1986 Fleer League Leaders

Card Manufacturer: Fleer

Card Set: League Leaders

Set Type: Box

Year: 1986

Card Number: 44

Card Type: Base

Not everything I picked up on Black Friday was a serial numbered, color foil parallel card.  No some of the cards were just the blue collar working man's cards from the late eighties and early nineties.  

Here we have Mr. Yount's card from Fleer's 1986 League Leaders box set.  Fleer put out a ton of these sets from the late 80's to the early nineties. League Leaders, Award Winners, Baseball's Best, Heroes of Baseball, you get the idea.  And all these sets were always numbered to 44.  I always thought that was a bit odd.  I mean 45 is a much more solid number, at least in my mind, and 45 is 5 full 9 pocket pages. Of course the answer to why Fleer put out 44 card box sets is simple math.  A full size press sheet of baseball cards is 264 cards. 264 divided by 44 is 6.  So you can get 6 sets per sheet.  And Fleer pumped these out by the millions.  I can remember a local card shop I frequented in El Paso, where my dad was stationed in the 80's, had a display with all sorts of sets like this, and they were all a buck a pop.  And to be honest that wasn't a bad deal, these sets had all the stars of the day in them.

Of course the overall layout it is pretty simple, but Fleer wasn't know for it's complex designs, I'm not counting 1995 either where they went way over the top.  After staring at this card for a good long while I had to play card detective and try and figure out who that was in the background.  After some quick Googling that is either  former coach and Brewers catcher Andy Etchebarren, if this photo was taken from 1986. If it's older it would have to be pre 1984 as no one with number 8 played for the Brewers in 1985. If it's from 1984 it's catcher Jim Sundberg and if it's from 1983 or earlier its Rob Picciolo. I'm not sure how far back Fleer would go for photos. Plus it's hard to get a good look at that guy back there. At first I thought he was black or at least darker skinned, but that's probably just the effect from the flashbulb. And after thinking about it I think it's safe to say it's probably Andy Etchebaren