Strange 1984 Fleer Baseball Cards

A forgotten set

Strange 1984 Fleer Baseball Cards

Upper Deck gets too much attention.

The hobby went absolutely nuts when Upper Deck first started selling cards in 1989. The excitement lasted until the 1994 strike put a big dent in the industry. We’ve never seen anything quite like that level of hype and excitement in baseball cards since.

But, because Upper Deck tends to command so much “junk wax era” attention, we tend to overlook the other great sets.

1984 Fleer was an absolutely fantastic set.

The card design wasn’t anything special, of course. The cards weren’t artifically short printed the way the 1984 Donruss set was. There are key rookies (Mattingly), but that’s not the thing that makes this set special.

Nope: the reason why this is a special set is because of the bizarre cards. And you’ve surely heard of at least some of them.

Check out the Tony Pena card for example:

It’s your standard bat over the shoulder view, and the truth is that Pena isn’t even looking at the camera. But having him use two bats to lug his catching gear around was an absolutely brilliant decision by the photographer.

And then there’s this crazy meta Larry McWilliams card:

Larry’s holding up his 1981 Fleer card — a rare example of baseball cards being self-referential.

Everybody knows about the Glenn Hubbard, one of the most famous baseball cards of all time:

According to this mlb.com story, the giant snake was indeed real. I’m not sure how it got into Veterans Stadium.

The Jay Johnstone card was a bit controversial:

Of course, this is back when people thought that baseball cards should still be geared only towards children. The beer advertisement is probably not what parents wanted their kids to encounter. But, then again, if they were Cubs fans they were getting beer commercials from Harry Caray on WGN every few innings anyway.

Now, none of these players were stars (okay, Pena was, but the others weren’t). But they’re not the only interesting cards in this set. Check out the Mookie Wilson, for example:

Sure, Mookie is applying pine tar to get ready to hit. But it almost looks like he’s using his bat as a machine gun.

Speaking of pine tar, the set also included cards like this one:

Why include Gaylord Perry? Well, it turns out that Perry tried to hide the bat to prevent the American League from investigating:

And I could go on.

Now, my old copy of The Complete Book of Collectible Baseball Cards (copyright 1987) indicates that some collectors thought the poses in this set weren’t “traditional” enough:

I strongly disagree. In fact, this set is like a breath of fresh air amidst the boring pictures that Topps was churning out set after set.

These cards aren’t quite as spectacular as 1989 Upper Deck. However, if you’re going to go back and pick up a cheap 1984 set, I strongly suggest going for Fleer. This is a set you’ll want to sit down and look through.