1987 Fleer Limited Edition

Fresh off one of the ugliest sets ever, comes another. The highlight is the pre-juice card of Roger Clemens.

Mike Krukow? He sucked....

The stickers suck too.

The Tigers:

17-Kirk Gibson

28-Jack Morris

I don't know what else to add about this set, other than I paid $2 for it. 

It sucks.

1986 Fleer Limited Edition

Year two of the Limited Edition sets, and as ugly as they are, not even close to the worst it would get. But pretty bad nonetheless.

At least the stickers were somewhat cool.

The worst player of the set? Chris Brown, pictured sweating his ass off here at Wrigley while wearing a jacket, unbeknowing that one day he would be a Tiger, who would eventually go on to drive trucks for Haliburton in Iraq and die a few years later in a house fire in Texas. 

RIP

The Tigers:

19-Kirk Gibson

44-Lou Whitaker

Boy was this an ugly set.

1986 Donruss Major League All-Stars

Following along with their Action All-Stars set, in 1986 Donruss actually produced a 3.5" x 5" set of all of actual All-Stars from the 1985 All-Star Game, with a new twist. 

The set contains all 58 participants in the 1985 game, along with a card of the Metrodome and a checklist card.

The first 18 cards are the starting nine from each side, with the rest of the set consisting of the reserves and the managers.

The MVP of the game was newly acquired Padre Lamarr Hoyt.

This was the infamous game where Lou Whitaker lost his uniform in transit and had to buy a Tigers jersey at the game and color his number on the back with a magic marker.

For the first time the oversized set resembled the Donruss base set of the same year.

The worst All-Star of the bunch? Yep, you guessed it. Scott Garrelts, who looks like the offspring of Greg Minton.

Tigers were aplenty this year, and include:

11-Lou Whitaker

18-Jack Morris

42-Dan Petry

43-Willie Hernandez

45-Alan Trammell

58-Sparky Anderson

The new twist I mentioned earlier? The very cool and innovative "pop-up." A die cut card that you could unfold to be a self standing deal. There was one of each starter in the game. Again, kudos to Donruss for collation, as I got a full set of 18 as well as doubles of both Tigers, Morris and Whitaker.

This box also included the box bottom card panel that Donruss started the year before. This box had the following:

1985 Fleer Limited Edition

Ok, so this is not a set I picked up at the National. But this was the debut of what would become a Fleer trademark in the 1980's, the Limited Edition box set. And since I picked up a couple at the show, let me start at the beginning of it all.

Easily the most attractive design of all the box sets they would produce over a 6 year period from 1985-1989, this one is chock full of HOFers. 16 so far, not counting Andre Dawson, Jim Rice, and Pete Rose.

Each box came with 44 cards, and 6 stickers. The 1985 stickers were also the best Fleer ever produced. These sets could be found anywhere for $3 in 1985. The same holds true today.

It's as much fun for me to see who in the sets never panned out and would arguably be the worst player included. Ron Kittle narrowly edges out Tony Peña in this set.

There were two Tigers included.

21-Jack Morris

40-Alan Trammell

Great looking set indeed.

1984 Donruss Grand Champions

Here is yet another underrated 80's set. Following on the heels of their 3.5" x 5" 1983 Action All-Stars, Donruss released the Grand Champions set in 1984. This time they mixed in several Dick Perez paintings of all-time greats along side the superstars of the game. They combined a great player selection that leans on the veteran side with an uncluttered card design to produce one of the nicest looking sets in Donruss history.

Sadly, the Ty Cobb card is the only Tiger in the set, but it is veteran heavy, and the Tigers team that would capture the World Series that year had yet to make their names in the baseball card world.

This is another unopened box that I picked up at the National for $5. True to Donruss form of the 80's, the collation was superb. Out of this box I got a complete 60 card set and an entire Duke Snider puzzle, with probably 100 doubles to boot. I ended up pulling 3-4 cards each of Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, and Hank Aaron. Not too shabby.

1983 Topps Stickers

Let me just start by saying that if this set came out today, it would be a huge hit among collectors. The 330 stickers are composed of a great collection of reverent, neat looking, and innovative subsets as well as a crisp, colorful, and orderly selection of players from 1983. Not too big, not too small, but just right. Whoever Topps put in charge of this set must have been fired not long after its release, because there are too many good things going on with this set.

Part of the fun of this is going to be trying to figure out what some of the subsets are without having the sticker book they go in. Some are easier than others, and I think I've got them all figured out, but why some are done one way and others another way is a mystery to me. But on we go!

This was one of the boxes I picked up at the National for $5. Each box has 100 packs containing 6 stickers each. That's 600 stickers for less than a penny apiece. As you can see from the wrapper, this product held no value whatsoever from it's original price of 25 cents a pack ($25 a box, in 1983 dollars). I like that already.

The set starts off with gold foil stickers of the top four all-time HR leaders. The real ones. The gold foil sets these apart, while at the same time honoring the greats of the past. Given the success today of archives sets, I've never understood why Topps or Upper Deck doesn't do more things like this in their base sets.

That's followed by a group of players that I have no idea what the correlation is. It looks to be some of the game's older, active players, such as HOFer's Reggie, Yaz, Bench, and Tony Perez, but also includes Dave Kingman, Reggie Smith, and Graig Nettles.

Then come stickers of the A.L. stat leaders of 1982 followed by the A.L. players. These are sorted by team in alphabetical order, starting with Baltimore and ending with Toronto. There are gold foil stickers scattered throughout of a top player on each team.

Now we are at what I think is the coolest part of the set. The split stickers. Anywhere from two to six stickers that combine to make one image. These commemorate the highlights, records, All-Stars, and postseason heroes of 1982.

These are awesome, especially the 6 sticker Rickey Henderson set.

How cool is it that the All-Star stickers fit side by side and form an actual star?

Those are followed by the N.L. stat leaders and players in the same manner as the A.L. earlier.

Then the set finishes with stickers of rising stars that includes Wade Boggs, Cal Ripken, and Ryne Sandberg.

The Tigers in the set are as follows:

63-Lance Parrish gold foil

64-John Wockenfuss

65-Lou Whitaker

66-Alan Trammell

67-Kirk Gibson

68-Larry Herndon

69-Jack Morris

70-Dan Petry

193 & 194-Lance Parrish Record Breaker

318-Glenn Wilson

This is just a beautiful set. It's too bad the card companies today don't look back to something like this as a way to make fun and interesting sets without resorting to contrived crap like errors and parallels to drive sales. But, in true Topps fashion, I came up two stickers short of a full set from a box that had almost enough stickers to make two sets.

Now if I can just get my hands on one of those sticker books....

The National

Ok, so literally the day after I decide that I'm done buying cards, I find out that the National Convention is here in Chicago for the weekend.  I've always wanted to go to one and now I finally had the chance.  

I have to say that I was disappointed and overjoyed all at the same time.

First off, I thought that there would be loads of free giveaways that would justify my $18 ticket just to get in. Nope. I got the Babe Ruth card pictured above. That's it. I received a few free catalogs at a few places, but nothing collectible. While I think the Ruth card is pretty cool, it's a little bit of a let down that it's all I got. 

Second, the graded card thing is out of control. I do not own a single graded card. I cannot stand the fact that it's become impossible to put together pre-1981 sets because of the scarcity of ungraded cards. But there were tables galore that had nothing but graded cards. I saw one where a guy was advertising $5 each. Curious, I looked to see that the first few were all common cards that were released in the last 10 years. Why? Does the world really need a 2004 Topps Jim Edmonds PSA 8? This is just another money grubbing tactic by the fuckers who have ruined this hobby for the people who enjoy the love of collecting.

Which, believe it or not, brings me to the thing I absolutely loved about the show. The amount of stuff I found that has more sentimental than dollar value and just how cheap it was get.

I was 10 when 1980 began and 20 when it ended. So to say that the 80's were my halcyon days of collecting baseball cards would be an understatement. It would also explain my undying love of such things ranging from The Hooters to It's Your Move, but I digress. 

I found a treasure trove of niche products from the 80's for dirt cheap that I have been having a blast opening over the past couple of days. Topps Stickers, Fleer Limited Edition Box Sets, and Donruss Action All-Stars just to name a few. And I only paid anywhere from $2 to $8 a box for this stuff! THAT'S RIGHT, A BOX!!! Not a pack, BUT A BOX!!!

I'm currently opening a box right now and I'm having more fun doing so than I've had in a long time. It's amazing what opening a pack and pulling a John Wockenfuss or Atlee Hammaker will do for the soul. Especially when you paid almost nothing to do it.

So I say that the National was well worth the trip. As down as I am on the hobby these days, the show offered me a cheap alternative to collect players from my favorite era of the game. 

Oh yeah, my big announcement for today was going to be the preview of the 2009 RobbyT cards. But that can wait. Maybe September.

Somewhere there is a Mario Soto or a Toby Harrah that needs to see the light of day.....