News
1970s Fleer World Series cards bring back memories of greatest moments of Fall Classic
Vintage baseball card collectors of a certain age will remember the 1960s and ’70s when Topps had a virtual monopoly on the baseball card market.
Topps had signed most players to exclusive contracts, driving previous competitors such as Fleer and Bowman out of the market. Back in the day, Topps released cards by series starting early in the year, and then a new series every month or so through the summer. That meant that if you collected all the cards for a particular series, you had no alternative but to wait for the next series to come out.
Enter Robert “Bob” G. Laughlin, a professional cartoonist who worked on many comic strips, including “Heathcliff.” Laughlin was an avid baseball fan and rooted for the New York Yankees, according to his obituary.
Many vintage baseball card collectors know that Fleer issued World Series cards in both 1970 and 1971 but might not know that they did it in collaboration with Laughlin. In fact, Laughlin originally designed and issued his own set of monochrome World Series cards in 1967. His black-and-white set was only available by writing directly to Laughlin in response to ads he placed in sports publications. He charged $3 for the original 64-card set covering every World Series from 1903 to 1967, excluding the cancelled 1904 World Series.
He printed the cards in sheets of nine but quickly discovered that the sheets he printed were on “too-thin stock.” His solution was to rubber-cement “two sheets of cards together to thicken them up.” Laughlin stated in his May 1976 “Inside Pitch Newsletter” that he had only created 250 of these sets. That’s it!
These original 1967 RG Laughlin cards are known as “2-line originals,” as they contain two lines of information, including his address on the bottom of the reverse side of the card. When he reprinted this set in 1974, he intentionally dropped the address line “so that anyone having a set with that line intact [knows that he] has one of the original 250.”
Interested collectors will be happy to find that the reprinted cards from 1974 were issued in a larger quantity and are widely available and more reasonably priced than the original set.
CARTOON METS
My love affair with these cards began when I was only 7 years old. My mother took me to buy baseball cards at a convenience store near where I grew up in New Jersey. As I grabbed a couple packs of Topps cards, I noticed this colorful box with a cartoon drawing of a batter wearing a Mets uniform.
Although I had never seen this box before it grabbed my attention because I was a Mets fan, and they had won the World Series the previous fall. The box read: “Now for the 1st time … Fleer Official World Series Trading Cards.”
Since they were priced at the same 10 cents a pack for 10 cards as Topps, my mom allowed me to buy one. I couldn’t wait to open the pack of these new cards, so I ripped them open sitting in the front seat of my mom’s 1967 Ford LTD. I still vividly remember unwrapping the pack and finding a 1969 World Series card featuring my Miracle Mets inside. I was instantly hooked.
Fleer World Series Cards were first issued in 1970 and contained a total of 66 cards in the set that depicted each World Series from 1903 to 1969 (except 1904). According to Laughlin’s January 1976 newsletter, this card set came about when he submitted his idea to Fleer to produce and distribute his World Series cards in a color format.
The front of the cards, about half of them redesigned from his original set, featured colorful cartoon artwork created by Laughlin that commemorated a significant event for each year’s series. For instance, the 1909 card featured the faces of Honus Wagner and a scowling Ty Cobb in a series won by the Pirates.
My favorite card, after the 1969 Mets, depicts the 1923 World Series with a picture of Babe Ruth’s face superimposed over Yankee Stadium with the caption “house that Ruth Built.”
One of the most valuable cards in this set is the 1960 World Series where the Pirates beat the Yankees on Bill Mazeroski’s walk-off home run.
Another card of distinction in this set is one depicting Lou Gehrig congratulating Ruth at home plate, presumably after his famous “called shot” home run in the 1932 Series.
But it was the reverse side of the cards where I initially learned all about the history of each World Series. The back of the cards contained a text narrative, now known as a “Blue Back” due to its blue colored print on an off-white card stock. The text contained a summary of each year’s series that provided an overview that was very educational.
For instance, the 1903 card explained that the series was the “first modern World Series between the separate National and American Leagues” and described how the Red Sox came back to defeat the Pirates in a best-of-nine-game series. Who knew they played a nine-game format back then?
The back of the 1969 card described how the Mets “completed the Cinderella story by stunning the favored and powerful Orioles.” I remember walking home from school and reading the backs of the cards with more interest than any schoolbook.
NEW WORLD SERIES CARDS
The following year, I was excited to discover a new baseball card box that proclaimed: “Fleer World Series … all-new 1971 cards.” Much to my delight, the new version contained all new artwork on the front of each card, which illustrated baseball greats such as Ruth, Ty Cobb and Hank Greenberg.
The 1971 edition was expanded to 68 cards and added cards for 1904, featuring John McGraw with his arms crossed and a “No Series” caption, as well a card for the recently completed 1970 World Series, when the Orioles took their revenge for the year before.
The cards also contained the relatively new MLB logo underneath the specific year of each World Series, making them easy to differentiate from the 1970 cards, which presents the year of the series inside of a baseball. Additionally, the card backs of the new set were printed with black ink (Black Backs) and contained all new series summaries. These summaries now included a game-by-game list of the final scores. Interestingly, the cards for both the 1970 and 1971 sets listed 1968 on the back as the copyright year, which has confused many a collector, including me.
Fleer did not produce another set of World Series cards until 1978. In the ’78 card series, Fleer re-issued the 1971 set but added seven new cards representing subsequent World Series covering 1971-77. These are commonly known as the “Extension Cards” and are rarer and more difficult to find than the base set cards. Many collectors aren’t even aware that these cards exist. The extension cards were distributed through a promotion with the Good Humor Ice Cream company and later also sold by Laughlin after he purchased the leftover cards from Fleer and sold them per an ad he placed in a 1979 issue of Sports Collectors Digest.
The rarest of these depicts the great Roberto Clemente and commemorates the 1971 World Series. The 1971 series is known as the “Clemente Series” because of his outstanding performance and untimely death by plane crash a little over a year later.
Another popular extension card is the one highlighting the thrilling 1975 World Series in which the Reds defeated the Red Sox in seven games. The front of the card depicts the likeness of two players who look to me like Pete Rose and Fred Lynn.
Fleer released a condensed set of World Series cards in 1980 that only contained 40 cards, covering the years 1940 to 1979. One disappointing change to the 1980s edition is that some of these cards had different artwork than the original issues, including removing the image of Clemente from the 1971 card. Worse, they replaced the summaries on the back of the cards with team logo stickers. Unsurprisingly, these were not as popular as the original versions and have little value today.
I had forgotten about these cards until a few years ago when something made me think of the cartoon cards that I loved as a child. I was surprised with how many search results came up when I typed in Fleer World Series cards on eBay. And then, almost 50 years later, the memories came flooding in.
Many of the cards were familiar to me, including the 1956 card with a drawing of the Yankee Stadium scoreboard showing all zeros for Don Larsen’s perfect game and the 1919 card commemorating the Black Sox scandal. I was so fascinated that I immediately purchased a 1971 mid-grade complete set. When the set arrived, I found myself reading the text on the back of the cards just like I did as a little leaguer.
But being a collector, I now wanted a high-grade 1970 set that I could add to my collection of cards from my childhood. Since I could not find a high-grade set for sale, I found and purchased a box of 1970 unopened packs and relived a part of my childhood as I opened pack after pack hoping for the 1969 Mets card. I found one quickly, and it was pretty easy to put together a full set of 66 cards, as there are 240 cards in a box. Most of these cards were in Near Mint condition; although, all the cards on the top of the packs were damaged by the stale gum.
Now I had a dilemma of what to do with all the leftover cards, so I decided to put more sets together and sell them to subsidize the cost of the box. But since there were uneven amounts of each of the cards, I had to search to find and purchase the missing cards. Instead of this being a chore, it was fun for me, just like when I collected cards as a kid.
My recent experiences with collecting World Series cards have brought me full circle back to my childhood and led me to collecting and reselling them. My specialty is creating complete sets of varying grades, as well as collecting the hard-to-find extension cards.
Considering these cards are all from the ’70s, the prices are very reasonable. Individual cards generally run from a couple dollars to around $20 for the more highly sought-after cards in nicer condition. The price of a complete set will range from $100 for a lower-grade set up to $500 for a NM-Mint set. Extension cards generally range from $100 for mid-grade up to a couple hundred for Mint condition. The exception is the Clemente card, which can run from several hundred in excellent or better condition to over $1,000 for highly-graded cards by PSA.
— Colin Mckeon is a passionate collector of World Series cards and appeared on the November 2023 episode of The Card Life. He can be reached at colinmckeon@comcast.net or search colins-worldseries-cards on eBay.
Colin Mckeon
