The Trading Post #138: Big Shep's Cards (Part 2: Fleer)

After Topps, Fleer was my second favorite baseball card brand growing up. The local big-box store carried a lot of Fleer product, which was both easy to find and affordable. In fact, 1993 Fleer was the first set I completed from scratch, rather than just buying the factory set or a hand-collated set at the card shop. So when I was sorting through a large box from Big Shep's Cards, there were plenty of great Fleer cards to put together a post with.

1997 Ultra #189 Kevin Ritz

And Fleer Ultra, commonly known as just "Ultra" despite the gold foil branding Fleer put on every card, leads things off with a duo of Rockies. Kevin Ritz and Todd Hollandsworth were NL West rivals in the 1997 Ultra set, but both spent time with the Rockies, though they were never teammates. This photo of Ritz is probably from 1996, meaning that Todd Hollandsworth's cameo is from his Rookie of the Year season. There are two more photos of Ritz on the back, and he has the same snarling expression on each one.

I got his autograph on a hat during one of my earliest trips to Coors Field, which has since been lost to time. My sister got one too, on a scrap of paper my dad helpfully produced from a pocket memo pad, which ended up in my collection. Dad's hyper-preparedness is sort of a running joke in my family, but he's had the last laugh every time it counts.

Kevin Ritz's actual autograph looks a bit different from the script typeface used on this card, but it's clear what Fleer was going for with the nameplate. They even blended the team banner into the Z at the end of Ritz's surname. All the 1997 Ultra cards have that blending, which works nearly perfectly with Zs and Gs and such, but quite poorly with Rs and Ss. It's definitely an ancestor of 2017 Stadium Club.

2001 Ultra Tomorrow's Legends #4 Todd Helton

I always enjoy looking through the checklists of insert sets that proclaim young players as "Tomorrow's Legends" or "Hall Bound" to see how accurately the card companies selected star players. Is it full of flashes in the pan, or is it more like a visit to Cooperstown? Tomorrow's Legends from 2001 Ultra is a bit of a mix, as usual. You've got your Derek Jeters and Vladimir Guererros in this 15-card set, but also a few who never even had an All-Star selection, like Pat Burrell and Rick Ankiel.

Todd Helton is still in the early stages of his Hall of Fame candidacy, but in 2001, he was fresh off the best season he'd ever have. As with most of his early cards, the card back tells us that he was teammates with Peyton Manning at the University of Tennessee. That was before he became the face of the Rockies, and long before his uniform number in Denver would be retired.

1993 Ultra Performers #7 David Nied

A pair of cards showing Todd Helton and David Nied will give you a complete history of everyone who ever wore #17 for the Rockies. You can see Nied's previous stewardship of that number in the lower right quadrant, the yellow one.

This colorful card is from a 1993 set known as Ultra Performers, and while I purchased plenty of product from Fleer in 1993, I've never seen this one. That's because it's not actually an insert set, but rather it's more of a redemption, only orderable directly from Fleer in exchange for about $10 and some pack wrappers.

Fleer took the trouble to serial number this set, printing the set number in a little white box on the card back, right below the Ultra Performer logo. That same gold foil logo with the blue baseball trail appears both front and back, and the card number is also in gold foil. This one is #34,547 out of 200,000 sets printed. And if Fleer's marketing department took the stance that one of 200,000 was exclusive, just think of how many millions upon millions of cards were printed for the main releases.

2001 Fleer Premium #172 Jeff Cirillo

Fleer Premium only existed for two years, just like Jeff Cirillo's tenure with the Rockies. I've shown his 2002 Premium card, which is a Rockies card in photograph only. Really, it's more of a Mariners card. But in the inaugural 2001 Fleer Premium set, Cirillo has a true Rockies card. It's sturdy, shiny, black bordered, and really quite beautiful. The card back doesn't have many frills either, mainly just statistics, vitals, and a small color photo. He was a real workhorse, playing in over 150 games in each of the five seasons Fleer provided stats for.

If it wasn't buried under an avalanche of other Fleer products, I could see this one doing quite well. Perhaps if Fleer (now part of Upper Deck) ever makes a comeback, a design like this could one day grace packs again.

2001 Fleer Game Time #88 Magglio Ordóñez

As in the Topps post, another Chicago White Sock snuck into the Rockies pile. This one is of Magglio Ordóñez, a longtime American League outfielder hailing from Venezuela. I'm not an expert on Maggs by any means, but I certainly knew of him. Six All-Star selections and a batting title is certainly good enough to appear in a set like Tomorrow's Legends.

Or at least in a smallish Fleer set like Game Time. Not counting short prints, the main set is just 90 cards.

For some reason, this has always looked to me like it should be a hockey set. Maybe it's the small inset photo in the lower left with the grid over it, which reminds me of the tight weave of a hockey net. The background photo, which matches the main photo, transitions to a pixelated look as it moves from top to bottom. There's also a grainy element in the upper left, which I think is meant to represent TV "snow", the noisy static you used to get in the pre-digital rabbit ear days of broadcast television.

2002 E-X #50 Todd Helton

Long ago, I was sent a Todd Helton relic card from 2002 E-X, and now here's the base card. It's a translucent acetate, with a pale gold color making up the non-purple parts of the design. Interestingly, the gold color completely disappears when you hold it up to the light (also when you scan it), looking more like frosted glass. If you look really closely at the design, there's a little bit of texture in the purple area, which is supposed to be baseball stitches. It's very subtle.

All these designs are nice to look at, but none of these past three have any sort of player-specific paragraph on the card back. Maybe no one really reads them anyway (I've certainly never read all my 1991 Score cards), but if there's anything I find lacking in all these Fleer sets, it's that.

1997 Fleer Rookie Sensations #17 Neifi Pérez

Several years ago, there was a Topps Update insert set called Rookie Sensations. The particular card I have from that set is of Troy Tulowitzki. But long before that, Fleer used the same name for a 20-card insert set. The background encapsulates the late-'90s, and the swirly patterns look either like magnetic field lines or a wind speed map, depending on which scientific field you're an expert in. There were a lot of weird designs to be found throughout the late-'90s, and many of them came from Fleer.

That strange, blocky typeface on the front is also used on the back for the write-up, and it's a little tricky to read. The black letters don't stand out very well against this pink-and-green vortex. In it, Neifi Pérez is compared to Rey Ordóñez, no relation to Magglio.

Joining Pérez in the Rookie Sensations set were Rey Ordóñez, Derek Jeter, Todd Hollandsworth, Bobby Abreu, and quite a few players from that Tomorrow's Legends Ultra insert set.

2003 Fleer Tradition #421 Jason Jennings AW

On his card, Neifi Pérez was listed as a "'97 Rookie of the Year Hopeful". Scott Rolen was the winner that year, the player who finally broke the Dodgers's streak of five straight Rookies of the Year. Before that run, Jeff Bagwell won in 1991.

It would take five more years before a Rockie would win Rookie of the Year honors in 2002, documented on this Fleer Tradition card. Perhaps not coincidentally, 2002 was the year the famous humidor was installed at Coors Field. The card back says that Jennings wasn't intimidated by the thin air at Coors Field, but really it's the dry air that poses a problem. You should see my hands in the winter months. I never really think to wear lotion (and certainly not when handling cards), but they dry out nearly as badly as the baseballs when the days get short.

In any case, Jason Jennings took home the only Rookie of the Year award a Rockie has ever won, and he did it the same year he got to wear a 10th Anniversary patch on his right sleeve, about as clearly visible as any collector can hope for.

Our third and final post will cover the remaining brands. Maybe even Pacific.

My First Group Break

I was recently involved in my first-ever group break, which was hosted by Nachos Grande. He does these quite frequently; he's already on his second this year. The one previous was a jumbo case of 2015 Topps Series 1, which I was not involved in. This post is actually from his final group break of 2014, where he opened some Topps High Tek and Stadium Club. I didn't see too many posts from other bloggers about their winnings, but that may be because I ended up with one of the hits from a fairly small selection of high-end cards.

For the uninitiated, a group break works like this: a couple dozen or so people pool their money and buy several boxes, or perhaps a case, and divide up the cards by team. Anyone who anted up gets all the cards of their chosen team(s), or perhaps a random team; there are lots of ways to do it.

Anyway, I'll get to that in a bit, but part of this group break also included a bunch of assorted cards from your team that had nothing to do with the fancy new boxes of high-end Topps. That means that much of this shipment looked a lot like a trade package, and I'm sure that Nachos Grande was able to clear out lots of extras.

Gold was the name of the game in the mid-1990s, and even the "filler" cards didn't disappoint.

1998 Bowman's Best #4 Dante Bichette

I never saw any of the Bowman's Best cards when they were released. I'm sure I acquired a few here and there in the early 2000s, but I never really got a good look at this brand until they made it an insert set it in recent Bowman releases.

They're quite thick, maybe even a little more so than Topps Finest. And I think I finally found the right scanner settings to get a somewhat accurate representation of a shiny card.

1994 SP #165 Ellis Burks

Upper Deck didn't miss an opportunity to put the "Super Premium" in "SP", because all that brass-colored foil on the right side wasn't enough. Even the little Upper Deck hologram on the back is gold on these SP cards, as opposed to the usual silver.

If I never ran across Bowman's Best in their early years, then I definitely never saw the first few Upper Deck SP sets. They just weren't in my budget as a young collector, although I could probably have stretched if I really wanted to. But at $75 for a box of eight cards, Topps High Tek would have been completely out of my price range. Even now, taking my chances in a group break really only made sense because I knew there would be lots of other goodies included.

Goodies like awesome photography on UD Collector's Choice.

1997 Collector's Choice #321 Bruce Ruffin

I'm not sure how well a Bic ballpoint pen will do when used to sign a baseball, but it beats no signature at all if the Rockies' closer is giving out autographs under a partly cloudy sky.

Based on that black jersey and the relatively small light fixture in the background, I'm guessing that this was taken during Spring Training. The players are a lot more accessible during the preseason, and most of the autograph collectors I know have had much of their success while visiting Arizona or Florida in the month of March.

Speaking of Spring Training, we're just a few games in, and as I write this, my TV is tuned to live baseball for the first time in many months! Nothing like a ballgame to get me in the card-blogging spirit.

I don't have any autographs from Spring Training, but I have managed to snag a few at Coors Field over the years.

1996 Stadium Club #377 Kevin Ritz

Kevin Ritz spent a few years in the Rockies' rotation, and he signed my hat before a game. He probably wasn't on the mound that day, as starters have plenty of time to kill during game time except every fifth day.

This card shows Ritz pitching in an away stadium, as neither Coors Field nor Mile High Stadium employed the use of Astroturf, thankfully. That stuff was just hideous. It was in quite a few parks before the recent round of new ballpark construction, even in outdoor stadiums with relatively mild climates, like St. Louis and Philadelphia. Only Toronto and Tampa Bay still have artificial surfaces, and those are both indoor stadiums.

Pretty much every time I get a random stack of cards from about 1997 to 2005, there's a card from a set I've never seen before. And I'm not talking about insert sets; that's how many base sets were out there until Fleer, Pacific, Pinnacle, and Donruss all fell on hard times.

2002 Fleer Maximum #17 Todd Helton

Fleer Maximum. New to me. Unfortunately, this card is a bit beat up. It probably fell victim to being stuck to the card on top of it, which has a tendency to take out tiny bits of the glossy coating when you peel them apart. It might just be generally fragile and was thumbed through too many times in a discount box, but it looks to me like this was sealed in a pack and left to cook in someone's garage for too long before it was liberated.

Jeff Baker's 2003 Studio card fared quite a bit better, which is fortunate, because this is just about the best Coors Field backdrop that's ever appeared on a card.

2003 Studio #123 Jeff Baker

That's a great example of a summertime Colorado sunset, just before the Giants faced off with the Rockies in Denver. If you look closely, Andres Galarraga and John Vander Wal, both former Rockies, are back to back in the San Francisco lineup.

There's lots in this photo to document the earlier iterations of Coors Field. That Bank One sign is no more, as that bank was acquired by Chase not long after this card was printed. The left field scoreboard is also in its original layout, where all the lights were an amber color. They've since replaced it with a full-color high definition screen. Longtime readers know how I love little details, and there's another one to point out. The bat that Baker is holding has "17" written on the knob, indicating that he swiped one of Todd Helton's bats for this photo op.

1998 Leaf #76 Dante Bichette

I have no reason to believe that Dante Bichette isn't using his own bat in this photograph, but one thing I noticed about this Leaf card is that prominent "50th Anniversary" seal.

The 1948 Leaf set is considered to be the first set in the modern collecting era, at least according to Beckett. 1998 happened to be fifty years after that set was released, but calling it an "anniversary" seems like a huge stretch to me. Until the mid-'80s when the Leaf brand was basically a Canadian Donruss parallel set, and 1990 when they took it upmarket with a high-end set, the brand was pretty much nonexistent for decades following that seminal 1948 release. Far be it from me to admonish the use of gold foil on a late-1990s card, but using the word "anniversary" implies a lot more continuity than a decades-long gap between releases.

Munnatawket Custom #62 Carlos Gonzalez

As is common with shipments from Nachos Grande, he included a card from the custom Munnatawket Mini set, and this one was of a Rockie, no less. I only have a handful of these, but it's a small set and trading is a great way to find a few more. I've written about these before, and now that I have both CarGo and Tulo, I probably have all the Rockies from this small set. And Spider-Man.

Anyway, this has pretty much been a trade post so far, so let's get to the actual cards from the break! The slot I purchased in this break contained not only the Rockies, but also the San Francisco Giants. There were a handful of assorted Giants cards like the above, but I hit some new ones in the break itself.

2014 Stadium Club #64 Tim Lincecum

I'm slowly finding more cards from 2014 Stadium Club, including Tim Lincecum experimenting with facial hair. As the back of this card notes, he's chopped off the long hair he was known for, but still has "electric" stuff on the mound. The only way this card could be better is if it were the "electric foil" parallel.

But the headliner of this break were the Topps High Tek cards. Topps saw fit to resurrect this brand from the late-'90s, which are printed on clear acetate instead of cardboard, and have a wide variety of possible background patterns. Unlike the earlier sets that had up to 80 possible backgrounds (making for an 8000+ card set), they scaled that back significantly in 2014, offering only twelve patterns, six for each league. You could call this a "fractured set", which are pretty much impossible to explain in a reasonably-sized paragraph.

The luck of the draw meant I ended up with two of the sixteen Topps High Tek cards in the group break. The same held true for the collectors who had the Braves, Dodgers, Yankees, Brewers, and White Sox. That's rather unfortunate collation for a group break, as all the rest of the team slots walked away with only four cards. Such are the risks with these high-end products that contain only a few cards per box.

Based on the patterns guide, it looks like these two boxes yielded the more common patterns, and that held true for my two as well.

2014 Topps High Tek Net #HT-TT Troy Tulowitzki

This Tulo card has the National League's "Net" pattern. As usual in these small sets, the only two Rockies to be found are he and Carlos Gonzalez. The plastic is fairly flexible, but it's probably pretty hard to actually crease it. This type of plastic instead tends to turn white when bent too much. None of the cards has a numeric card number; instead they use the frustrating alphabet soup of the set name and player's initials. Trying to actually build a fractured set without card or pattern numbers would be a pure nightmare.

Still, these are pretty cool cards, and my second win from the break is an awesome one!

2014 Topps High Tek Spiral Bricks Clouds Diffractor #HT-WMA Willie Mays /25

Like Stadium Club, Topps High Tek contains a mixture of current and retired players. That's a "clouds diffractor" parallel of the Say Hey Kid, numbered to 25. The acetate pattern is the National League's "Spiral Bricks" pattern, one of the more common patterns. The diffractor pattern isn't visible in the scan, but it looks more like bubbles than clouds. The break got a pretty even mix of current and retired players, and I'm happy with one of each.

I definitely got lucky with this one. It was my first experience both with a group break and packs of high-end baseball cards. The group break idea I am sold on, and I really have to hand it to Nachos Grande for putting these together. After all, we do have a pretty small community, and it seems like he struggles a bit filling breaks. I appreciate the effort he puts in, and I'm sure it's not the last one I'll participate in.