1990 Fleer Cello Rip, R.I.P

I was digging through boxes in my closet the other day and, among other long forgotten stuff, was a 1990 Fleer cello three pack. 45 cards, 3 logo stickers, one "Limited Edition League Standout"!!!

$1.58 from K-Mart. Not much less than they go for now on eBay! I'm sure I kept it because the front showed Darryl Strawberry and Tony Gwynn. I hoped to someday finance my daughter's and my then newborn twin's college educations with stuff like this. Oh well. At least I got a couple of blog posts out of it.

First, to be clear, there are worse cards designs that the 1990 Fleer. It featured team logos and had consistent team colors. That is to say the players on any team matched each other. The colors didn't necessarily match the teams actual colors. I was o.k. with it. 1990 is really the last year I was interested in cards. The rookie/error card crazes were raging and when Upper Deck hit both nerves with their Ben McDonald 'error', I had had enough. I wasn't going to spend upwards of $70 to complete my Oriole team sets for the year so I quit. 

I cut this baby open today and dug into the contents. Each section had 15 cards and each had a Fleer team logo sticker. One card, in the bottom section (at least in this example) was a 'League Standout' card which was very different from the regular issue cards.

Here's the best of what I got in the top section:

Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn. 

A very young Omar Vizquel. I didn't know much about Vizquel and I had no idea he was still playing!!! He's coming off his rookie season of 1989 here. And 23 seasons later he's still up there hacking. Cool.

Sandy Alomar Jr. He played a long time, too. He was in Cleveland by the time this card was issued. 

 The Crime Dog. 19 seasons and almost 500 homers.

 The Dipper. I don't know how he played in the bigs with a grip and swing like that.

 Andres Galarraga. I liked this guy for no reason.

 Glenn Wilson played for the same high school my kids went to. He was born in the town I taught in. In 1985 my man Glenn had 14 homers but led the Phils with 102 RBIs. Mike Schmidt had 33 homers but only 93 RBIs.

 Danny Tartabull, another second generation player.

And a bunch of others of varying notoriety.

Scott Coolbaugh whose card I scanned by mistake. 

Devon White

Ron Hassey

Von Hayes

Bob Kipper

Milt Thompson

Pirates logo sticker

 And this card of two guys I had to look up, Scott Hemond and Mark Gardner. Gardner 99 big league games while Hemond, a first round pick by the A's had a couple of seasons in a platoon role among his seven seasons in the bigs.

I'll post the rest of this soon. But I can tell you it doesn't get better.