Ranking the 80's Part Two : Fleer Base

This is going to sound crazy.

            Maybe even sacrilegious to some in the collecting world.

            But I’ve always considered brands like Fleer and Donruss to be also-rans. And that doesn’t made sense. Fleer and Donruss showed up a year into my collecting life. I was seven. Seven-year-olds don’t even also-rans. A lot of stuff is still new to seven-year-olds. Hell, in 1981, I didn’t even know that Fleer and Donruss weren’t making cards.

            Yet I can’t shake that feeling whenever I see Fleer or Donruss cards.

            Also-rans.

Maybe I drank the Kool-Aid and believed Topps when they said they were “The Real One.” Parents are a big influence too. My old man wasn’t a card collector, and probably thought the money he’d seen me and my brother waste on them as profligate or less-than-smart. But my old man had opinions. And he liked to share them. If he commented on our card-collecting habits at all, aside from the money we were wasting on them, it was to let me and my brother know that Topps really was “the real one.”

Because they were the only cards around when he was a kid.

And everyone knows that their generation is the best, right?

So, I always had this sense of “other” with Fleer and Donruss. To be even more honest, the “otherness” is more geared toward Donruss than Fleer. Fleer cards were actually pretty present in my life during the 1980s. They were available from the get-go. The first wax box I ever opened was 1982 Fleer. Revco drugs had them. If I wanted Donruss I had to risk life and limb cross the intersection at Beulah and Frankstown Road, to get to Statlander Pharmacy. And anyone reading this from Penn Hills knows what I’m talking about. We all knew someone who was in a car accident at that intersection.

I wasn’t risking my life for Donruss.

But we’ll get to Donruss next week.

Last week when I ranked Topps I ranked them best to worst. With words, and how one uses words, being of the utmost importance these days, I fear I misspoke. You see, I’m just a jerk who collects baseball cards. I’m no expert. I couldn’t honestly tell you what the best to worst baseball card of a brand in a decade is. In essence, I used the wrong words. What I should’ve said is that I’m ranking Topps, Fleer and Donruss cards of the 80s by MY favorite design to least favorite design.

So that’s how we’ll consider these ranking blog posts from this point on.

One collector’s humble opinion.

 1987 Fleer:

            I recently wrote a blog post about 1987 Fleer baseball cards, so excuse me if I get a bit redundant here. But, if 1987 Topps did not exist, 1987 Fleer would not only be my favorite Fleer design of the decade, but also my favorite baseball card design of any brand in the 1980s. I’m an absolute fan of everything Fleer was doing with this design, from the icy-blue borders that fade into white, to the icy-blue bar that resurfaces at the bottom of the card. 1987 IS my wheelhouse. I love the 3-D like design of the player image, the way a bit of the photo pops out onto the border. And I love the simplicity of where Fleer places its brand name in juxtaposition to the team logo.

            1987 Fleer brings back so many memories. The turn-of-the-century Jim Leyland helmed Pirates lead by Barry Bonds, Bobby Bonilla and Andy Van Slyke, vying for respectability in the NL East. Summer evenings sitting on my bed, going through these cards. 1987 Fleer reminds me of how further my reach was in collecting. The ability to walk further out of my neighborhood to seek these out. Going to card shows.

            My God, how they bring me right back to my youth.

 1983 Fleer:

            1983 Fleer and the next design we’ll discuss could almost be interchangeable for me on this list, as I love them both. 1983 Fleer gets the edge for personal reasons. But the design itself is fantastic. I love that the border is gray. That it’s a wide gray that still allows for a good size player picture. And how about those pictures. Everything about 1983 reminds me of early baseball. Those April games where its still a bit cold out, and there’s a chance for rain. Maybe it’s the Stargell card that invokes that feeling for me. Willie looks like he’s cold. Like someone snapped a photo of him during the end of a rain delay. A lot of 1983 Fleer look like the Stargell card. They’re close-up photo. Intimate.

            Really just the first great set Fleer produced and they hit it out of the ballpark.

            The Stargell card is special to me. Only Fleer and Donruss gave Pops a card in 1983 as a way to cap off his career and show his full stats. Topps, who tends to milk everything, really missed the ball a lot with end-of-career cards. Not only Stargell. Willie McCovey was given a 1981 Fleer. Johnny Bench and Yaz were giving career send-offs in 1984.

            I’m sure there are others.

            1983 Fleer feels like independence to me. My independence. My family had just moved to a new neighborhood. I didn’t know anyone yet. I hadn’t met A.J. yet, and wouldn’t meet Miller until later that summer. So, I was alone a lot, or it was me and my brother. At nine I was deemed old enough to be able to walk to the Thrift Drug in the Ritzland Shopping Plaza or Revco that sat atop Penn Oak Drive. Thrift had 1983 Topps. Revco had 1983 Fleer. And I spent a lot of change buying both.

            But…those cards met a sad ending.

 1985 Fleer:

            There wasn’t a lot of color in baseball card borders for us 1980s kids. We were too young to experience 1975 Topps, and it seemed like Topps had settled down after that experiment. Fleer and Donruss were just trying to put out cards that weren’t rife with errors. But in 1985 the game changed. If 1985 Topps is the MTV card of the decade, Fleer is the VH-1. You get two borders for the price-of-one. A fine gray border, that has proven difficult to keep in mint-condition over the ensuing years, and an awesome color border that tended to coincide with the team color. Again, the Fleer brand name is understated and doesn’t interfere with the design, and they just seem to know where to place a team logo.

            1985 Fleer has the distinction of being the first pack of baseball cards that I ever stole. Yeah. I was going though a bit of a thievery phase back then. Baseball cards. Action figures that someone had ripped out of the packaging in a Hills department store. What? It wasn’t like they could resell it. My old man caught me with the action figure, but I got away with my share of 1985 Fleer.

            Though stealing is wrong.

            My favorite 1985 Fleer card is the Pete Rose card. Though they are rival brands, I feel like the card is almost an homage to his 1974 Topps. I put the Gooden at the forefront A) Because its his base rookie card. B) Because it’s the first 1985 Fleer card that I bought when I returned to collecting. Got it at an indoor flea market in December 2019. I was with my brother. This was weeks before Covid would start making its way into our lives. I wouldn’t see him or that Flea Market again until April 2021.

 1984 Fleer:

            1984 Fleer is all business to me. Plain white border with a navy stripe at the Top and at the Bottom. It’s the 2^nd great set that Fleer put out, and is a bona fide classic from my point-of-view. And to show you just how awesome baseball card product was in 1984, it’s my least favorite of the three brands. But that takes nothing away from the card. Any chance I get to get my hands on some 1984 Fleer I’ll take.

            Strangely, though, 1984 Fleer cards don’t invoke many memories for me. I’m sure I bought my share. But I can’t conjure up a time or place, like I can with Topps, or the yearning that I had for 1984 Donruss.

            So, we’ll leave 1984 Fleer where it is.

            Just a great-looking card.

 1986 Fleer:

            Why wasn’t I clamoring for more of these in 1986? Why had I wasted so much money on Topps, and gave 1986 Fleer only a passing glance. And we know that by “passing glance” in the Junk Wax Era, it means I bought a shit-ton but didn’t spend nearly as much time on them as I did on Topps.

            But look at 1986 Fleer! Look at that way it shines. The crisp dark blue border. That thin surrounding white. That elongated raindrop drip of color at the bottom that houses the team logo, the player’s name and position all in one burst. If 1986 Topps has fallen from grace for me, then 1986 Fleer has risen to reverence in my view.

            Again, that’s not to say I didn’t buy my share. If I previously complained about Topps’ failure to give a player a proper final card, they also dropped the ball on a number of key rookie cards in the 1980s. With the exception of Ken Griffey Jr in 1989, none are more glaring than omitting Jose Canseco from their 1986 base set. A kid had to turn to Fleer and Donruss for Jose’s rookie. The most famous and classic of the two is the Donruss. But Donruss was hard to find for me. So, I settled on Fleer.

            And…the card is all right.

            It’s a shared rookie card.

            With Eric Plunk.

            Who seemed to show up in every other baseball card pack I opened in the late 1980s.

            Sadly, I don’t currently have Jose Canseco’s 1986 Fleer rookie. In fact, I don’t have much in the way of 1986 Fleer. Which is shame. I’d actually like to build the set. But 1986 Fleer has gotten pricey. The Steve Carlton card above, I got out of a dime box at a card shop in Buffalo back in April. You wanna sell me one of Lefty’s cards for a dime? You got it buddy!

 1989 Fleer:

            I don’t know if I’m so much a fan of 1989 Fleer as I am of the Ken Griffey Jr. card. Upper Deck might have icon status where The Kid’s rookie card is concerned, but Junior’s Fleer and Donruss cards look waaaaaaayyyyyy better. I can’t get over how young The Kid looks here. I can’t get over those cool Mariner’s uniforms.

            As for the design? I don’t really know what Fleer was going for her. I like the gray. I like that the cards have angular edge to them. There’s that player image coming out of the card again. But white stripes on the card? On a baseball card? They look like someone’s pajamas. Or, worse, prison bars.

            I guess if we’re talking about 1989 Fleer, I have to mention the Billy Ripken “Fuck Face” card. I remember the controversy over that. I remember kids clamoring for the card. Overweight men with bad mustaches and coffee-breath trying to rip kids off at card shows for the card. Truth be told, I never cared one way or the other about the Ripken card and its variants. Or error cards in general. I’m not a fan.

            An error is a mistake.

            And a mistake is just a kind way of saying you fucked up.

            Or in this instance, you fuck-faced up.

 1981 Fleer:

            And talk about fucking up. Fleer’s debut was full of errors. Fernand Valenzuela anyone? But 1981 Fleer aren’t bad looking cards, even if they don’t use team logos. There’s a plain simplicity to them. Maybe that’s because Fleer had to rush production after Topps lost its monopoly. Hence the errors.

            But I like 1981 Fleer’s white borders. Like the round border that surrounds the player’s image. I even like the script team name. 1981 Fleer brings back a lot of memories. Of being in flux. I bought my first packs of 1981 Fleer at corner stores in Pittsburgh, and a month or so later my old man was buying me packs at a convenience store a block away from what would be my new school in Wellsburg, West Virginia.

            I don’t have much in the way of 1981 Fleer, other than some Pirates cards. This Ricky Henderson was actually given to me by fellow poet and collector Steve Brightman. We got to DMing on Twitter one day when I got back into collecting. We were talking about anxiety and how getting back into collecting helped quell some of it. Steve sent me some cards to get my new collection going. The Rickey is a part of what he sent.

            Thanks Steve.

 1988 Fleer:

            I’m either just picky or no one made a baseball card I liked in 1988. At least not between Topps, Fleer and Donruss. Maybe that’s why I like 1988 Score so much. At least their debut cards looked interesting with their colored borders. I don’t realty know what Fleer was trying to do with this The busy red and blue stripes all over. That borderless top of the card. It’s like they were doing so much just to make the card seem dull.

            But I’m a slave to the Junk Wax Era. There’s a sports clothing shop in my neighborhood that was selling Junk Wax dirt cheap. They had packs of 1988 Fleer going for a quarter a piece. I wasn’t going to pass up 1988 Fleer for a quarter a piece. So, I bought a wax box of them.

            The strange irony is, when The Hobby exploded in 2020, the owners of the sports clothing store jacked the prices on all of their Junk Wax…a little too much. Those 25-cent packs of 1988 Fleer are now going for three-dollars a pack.

            NOPE.

 1982 Fleer:

            You had to know this one was inevitable. What is there to say about 1982 Fleer that hasn’t already been said? That its one of the worst sets ever produced? That no one seemed to care about design. Or photos that were in focus. Or too shaded. If you want to sum up 1982 Fleer, just Google the Jack Morris card, and that’ll show you all you need to know.

            I've heard people say better things about 1991 Fleer.

            The weird thing is…I have a lot of memories attached to 1982 Fleer. It’s the first wax box I ever opened. I was still living in Wellsburg, West Virginia. I was friends with this kid, Chris, who happened to be cousins with Joe Petini. Petini was a reserve infielder for the San Francisco Giants. He played parts of just a few seasons with them. Chris’ grandmother bought two boxes of 1982 Fleer with the intent that Chris and I open them and find Joe’s card. Me, being the Pirates fan I am, and not very good at understanding the task at hand, opened up the Fleer packs, discarding every card that wasn’t a Pirates card. Eventually Chris’ grandmother got hip to what I was doing, and took the cards away from me to search for Joe’s on her own.

            I always wondered if I opened a pack with Cal Ripken Jr’s rookie card in it.

 Thanks for reading! Happy collecting!

NEXT FRIDAY: We tackle Donruss in the 1980s. My favorite to least favorite...and I'm really torn about which is my favorite.