1985 Fleer Baseball Stickers

The 1985 set was in some ways a significant departure from the designs of the previous 2 years, but in other ways, it was very similar to the 1983 and 1984 Baseball Sticker sets.


The differences are obvious: team jersey /uniform stickers have replaced the cap stickers:


and the rainbow borders have been replaced by yellow borders for the jersey stickers and blue borders for the logo stickers:

However, if you take a closer look at the stickers, you will see that all of the "PEEL" variations that we found in the 1983 & 1984 sets are once again present in the 1985 set. In addition, some other minor variations which I didn't cover in my previous reviews show up again in 1985.

There are some very subtle differences found on the Cardinals and Giants stickers which I didn't bother mentioning in the 1983 & 1984 reviews because I had already covered the fact that both teams had rainbow border variations. Those same subtle differences are found in the 1985 set as well.

The Cardinals variation is found on the baseball seam just to the left of the Cardinal. On some stickers the seam is thin, just like on the the rest of the baseball, but on others, the seam is thicker, and is black instead of red.

The Giants variation has to do with the position of the TM. It can be found either lined up under the "FL" in the Fleer logo or lined up under the "EE" in Fleer. The picture below shows the variations are present in both the 1983/1984 sets as well as the 1985 set.
It would appear that Fleer used the same 11 x 12 sheet of 132 stickers, and changed the cap stickers to jersey stickers and changed the border colors, but left the logo stickers including the PEEL arrows and TMs exactly as they were for 1983 - 1984. This would be the most reasonable explanation of why all the logo varations can be found once again in 1985.

There are also 2 uniform sticker variations. Both the Red Sox and Astros jersey stickers can be found with and without the city names on the pennants under the jerseys:


And just to make variation collecting even more fun, Fleer issued 3 different backs!

The most common back has a contest form on the back, a less common back has the same contest form, but in a bigger font, and finally, the least common back is blank:


Since its been over 20 years since I've opened any 1985 Fleer product, I can't say for sure whether or not a particular back was found in a certain release.

Here is the complete 1985 Fleer Baseball Sticker set with all the variations (except for the Red Sox jersey and Yankees PEEL variations I'm still trying to track down):







The stickers were once again inserts in 1985 Fleer Baseball Card set, as well as were included with the 1985 update set: