Thursday, January 17, 2019

More on the 1987-1991 Fleer World Series sets

I've gotten a lot (for me) of feedback on the Fleer World Series sets I've posted; it seems a number of people didn't know these existed, at least for as many years as they made them.  My impression is that they were a bonus with factory sets, although I'm not sure they were in all factory sets.  My only Fleer factory set is the 1990 set, and I don't think it included the extra World Series set.  Anyway, I will keep on showing the complete sets, but since there's interest in them, I thought I'd show the design (front and back) of all 5 years, with card #1 from each year.  Here we go.
The first of these is the 1987 set of the 1986 World Series, and Fleer went all-out with an American flag theme, with red and white stripes on the top half, and a blue field with white stars on the bottom half.  Here we see Bruce Hurst, who had a good Game 1 against the Mets.  The back is text-heavy, which continues throughout all the years.
I showed the 1988 Fleer set of the 1987 World Series already, showing all the card fronts.  The American flag theme continues but less literally, with a solid red border and blue bunting with white stars.  The back has the same design, again with a large text box.

The 1988 set continues to be red, white, and blue, but it's much more of a minimal design, with a stripe of red and a stripe of blue forming the border for the picture and for a small text region.  The back is similarly minimal.  In Game 1, the big news was Kirk Gibson's famous home run, but that's not the subject of card #1, after all, since that happened at the end of the game.  Instead card #1 features Mickey Hatcher's first inning two-run home run.
For the 1989 World Series, there's an abstract representation of red, white, and blue flag elements.  You could call the parallelograms, which appear on both the front and the back, stripes, I suppose, and I think they're reminiscent of bunting.  Anyway, this was the one total success of the near-dynastic A's of the time, and card #1 starts the series off with pitcher Mike Moore.
Finally, we have the 1990 set, which is the most minimalist of all the 5 sets in its design.  It continues the red, white, and blue theme, but with no design elements to spare.  The back is really just one large text box with little else, other than the World Series header.  This Eric Davis led off the recent post in which I showed the (fronts of) the whole set.

Thanks for reading!  I will be showing the 1986 World Series, 1988 World Series, and 1989 World Series sets in their entirety before long, to go with the already-completed posts of the 1987 World Series and 1990 World Series sets.

4 comments:

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  2. I like these sets a lot. Do any modern sets include a brief World Series recap like this? If not, they should.

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    1. I don't know much about modern cards, but I just looked on COMC, and it looks like Topps Heritage has it some years.

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  3. I love these cards. There were some team cards or highlight-y like cards in recent Topps base sets. Pretty sure there was a Royals card in 2016, for example, after their 2015 WS win.

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