From My Collection: 1969 Nabisco Team Flakes Cut-Outs (Mays, Brock)

Minor correction: in my post on 1987 Kraft Home Plate Heroes Cut-Out cards, I said that I also had a couple of Kraft cards from the 60s.  There were no Kraft cards in the 60s, as far as I can tell.  I had mixed up Kraft with Nabisco.  I have two cards from the 1969 Nabisco Team Flakes set.  Team Flakes was a cereal with which I have no familiarity; according to Cereal Graveyard, it was produced from 1963 until the 1990s, changing the name to just Team at some point; I don't remember it at all.

Lou Brock and Willie Mays.

I believe that I bought these at the consigment shop, Partners, at which I also bought my 1972 Frank Robinson Traded card.   I think I barely paid anything for these -- as I said in the Frank Robinson post, I think the owner had one or two boxes of baseball cards, and they were all the same price, like 50 cents or something.  Later, instead of having a consignment shop, the owner must have realized there was money in baseball cards, and she moved her store to a better location as just a card shop.  I think she had a good feel for the market -- I remember my last interaction with her, too, when I was in college and barely collecting anymore.  She told me she thought new cards weren't going to be worth anything, since they were making so many and everyone was stockpiling them.  I told her that my collection focused heavily on the 70s, and said she thought that was a good idea.  I don't know when her shop went away, like almost all the other card shops in town.

I have a couple of other Lou Brock cards from when he was playing, from the end of his career.  As I've said before, finding cards from Hall-of-Famers at the end of their careers was a strategy I had to get some of those players into my collection in an affordable way.  It didn't work for every Hall-of-Famer, though, and this is my only Willie Mays card from when he was playing.  I will seek to remedy that -- there is a Willie Mays card (1960 Topps) on the PSA-graded part of my want list.  Other than this, the other Willie Mays cards I have are what I would call nostalgia cards, like Pacific Legends, or Hygrade All-Time Greats, or Baseball Immortals.

I really like these cards despite the roughness of the cutting, the lack of logos, and the many creases.  That's partly because of the relative obscurity of the set, and also because I got a good deal on them.  As for the obscurity, I really had no idea for quite some time what these cards were.  Eventually, I got a book, the Great Book of Baseball Cards.  I looked and looked, and eventually I found a couple of pictures and a description of the black frame with yellow border in the 1969 Nabisco Team Flakes page of the book.  This was what research was like in the old days.

The Great Book of Baseball Cards.

The Great Book on the 1969 Nabisco Team Flakes set.