My first real serious venture into card collecting was the Topps Batman series in 1989. By the time I amassed the entire set, Topps redirected me to the new Ninja Turtles Movie Cards in early 1990, which lost traction with me once they unleashed the Dick Tracy cards. In between and all around these were also sets for California Raisins, Beetlejuice, The Simpsons, Ghostbusters II, and a new series from the long running Wacky Packages. There was never gonna be enough time or money to acquire every single card from every single set, but that never stopped me from trying. Obviously the concept of moderation would remain entirely lost on me, because alongside the endless parade of non sports trading cards, I played hard and deep into the world of Major League Baseball Cards.
Basketball may've been the most popular sport of the 1990s, but Baseball was a close second in the Untied States - if not tied. (The Sports Movies of that decade will corroborate this.) For me, Baseball was #1 - nothing else was even close: I liked playing it, I kinda liked watching it, and once I got the fever, I loved collecting it. And the most exciting thing about Sports Card collecting is that, while each athlete was restricted to their own singular card in the series, there were also many different card brands to consider: Topps, Donruss, Upper Deck, Leaf, Bowman, Score, and Fleer (just to name a few). So, you could go hard and try to collect an entire set of Upper Deck, or, if you had some favorite players or teams, you could play the field and try to get each of their cards across every brand during any given season. The latter was the most attractive approach to me because, while the ball player was predictably in a different pose on each brand's card, they were also presented in a variety of graphic environments; the colors and borders and texts were sorta the highlight of all card collecting for me, so the idea of procuring an entire rainbow's worth of Ken Griffey Jr. images was entirely irresistible.
Having said that, there had been some really boring looking series over the years with nothing exciting in the way of making the cards really pop in terms of graphic design. Much of that blandness existed throughout the 80s, but once the 90s hit, everything seemed to get a bit more bold. But in 1991, Fleer managed to combine the stark coldness of the older designs and combine it with the loud garishness of the newer ones to create some of the most notoriously ugly Baseball Cards that I can remember.
Some might call the Fleer '91 set "elegant" or "sophisticated", and in a year when Grey Poupon ads dominated our TVs and Reba McEntire scored a hit with her cover of "Fancy", that's probably exactly the look they were going for. But My God, that yellow - if nothing else it didn't really convey the vibe of ballparks and peanuts and Cracker Jacks, but instead gave the whole series a National Geographic flavor. Honestly a solid white border with text would've been more striking... and for their special subset of insert cards, they did even better than that.
For the sake of clarity, an "insert" is a special trading card (sometimes part of a smaller subset) randomly placed into packs -- sometimes you got one, sometimes you didn't, some were common, some were rare. For anyone who thought "the sticker" was the best part of any pack of cards, these are what you were looking for, but when you added odds to the experience, it felt like winning the lottery anytime you spotted that noticeably different design. And in 1991, Fleer put out 12 randomly inserted cards from a subset called Fleer Pro-Visions.
Swapping the black & yellow color palette was a good start, but the real dazzle was in these badass illustrations. With attractive artwork credited to T. Smith, the set showcased 12 of the biggest All Stars of the moment, depicting them in some fantastical way that's specifically unique to their respective talents. Regardless of whether or not you're able to appreciate this from afar, I'm here to confirm that this is how an 8 year old boy sees Baseball and Baseball players: as almost Science Fiction Fantasy, complete with superpowers and cartoon whimsy.
I won't bore you with any subjective dissection of each portrait (Bo Jackson was my favorite player of the day, but Mike Greenwell in front of "The Green Monster" is undeniably the coolest card) so I'll just leave you these with the certainty that you'll enjoy them on as many levels as I do.
- Paul
#1 Kirby Puckett "Dynamite"
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