Several years ago I announced on this blog that I wanted to complete all of Fleer’s 1980s baseball sets.
After Topps, Fleer featured my favorite ’80s cards and since all players shown on those cards are players from my youth, I wanted all of them.
Building on the ones I’d already completed, like 1984 and 1981 Fleer, I tackled the rest. I now have 8 of the 9 1980s Fleer flagship sets finished. 1987 Fleer is the last remaining one incomplete.
I don’t have anything against 1987 Fleer, it just happened that way. In fact I like ’87 more than some other ’80s Fleer sets, like ’86 and ’89. But here we are. I need 70 cards to finish the set.
I mentioned not too long ago that I’m having trouble paying attention to this set build. The cards I do have sit in a box on the floor, they’re not even set up in a binder waiting for empty pockets to be filled. There are so many other card completion interests that come before this one.
I find I don’t want to “waste time” dedicating time to completing this. I don’t want to pick up cards I need card-by-card and I don’t want to buy a full set online cheap and accept all those dupes. Yet, it can’t just sit there 70 cards short.
The way this is going to get done is if people just randomly send me ’87 Fleer wants (another good way is spotting a bin of ’87 Fleer at a card show but that’s never happening).
Just the other day, Gavin of Baseball Card Breakdown did the right thing and sent some random 1987 Fleer needs.
This. This is how it’s going to get done.
This might actually get me to start an ’87 binder (but probably not — I still need to clear more space, and there’s another card giveaway coming up, by the way). I can already feel the progress in process after all that stagnation.
Most of what is left is just random cards with a few stars in the mix like Mike Schmidt, Cal Ripken Jr., Darryl Strawberry, guys like that. The top rooookies left are Will Clark, John Kruk and Wally Joyner. No bank-breakers.
But still I’d rather just find a lot with those guys or, best-case scenario, a pile of ’87s on the street corner. Hunting for such a plentiful set card-by-card makes me feel sad. Another thing I should finally do is list my wants on TCDB. (By the way, the blog want list is updated).
So, super-happy Gavin accepted my challenge. He sent along some customs, too, which I always look forward to receiving.
A couple Dodger greats, a sun-bleached Fernando and a sparkly fireworks Penguin cut-out.
Here are a couple of Kershaw tobacco-style minis, I enjoy getting Kershaw cards that no one else has.
And returning to officially-licensed cards, here’s a 2014 Heritage box topper featuring Dodgers catcher A.J. Ellis and a couple of Nates.
I have one or two other Heritage box toppers and always am tempted to cut the desired card out and store in a nine-pocket page. I haven’t gotten the courage up to do that but I should.
So there are some more cards that I can’t wait to officially add to my collection. Gavin dashed off a note saying I didn’t have to blog about any of this.
But of course I did.
I may not want to spend too much effort on completing an easily available set the traditional way, but the individual cards received from a fellow collector are always worth mentioning.
This is me tapping the sign.