30 Day Baseball Card Challenge

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Cheap Cool Cards #34: The Pine Tar Incident

There are hundreds of reasons why collecting sports cards is cool.  One of them is that they capture sporting events on cardboard.



Today marks the 30th Anniversary of the infamous Pine Tar Incident involving George Brett and the New York Yankees.  If you're too young to know what I'm talking about... just check out the video for yourself. 

Fleer decided to honor the event by creating a special card in their 1984 baseball card set.


1984 Fleer #638

You've gotta love Fleer's effort to immortalize the event... as well as Brett and Gaylord Perry for their willingness to pose for the photo.  In the end, both were happy because the umpire's ruling was eventually overturned, the home run was allowed, and a few weeks later the game resumed with the Royals holding off the Yankees.

On a side note... when the two teams got together again to wrap things up... Billy Martin had a little fun with the fielding arrangements.  He let the left-handed Don Mattingly play second base and pitcher Ron Guidry play centerfield.  It would have been cool had Fleer captured that on cardboard.

Happy Wednesday and sayonara!

7 comments:

The Lost Collector said...

I've never seen this card. Awesome!

night owl said...

I've been showing this card all day on Twitter. It's fantastic.

Anonymous said...

I was a big fan of Fleer in the 1980's, and cards like this were a large part of their appeal... They were never afraid to have fun with the cards.

Fuji said...

Fleer in the 80's rocked! Some of my favorite "cheap, cool cards" are those Fleer cards where you put them together to form a bigger picture.

Example:
1983 - Black and Blue & Speed and Power
1984 - Carew and Boggs & Sax and Thon
1985 - Toronto's Big Guns & Holland and Tunnell

Swing And A Pop-up said...

They should have made a card of him charging out of the dugout.

Ana Lu said...

I didn't know that was a limit measure for pine tar.
Those 'commemorative' cards are priceless!

Greg Zakwin said...

Let me echo Swing and a Pop-up's comment.