I can't even watch the game, it's killing me... I turned on the radio for a minute and Brian McCann popped up with the bases loaded, two outs and a 3-1 count. AND IT WAS ALL MY FAULT 'CAUSE I TURNED ON THE RADIO. Yes, this week shall be the death of me.
FleerFan had a request for some more basketball stickers. I think I was able to complete a couple of sets for people today.
It is very rare that I see a Knucksie card that I've never heard of before, but this was one of them. It's black & white (obviously) is playing card size with rounded corners and has the braves cap and logo so is apparently licensed. It's a 1981 First Issue, but first issue what? Here's the back:
It's some sort of game card. this one gets you a double. I'm not sure what the 9 indicates but it probably has something to do with the gameplay. The card has a logo: Batter up! by Frank Daniell. I couldn't find anything about the card or set in my SCD catalog. I also tried Googling and Binging it and still didn't find anything about it. I did find a batting cage in Woodstock I hadn't kn0wn about before so it wasn't a total loss. It's still a pretty cool oddball card though. does anyone have any information on it?
This. Is. AWESOME. I think these cards are from 1978-79, because the back of the stickers have a puzzle on them that show a piece of a Sonics logo, and bits of text that read "l's Large" "Crowd" "-39,4" "Seattle King Do". I'm guessing that refers to the 1978 playoff game that hosted 39,457 fans. I would have bought all of them had I unlimited funds, but I ended up getting 16 different stickers featuring some very outdated logos. This is the coolest:
It's still got the old ABA ball in the logo!
I wanted to get a '76 card just because, and I chose Bruce solely for the utterly bewildered look on his face.
Dick Pole rookie card! Plus Wayne Garland too, who wasn't a slouch. Here's the lifetime stats from the four rookies:
I haven't posted a sticker over the weekend in a long time, so I figured why not. I got this '70s era Fleer sticker in a package from Tribecards a loooong time ago. This is a good looking sticker, the script A logo is very brightly colored and has a lot of eye appeal. That cool old '7o's logo is very comforting to me in times of trouble. Plus it's two stickers in one! I could (theoretically) peel off the A and stick it to my 70's Braves binder and then slap the Braves name logo right on my monitor so I could stare at it while blogging. I'd never actually do that however, because I've always been neurotic about protecting my sticker cards. But it's possible. I'm not sure which year this is from but the back holds an important clue:
Better late than never?
Indeed!
It's weird, I have two of these Bowman Gold Parallel Heyward 
This BJ Upton mini '06 Bowman Heritage card was going to go into my Retro Rays post, but I decided to use Longoria's Bowman Heritage card instead. That set is kind of crappy looking, but the mini cards are fantastic. They look very similar to the original '49 Bowmans.
I haven't done a sticker post in ages, and I don't know when I'll do another, quite frankly. This Fleer sticker is from 1985 (I think - I'm sure I'll be corrected if not) and has a jersey instead of the usual logo or cap sticker. How fantastic is that? I think they only did one jersey per team, it would be sweet to have a sticker set with home and away unis. The really fantastic thing about this sticker is that Fleer used Phil Niekro's number - SuperAwesome. Knucksie was pitching for the Yankees when this card came out though.
Morten Anderson Rookie card. Raise your hand if he belongs in the Hall of Fame. So does Ray Guy, but the dillweed voters will never let him in, so nuke Canton. My self-imposed boycott on all things Falcon lasted five and a half games. Last weekend I ended up stuck in a situation where the game was on TV and I ended up watching the last half of the game. The Falcons looked pretty good (goal line stand baby!) and I have to admit now that the Matt Ryan Pick is not as disastrous as I thought. I'd still rather have an anchor on the D-Line for 10 years, but I'm not an NFL GM so ufck me. The game was going well, the Falcons had a 7 point week late in the game and then Jason Elam attempted a field goal to salt it away.
This... is not a card. It's a coin. Little did you know that I used to collect coins! Well I did, and I got most of them at Northlake Stamp and Coin when I was a kid. That shop has been in the same spot in the mall for probably 20 years now and the same guy with frizzy hair is still there running the joint. I was meeting a freind over in Tucker a few months ago and while I waited for him to get off work I went back to check out the place. They also sell baseball cards and they have shelves full of old boxes way up on the top shelf of their cases. They also had a few packs, but no prices as far as I could tell. Nothing card wise caught my eye but I did see the old Bargain Box on the counter that was there that I dug through when I was 12. I can't just browse through something like that so I looked through every last coin in the box. After all that work, I couldn't just not get something, so I picked out this 1844 Large Cent for 11 bucks. It's a pretty good looking coin actually, the date is strong, most of the details are there and most importantly the LIBERTY on her crown is readable. The reason it was so cheap is that someone tried to drill the thing for some reason. It's a really nice coin and I think it's now the oldest thing in my collection. This ain't no little Lincoln penny either, the sucker is bigger than a quarter. So there you have it, an old penny. Now you all know that I am not just a collector, but a pathological packrat.
These stickers had cartoons on the back from RG Laughlin. RG is all over Fleer sets and his Famous Feats set was revised for the sitckers. This one commemorates Deacon Phillippe's 5 complete games in the 1903 World Series.
Fleer was nice enough to add card numbers to make the 22 card set easier to build. With 22 cards in the set it's obvious that some card backs would be on more than one team's sticker. That's not all though, While I had one of these in my collection already, FleerFan sent me another in a package of Braves stickers. Check out this back:
Good ol' Georgia Peach on a Braves sticker. How appropriate. So there's variations for the card backs in these cards. For all I know there couple be every card possible on any given team's card back, but of the three I have two have Deacon and one has Ty. I really like this drawing of Ty, especially the radiation coming out of his head. I figure it means one of three things:
LOOK DEEPLY INTO THE CRYSTAL BALL 
Ask again tomorrow?? Stupid crystal ball. I'll have to resort to cardboard prognostication instead. Let's see what that Fleer sticker from the 80's can tell us about the 2008 Braves. I can't remember what year it's from and I don't care. I'm interested in the FUTURE not the past. Ask FleerFan. He's the one who gave me the sticker. Let's flip this puppy over and see what the future has in sto-
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! NOT THE ROYALS!!! OH DEAR LORD NOT THE FRACKING ROYALS! Wait, wait, calm down. They were good back in the mid 80's... they won a World Series! They had George Brett! And then they fell in to a long stretch of losing and despair noooooooooooooooooooooo
This card is a case study in why you shouldn't use the copyright date to figure out what year it's from. The copyright date clearly says 1968 on the front of that card, but that's the copyright date of the logo, not the card. That's not even Fleer's copyright, that's MLB's copyright. Nobody sue me now, this is for educational purposes only.
Here we have a cartoon depicting the 1972 All Star Game in Atlanta. Yes, that's Hank Aaron, and no, he didn't go 7 for 7 in the game. He did hit a home run off Gaylord Perry in the game, and Joe Morgan came up with the game winning single in the 10th inning, making the National league a perfect 7 for 7 in extra inning games up till that time. Gotta love Hank hitting a homer in front of the home crowd. I have the program and a pennant from this game in the archives somewhere, I'll have to show 'em off some day.
The one on the right has "Puzzle on Back" on it. That's because there's a puzzle on the back. That makes sense, doesn't it? Here's the puzzle:
Looks like the puzzle is of the All Star game in Cleveland Ohio to me. That game was played in 1981 once the strike was over. So this sticker is probably from 1982. I'm not sure if they were inserted in packs of Fleer baseball cards or were their own set. Here's the other card back:
Another All Star game, this time the 1975 contest illustrated by R.G Laughlin. The NL won that game on a Bill Madlock two-run single in the 9th off Catfish Hunter. Pete Rose tacked on the third run of the inning on a sacrifice fly. Yaz, Jim Wynn and Steve Garvey all had homers in Milwaukee. I really like these cards illustrated by Laughlin, I just wish they were a little easier to find. Unless there were two sets of these stickers in 1982 this card has to be from 1981, as it's the first year the Braves started wearing the blue hat with the script A again. The first year I really collected Fleer cards was 1982, so these are the most recent stickers that I can still concider to be strange and exotic. Someone bring back the stickers in packs! I'm getting all nostalgic here for stickers and puzzles and 'toons now.
This is the cap logo sticker. There's a second style sticker featuring the screaming Brave logo, but I can't find it right now so we'll stick with the cap logo for now. This is two stickers in one, you've got the Braves script logo and the cap logo A. This logo always seemed strange to me. I started following the Braves in '81 which is right when they switched over to the script A on the caps. Those uniforms always seemed to feel right to me, while the '70s style lower case A unis with the weird red pinstripes just seemed odd and creepy. Of course the '70's in general felt odd and creepy to me most of the time. The script Braves logo doesn't feel right either. The logo on the sticker is the version used with the screaming Brave full logo, just without the Brave. Check here to compare and see what I'm talking about. This logo screams '70s and I'm just an '80s kind of guy.
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.
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!
Awww yeah. Check out the bunting. Ya got bunting front and back. The team on the fronts and backs actually match too, not something you always got with Fleer stickers. The bats design make the sticker look like a major award or something. The only award the Braves deserved from 1988 was "Worst team ever that still wasn't the absolute worst team in the league that year". Seriously, the Braves went 54-106, one of the worst records of all time, and the stinkin' Orioles managed to go 54-107 just to screw us. That's just totally not fair. We coulda lost two more games if given the chance and gone 54-108. Stupid rainouts.
And check out the tons and tons of factoids! Stadium capacity! First game! (we lost) Longest game! (we lost) Milwaukee never had a losing season! (rub it in, whydoncha) Atlanta's never been to a World Series! (just you wait!!!) The retired numbers threw me for a loop, I've had it etched into my brain that we have retired 5 Braves uniform numbers, and it took me a while to realize why there was only 4 listed on the card. That's 'cause Murphy was still wearing his Braves uniform! Feeling really old now...
One double, no Braves and they are the same red striped sticker design that I got in my other box. Looks like I did get hoodwinked. That is until I noticed something:
Aha, a clue! the cool Trident Mariners logo on the left was from the 1986 box, the boring stupid generic M's in a baseball logo on the right was in the box of '87s. I wasn't able to find a Mariners sticker from 1986, but I do have this rather beat up M's sticker from '87.
I think that card spent some significant time in a back pocket. So now we know that the M's logo was definitely used in 87, we just need to find out what they were using in 86. My 86 Fleer collection mostly came from junk lots, so I don't have too many stickers. I'll have to defer to the expert on this one.
Ok I lied, Carlton was the first card I saw in the set so he gets posted because I'm a big fan of Lefty. Now on to the stickers.
Braves! Yes! First sticker even! It doesn't look like the one from the last post though, this has stripes instead of stars. Oh well, onward!
Yankees, slightly miscut causing a weird step design on the left side. Why didn't Fleer just have uniform stripes throughout the sheet? Another mid 80's trading card mystery...
Giants
Rangers! We got the Rangers card Fleerfan needed! Unless he needs the one with stars and not wth stripes! We'll soon find out won't we! Why am I yelling about old stickers!
Twins
