Getting Help With My 1967 Fleer Baseball Emblem Cards

Contributor to the blog John was kind enough to send me one of the hard to find 1967 Baseball Emblem cards that I need for my set:

You may recall that John provided scans of the cards from his collection which I shared in a post reviewing the 1967 Fleer Baseball Emblem Cards and Cloth Patches.  At the time he still needed 2 teams - the Senators and the Giants.

Fortunately John has been able to track down the 1967 Senators card since then,

which leaves only the Giants.

If anyone has a copy of the 1967 Fleer Baseball Emblems Giants card and would be interested in trading with John, please let me know and I will be glad to put you in touch.

John was also kind enough to send a few scans of the 1967 Fleer Baseball Emblems Cloth Patches from his collection:

I'd like to say thanks to John for sharing pictures of his collection and for his generosity in sending me the Braves card. 

Celebrating 10 Years and 1,000,000 Page Views!

I'd been meaning to post this last month, but ended up being very busy during the holidays.  I wanted to announce that December marked the 10 year anniversary of The Fleer Sticker Project!

Another exciting milestone for the blog occurred in December as well when the blog passed the 1 million page view mark.

I would have never imagined that when I made my first post back on December 12, 2007 that 10 years later the blog would still be going, and that it would have been viewed as much as it has.

My posting frequency has decreased significantly since the first few years where I was focused on trying to cover all of the different Fleer releases and the many variations from the early 1960s to the early 1990s

  

 

 

 

as well as the many different oddball sets from the late 1960's through the 1980's:

 

 

 

  

Although I've covered just about every Fleer set that I had planned on reviewing, I still post occasionally when I come across something I find interesting that I would like to share.

Its been very rewarding to hear from people who have questions about things I've covered, and from people who have contacted me with additional information to share.  Putting together a resource of information on these Fleer items that for the most part fall outside of the standard baseball card catalogs was my goal in starting the blog, so it is very satisfying when I hear from others who say that the blog has helped them with their collection.

I'd like to say Thank You to everyone who has checked out the blog, and especially to those folks who have left comments and who have shared scans and information for me to post.   Thanks for helping me keep this going for 10 years!  Its great to know there are other collectors who also enjoy collecting Fleer decals/patches/stickers/cards/stamps, etc, as well as other items featuring team logos.

1969 California Angels Program - Inspired by Fleer Quiz Cards?

In addition to the program that showed the American League West Division alignment, the Angels had another scorecard in 1969 that included all the American League team logos that looks somewhat similar to something I've covered in considerable detail on the blog:



The 1969 - 1971 Fleer Quiz cards:


Even though the colored borders don't match up for most of the teams, the Twins


and Royals do match:


Whenever I see a picture of this program, I can't help but think of the Fleer Quiz cards given the similar design with team logos inside a white circle surrounded by a colored border. Given the similarity to the Fleer Quiz Card design, this is one of my favorite program covers.

1972 Fleer Baseball Quiz Card Variations

In response to my review of the 1972 Fleer Baseball Quiz Cards where I had indicated there were a number of different sets of questions, Fleer Sticker Project contributor Troy sent me pictures of the 29 different cards that he has been able to find. In addition to the 29 that Troy found, I had 1 variation that Troy did not have which brings the total to at least 30 different quiz cards.

The quiz cards that have the Orioles in the bottom left corner appear to have the most variations, with 13 different sets of questions (click on the picture for a larger view):




As you can see with these cards, in some cases the first question is the same on 2 different cards, but if you check the 2nd question, you will see that they don't match up, so you need to look at more than just the first question when looking for variations.

There are at least 8 different cards with the Red Sox logo in the bottom left corner:

In some cases cards can be found with the exact same set of questions, but with different sets of team logos. This card from the group of 8 cards pictured above starting with the RedSox logo has the exact same set of questions as one of the cards starting with the Orioles logo:



Finally, there are at least 9 different cards that have the Royals in the bottom left:


For whatever reason, Fleer did not include logos of the Braves, Angels, Brewers, Mets, Phillies, or Rangers on any of these quiz cards (yet the Reds and Cubs appear on 2 of the 3 versions of logos).

Fleer initially printed some of the quiz cards without the team logos and without a yellow background for the questions:

As you can see, the questions on the all white quiz cards match up to the version with the yellow background and team insignias. The all white version is much less common.

Thanks to Troy for sharing his collection and helping give an idea of approximately how many different 1972 Fleer quiz card variations exist. I wouldn't be surprised if there are a few others that neither Troy nor I have found yet, so there may well be more than 30 (not counting the all white card variations).

If you happen to have a variation not pictured, please let me know, and I'll be glad to add it to this post.

Busting 41 Year Old Wax ! - Opening a Pack of 1969 Fleer Pennants & Stamps

I recently picked up an unopened pack of 1969 Fleer Pennants & Stamps:



Based on the article we recently reviewed from The Troy Files from the July 1969 issue of Ballcard Collector :


this pack should contain "a sheet of stickers (3 x 9 1/2") perforated with about 10 diff. team emblems on it...Also in each pack is a card measuring 2 1/4 x 4" with a baseball team quiz and a team emblem (in color)".

Thanks to Fleer collector and expert Barry I was able to acquire a pack which I decided would be much more fun to open than keep unopened (and always wonder what was to found inside).

Here is what I found when I opened the pack:


The gum had not stayed in one piece for all of its 41 years, as a few pieces were stuck to the inside of the wrapper


while most of the rest of the gum was stuck to the stamp sheet:


Since the sheet has a glue backing for the stamps, its not surprising that most of the gum ended up being stuck to the stamp sheet.

Unfolding the sheet, I discovered I had gotten a Pirates pennant, along with a number of other team logos, including the classic Astros logo and an Orioles cap (click on the picture for a larger image):


With a little work, I was able to get the gum off the back of the sheet, and fortunately the sheet didn't suffer too much paper damage:

There was a quiz card in the pack, which confirms that the 1969 quiz cards had 3 questions, and had the smaller logo (relative to the 1971 cards which also have 3 cards, but have a logo that extends all the way out to the edges of the border):

I'm very pleased with this pack as I'd gotten a sheet that I had not seen a picture of before, got a Twins quiz card that was an upgrade from the miscut one that I had in my collection, and also got a nice clean copy of the wrapper:


Thanks for the pack Barry!

The Fleer Sticker Project Turns 1 !

I can't believe its been a year to the day since I started off the blog with a post on the 1960 Fleer Baseball Decals back on December 12 last year:


If you would have told me before I started this venture last year that I'd do 145 posts over the course of a year's time and would have over 37,500 visits to the site over the last 7 months once I figured out how to add a counter, I would never have believed it.

I got the idea for the blog in the fall of last year after discovering the growing number of baseball card blogs including Ben Henry's The Baseball Card Blog, dayf's Cardboard Junkie, and Steve's White Sox Cards. Paul Lukas' UniWatch and Rob's Aquaman Shrine also provided a lot of inspiration.

As I had been spending a lot of time communicating with other collectors on a number of different Fleer sticker sets, the idea started to take shape of putting together an online database of information on these various sets and the variations so that I could share what I had found out about these different sets as well as get feedback from other collectors.

Seeing blogs where people posted pictures of their cards and commented on them gave me the idea of doing the same thing for what I wanted to do with cataloging the Fleer sets.

The results have turned out much better than I could have ever hoped. I've met a number of great people that I never would have come into contact with had it not been for the blog, and the response to the blog in terms of the number of people visiting the site each day amazes me.

I'd like to take a few minutes to look back on some highlights from the 1st year:

January: My first look back at NFL merchandise from vintage Sears and JC Penney's catalogs:




I've gotten a great response to this post as a number of other sites linked to it at the time.

February: The review of the 1969 - 1971 Fleer Quiz Cards.

These sets were one of the reasons I wanted to do the blog as this 3 year series is full of variations that I've never seen documented before.

March & April: Fleer Baseball Cloth Patch Month(s):


This series of Cloth Patches issued over a 7 year period from 1969 to 1975 was the second topic that I really wanted to spend a lot of time trying to cover in depth. Trying to sort out all the variations like this took two months to cover given that I only focused on one team at a time:

I'm pretty sure the blog is the most comprehensive look at this series ever done.

May: Fleer Big Baseball and Big Football Signs:



The most rewarding part of doing these posts was the response I got from Jeff who shared his collection of signs he created for teams that had joined the league after these had been originally issued as well as some custom signs he did that I requested:



July: The blog starts to get noticed!

First, I came across an auction on ebay that lifted my post (word for work) about the 1977 Fleer Baseball Grand Slam Hi-Gloss stickers:


At least he also copied the embedded link in the post to another post of mine so I'll take it as free advertising!

Later in the month, an article on ESPN the Magazine's site linked to my ode to Lowell Palmer as the Coolest Baseball Card of All Time:


If you believe the people who left comments on my post about Lowell, it appears that he was quite the ladies man as a few people left some notes about having dated Lowell during his playing days.

September, October & November: Fleer NFL Football Cloth Patches Month(s):


Just as I had done with the Baseball patches, I undertook a team by team review of all the different Football cloth patch variations in the 1972 to 1976 Fleer NFL Football Cloth Patches like these:



I had a tremendous amount of help from Craig in putting this together as he shared many pictures from his collection.

December: Taking a break from Fleer items for a bit, I covered the various Sunbeam Bread NFL issues from the mid '70s:


I'd like to thank Steve from TheCowboysGuide.com for his help with the Sunbeam Bread cloth patches review.


Looking back, its been a great year for the blog as I've had a lot of fun posting every few days and meeting a number of great people that are bloggers themselves, or collectors who find the site and drop me a note.

Before I took the plunge this time last year, I wasn't sure what to expect and whether or not it would be a worthwhile exercise. I'm happy to report that this has turned out to be a great experience that I hope to continue for at least another year or so.

I've still got a lot of Fleer related items to cover for Baseball and Football, and I'm going to try to cover Basketball items at some point as well.


I'll also continue to cover other items from time to time to mix things up and hopefully keep it interesting.

I'd like to say Thanks! to everyone who follows the blog on a regular basis, and to everyone who has added a link to the site on their blog or linked to a specific post that they enjoyed.

And finally, thanks to everyone who takes the time to leave a comment. Its always gratifying to see comments on something you've posted as it shows that your post was interesting enough to warrant someone spending their time to share their thoughts.

One of the things I've found more and more challenging as the year has gone by is to leave comments on other people's blogs due to the large increase in blogs that I enjoy reading. When I first started the blog, there were about 4 or 5 blogs I would regularly read, but that list has grown considerably as you can see by all the blogs that I now link to and try to follow daily. I'm afraid my ability to leave comments has suffered as a result since I don't have enough time to repsond to every interesting post I read.

Not that I'm complaining as I think its great that a number of people have decided to join in the fun and share their perspectives on the card / sports memorabilia hobby. Its just that an unfortunate consequence is that as more and more good blogs are being written, its harder to spend the same amount of time that I used to spend reading each of my favorite blogs.

Hopefully I'll find myself writing a similar year end review this time next year. In the meantime, Thanks for reading!