many variations of these there may be, or if there is a way to distinguish the 1967 patches from the 1968 patches (other than the fact that any patches with the A's would either say Kansas City in 1967 or Oakland in 1968).

The packs for 1967 look similar to the 1968 packs, with the main difference being the title "Baseball Emblems" is red in 1967, and black with a different font in 1968:


In each pack, there was one large team Cloth Patch sticker (consisting of 3 patches), and one of the smaller trio stickers (with 3 team names), which make up the 6 cloth patches in each pack.  In addition to the patches, there was also one team Emblem card in each pack, which was included to give the pack some stability, but it is not mentioned on the pack (as were none of the other various cards inserted with cloth patches over the years for some reason).

Finally, here is a look at the box the packs came in:


Many thanks to John for sharing his collection of team emblem cards, and for giving me a great reason to update my review of this set.

5 comments:

Fuji said...

Great post. I've never seen these before, but I'm a huge fan of the cloth patches. I've picked up some of the 70's ones over the years.

Mike Rich said...

Wow. The more I learn the more I realize how little I actually know on some of these issues. I am struggling to complete the 1968 cards, let alone the stickers. Now there are 1967’s to find as well.

Steve Rittenberg said...

Thanks for the information.

Unknown said...

I have 17 of the fact cards in great shape if interested. My number is 770 584 8551 please send a text if interested. Want to sell.

Ed Bertolas said...

I have 6 fleer patches