Sticky Saturday - Recycling Edition

I would have done this earlier, but I got caught up watching my Venture Brothers DVDs. Dr. Girlfriend makes me all tingly. Tonight we have a 1980 Fleer sticker of the Oakland A's. From this sticker we can tell that Fleer's centering was just as bad on the stickers as on their regular cards, that they didn't cut the sticker all the way to the edge on the sheet and that the 1979 Swingin' A's were absolutely terrible. 54 and 108? Oy gevalt! The sad thing is they weren't even the worst team in the league - the Blue Jays went 53-109.

The back of the card doesn't feature a loser though, it has a smiling doodle of Lew Burdette fresh off of pwning the Yankees in 1957. Lew is best known for pulling pranks on Topps photographers and completely dominating the Yanks in the '57 World Series. Lew won the MVP for the series by only giving up two runs in three complete games, including shutouts in game 5 and 7. If this card design looks familiar you would be right.


While Topps had the monopoly on baseball cards with current players, Fleer still kept busy in the 70's with a bunch of oddball legends including a few series of World Series cards. The cards had a cartoon by Robert Laughlin on the front and a recap of the series on the back. Here's the '57 card from the first series done in 1970:

Lew's throwing the baffled batters some rotten eggs in the original cartoon. Fleer and Laughlin had a long collaboration together. They first put out a World Series set in 1967 that was a true oddball at 2 3/4" by 3 1/2" in size and printed in black and white. Those cartoons were reused for this 1970 set that was made standard size and printed in color. For 1971 Laughlin created new drawings for the set that were reprinted and updated with the past year's World Series until 1979. Then in 1980, the World Series got stuck on the pack of the sticker cards. You can tell the 1970 series from the later versions by the blue backs and lack of a MLB logo on the front.

These cards are fun and reasonably cheap if you can find them out there. They are especially cool for team collectors as putting together a set of World Series appearances for your favorite franchise isn't too difficult unless you're a Yankee fan. As long as we're on the subject of Lew, here's a cool old newspaper clipping sent to me by reader Billy featuring Lew and his wife Mary on the team bus before they head off to New York to take the title. Awesome find by Billy!