I have a lot of good cards I've received in my past few COMC shipments that I still haven't featured on this blog. Their Spring Cleaning sale is about to start I think, and I think some of these I may have picked up in last year's Spring Cleaning sale. Whenever I got them, though, I might as well show them now. So here we have three of Phillies great Chuck Klein.
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| 1960 Fleer Chuck Klein. |
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| 1960 Fleer Chuck Klein card back. |
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When I was a kid, there were four Phillies retired numbers, and we saw them in the outfield all the time at all the games Dad and I went to at the Vet. I should say they were retired "numbers," though. Two of them were really retired numbers, Robin Roberts and Richie Ashburn. The other two, Chuck Klein and Grover Cleveland Alexander, were just their names really; they say players didn't wear numbers a long time ago, so they didn't have a number to properly retire. Klein actually did play partially in the period that players had numbers, but they weren't too consistent about it and he wore a bunch of different numbers so they didn't choose one in particular. Dad and I went to the games where they retired Schmidt's number and Carlton's number, making the total six at the time.
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| 1961 Fleer Chuck Klein. |
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| 1961 Fleer Chuck Klein card back. |
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I never knew much about these 1960 and 1961 Fleer sets. They go to show how long Fleer wanted to break into the baseball card business. I'm glad that both the 1960 Fleer and 1961 Fleer are finally represented in my collection. In addition to these 1960 and 1961 Fleer Chuck Klein cards, I also got the Grover Cleveland Alexander cards from the two sets, and will show them soon.
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| 1976 ISCA Hoosier Hot-Stove All-Stars Chuck Klein. |
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| Chuck Klein card back. |
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For each of Klein and Alexander, in addition to the 1960 and 1961 Fleer cards, I also got what I might call a Midwestern oddball. This one for Klein was issued by the Indiana Sports Collectors Association in 1976. Everything about this card is awesome, from the fact that the Indiana Sports Collectors Association existed and made cards, to the front photo framed in the shape of Indiana, the picture including the vintage Phillies uniform, and the font on the ISCA logo. The card back notes that Klein died in 1958, and in 1976 was still "a likely Hall of Fame candidate." Sure enough, the Veterans Committee enshrined him in 1980.
Thanks for reading!
It seems like every time I read an article about 1960 Fleer, the author always feels the need to mention that it's not a very popular set with collector's, and I always wonder which collector's talking about? I mean I love it, and from what I've seen on the blogs over the last couple of years, a lot of other people do too, so where are all of these "collector's" that dislike it so much?
ReplyDeleteI only have a couple of them, but I think they're great.
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