Milwaukee Braves, beeyotches! I think I have a couple of stickers that say Milwaukee Braves on 'em but not a whole lot and none with licensing info on 'em. I came across this when I was wrapping things up and decided to check out a couple of piles for something good to round off the day. There were a couple of stacks of stickers (or decals or whatever) and I found this one and a really neat Georgia Tech sticker with a really dated looking Buzz on it. I had to pass on the Tech sticker but I wasn't walking out without the decal. Seriously, Milwaukee Braves!
The Dubble Bubble ad identifies it as a Fleer product quite definitively. It's not a card like their later stickers but thin like an album sticker. It's not actually a sticker at all, technically, but a transfer. Dip it in water for about 30 seconds and then slide it on the surface where you want it stuck. Transfer, decal, if it sticks to something it's a sticker. It's for use on glass, wood, metal and other objects. Hair weaves, asphalt, mercury and whipped cream are objects so I guess it would work on them too. Not going to try it though because I am one of those crazy people who insist on denying stickers their sticky birthright in order to maintain "collectible value". I am a monster.
Fleerfan's the man if you want to know every detail possible for this sort of thing.
Wooooo! Dale Murphy album sticker! Whammo! He's whackin' the ball!
Yeaaaaah Falcons! This is a pretty old cloth sticker which appears to be sticker on the front than the back. Due to the age and the cloth material some of the gum has oozed to the front making it tacky enough to stick to my scanner. I was wondering why this one was sent in a penny sleeve. 
Here's the back. No company logo, no copyright, no nuttin. As you can see the glue's gotten icky, but the backing is containing it quite well. I'd never try to peel it off and stick it on something. I'd be afraid that sticker backing was holding back the horrors of the Necronomicon and I'd end up in an Evil Dead movie. 
of Milt Wilcox and decided to test its adhesive qualities. Todd let me have two of these stickers so I had a spare anyway. Here is Milt's future home:
#186 in the album. Will it stick to the album or will the ancient glue be useless? Only one way to find out:
It stuck! The glue wasn't super sticky, but there was more than enough stick 'em on there to adhere nicely to the page. Plus I can potentially peel it off if the mob demands I keep that album pristine. There you go, hard proof these stickers will still stick, even 27 years later.
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!
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.
This is the sticker from 1990 Upper Deck. It's less than half the size of a normal card, but is a pretty good size for a sticker. The Braves' tomahawk logo fills out the smaller card better than on the large size anyway. The hologram is also different from the large size cards, it looks like someone modeled the logo out of clay before they holographized it. It looks a lot more cartoony than the normal logo which is not necessarily a bad thing. Unfortunately, the handle of the tomahawk looks... well, how to describe it. Let's just say I've been on the internet too long since I'm seeing stuff like that on a Braves sticker. Look up 'The Little Mermaid" on Snopes if you don't understand what I'm talking about. It's a good thing the scan is blurry or the blog might get flagged for filth. Another weird thing on this sticker is that dot on the B. That's not schmutz on the scanner, that's a flaw or something on the hologram itself. I need to find another Braves sticker to see if they all have the dot or if this is just a mutant sticker.
Here's a 1989 Upper Deck sticker. I scanned it lopsided and the brave looks terrible. Let's try this again.
Ok, a little better but not much. It's ok that I posted two '89 UD stickers, each pack had two of these small round stickers in them. At least two. I saw one pack where five or six of the buggers rolled out of it. These were pretty dang neat for the time although today I curse them whenever they start falling out all over the place while I'm rooting through my 80's junk boxes. As you can see, the old style logo is used here, and it fills up the sticker but is a pretty weak subject for a hologram. The design is pretty flat and there's not a whole lot of 3-D to it. Upper Deck was on the ball in one way, their 1990 stickers used the new tomahawk logo while Fleer still had the laughing Brave on their stickers.
I'm not sure where this sticker even came from. Maybe it was inserted into one of the Heroes sets that were released in 1992. Maybe it was given away at the game. I found it for 50 cents and snagged it because I didn't have it already. It's a nice oddball Braves card though and the pennant kinda sorta waves in 3-D a little bit. Too bad relics and autos have taken over the hobby, we could use some sticker innovation like this nowadays.
All right, here's the 1991 Upper Deck Sticker just as I promised last week. As you can see, it looks identical to the '92 version except it's silver instead of gold. One per pack as well, so with a couple of boxes you can wallpaper your room with shiny hologram stickers. Don't expect a complete set out of those boxes though, because the collation for these stickers was terrible. One box I ripped had nine stickers each for the Twins, Pirates, Cardinals and American league. Blech. Luckily there were 18 billion boxes of this stuff out there and enough was ripped so these stickers are still fairly common. One thing I don't understand is why Upper Deck took horizontally oriented logos like the Braves here and squished them on a vertical card. Flipping the card on its side would have made a bigger and better sticker. As it is this is a pretty boring sticker. It's barely 3-D and they didn't put stars or anything in the background like on the White Sox sticker to avoid vast wastelands of boring nothing on top and bottom. At least UD had the correct logo. Up next week: 1990 Upper Deck stickers, assuming I can find one of the things.
Here's the other style of 1983 Fleer Stickers with the team logo. Here's our wonderfully non-PC logo from the early 80's. I grew up with this logo and never really realized how ridiculous it looked at the time. Kind of a Mr. Clean with Mohawk and feather accessories. The dude is bubblegum pink on this card too. The pink comes from whoever designed this thing's decision to go with a two-color scheme. Red for the writing and the face, and blue for the background. Throw in some halftone dots and you got bubblegum face. If they did the halftone on the blue, our mascot could have been Krishna or a Smurf. They could call him Losey Smurf from their record through most of the 80's. I think they finally ditched this goofy logo in 1990 or '91 about the same time they started winning. Like I said though, I grew up with this ugly thing and it was just normal back then. I'll take the Tomahawk or even the '74 feather logo any day of the week though.
Here's the back with the stats. I told you the runs scored went up for everyone involved. The ball just freakin' flew out of the stadium that year. How anyone can win a division while playing only three games over .500 at home is mind boggling. It's all that teepee's fault. If they would have kept it up instead of knocking it down to get a few more seats, we win the division by 15 games instead of holding on by a hangnail over the Dodgers and Giants. I think it was all the Falcons' fault actually, they made them take it down for the football season. They almost screwed up my Braves' championship the lousy rotten Matt Ryan pickin' inept loser motherf- No. I'm going to stop thinking about them. I've let it go. They can't hurt me any more. Back to baseball. Good clean wholesome baseball. It was such a young lineup too, the only regular older than 27 was Chris Chambliss. Another stat to check out is the one on the bottom of the left column. The Braves turned 109 double plays at home and led both leagues that year with 186 total. Now one side of that coin is that their pitchers had runners on base an awful lot. The other was that great DP combo of Raffy, Hubbard and Chambliss. Seeing one of the slick DPs from that crew was almost as good as a Murphy or Horner dinger. I wish there was some kind of way to raid the Turner offices and pull out the game tapes from that season. I could spend a couple months watching those games from '82.
They call it Sticky Monday.......
but Tuesday's just as bad.
Sticky Saturday is now on Monday....
'cause I goofed off this weekend, boy am I bad.
and now my fuel pump done blowed up...
isn't that just too sad.
See right there on the pack it says " Put All Stars on books, walls, bikes, anything!". PEEL OFF BACK. VANDALIZE YOUR SCHOOL. Stick Mickey Mantle's face in the middle of the hymnal right on top of "Nearer, My God, To Thee". Paste Ken Aspromonte on your teacher's chair so she can fart on him all day. Alter your History textbook so that the 27th President is now Ken Hubbs. Ya can't do these things with chase cards that have pull ratios advertised in sell sheets. You sure as hell could do it with these stickers though, but I'm glad a couple of kids had some restraint so I was able to pick up a few of 'em on eBay.
This Braves sticker is my Julio backup plan. I know for a fact I have a star sticker or Panini sticker or some kind of Julio sticker somewhere, but I just couldn't find it. I scanned this 1983 Fleer sticker with the hat and team name on it at the last possible minute instead. 1983 was the first year I really collected cards like an insane addict so cards from that year are a little special to me. The Revco next to the Winn Dixie my grandparents went shopping at had a big bin full of Fleer Cello packs that I bought tons of. I pulled one of these stickers from one of those packs and stuck the hat on a notebook or a binder. I always really liked the hats from that period, the thin red line around the A just looked cool to me. I have a hat like that squirreled away, it's one with the crappy mesh in the back and the cloth on the bill is frayed and it looks like a trucker hat from hell and I love it. The Braves swapped from the old style hat with the white panel with the lower case script a right when I really started following the team so this is the hat I grew up with even though it was replaced just a few years later.
The sticker has team stats on the back. The hat cards had away stats and the big logo stickers had the home stats. The Braves were actually better on the road than they were at home. It mostly had to do with the Launching Pad. I'll post the logo card with the home stats next week to compare, but if you check the batting average and ERA, both are on the low side. Not at home though, the ERA jumps to over four and there are almost twice as many home runs hit. Atlanta Fulton County was just a hitter's park, and the pitching staff while talented wasn't really good enough to keep it in the ball park. The real culprit was Chief Noc-A-Homa's teepee. When the Braves were on fire and leading the division, greedy management types decided to remove the teepee to have more seats to sell. It may have been a subtle change of wind patterns, or a Cherokee curse, or the pitchers got wore out, but they went on a huge slump after it was taken down and damn near lost the division. They prevailed though and took the National League West crown in 1982, Julio Franco's debut year. There's no more active players from the year I started collecting cards now, and boy do I feel old. Oh well, back to hunting for an autograph and a card of Julio.
The TRUTH about pairuhsoralophugus or however that's pronounced. Oh wait, there's a pronunciation guide right there! The back is chock full of facts, an enterprising young collector might be able to cobble together a report for class with a set of these. Thank goodness with all the needless slaughter going on we have a nice gentle creature here. A North American herbivore who plays the trombone! When I was in college, I knew a guy in a band who was just like that and he didn't go on killing sprees much at all. Let's take a look at the front.
Good looking card, this. The orange and yellow borders are attractive, it's very colorful and the art is top notch. It looks like Jurassic Park might have ganked the font too! I'd like to know who did the artwork, it's very good. The gentle plant eater looks positively cute with its crest and little smile and - hey what's it holding?
A baby carriage? What on earth would a dinosaur be doing with a baby carriaOHMYGAWDNO
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!! 
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!
