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Back in January, I attempted to restart my Complete Set Chronicles series of posts by looking at the Red Sox Greats set from 2006 Fleer Greats of the Game. In an effort to keep the momentum going, let's look at another completed insert set, this one also from the wonderful 2006 Fleer Greats of the Game set.
Chicago Cubs Greats
Like all of the "team greats" insert sets, the Cubs set features 10 different players with a very team-centric card design. In this case, we get ample shots of the Cubs' famed ivy.
The cards look kind of weird in the scan only because I store all my cards in binder pages and the two missing spots above were actually from the Boston Red Sox Greats set. I'm not a huge fan of pulling cards in and out of my binder pages so this is as good as it's going to get for the blog post!
Anyhow, the players featured for the Cubs on this page are:
- Andre Dawson
- Bruce Sutter
- Billy Williams
- Ernie Banks
- Fergie Jenkins
- Gary Matthews
- Mark Grace
The final three cards in the set include:
- Randy Hundley
- Ron Santo
- Ryne Sandberg
For the Cubs, only Randy Hundley sticks out to me as maybe a "swing and a miss" by Fleer in terms of player selection. Then again, perhaps Hundley is a fine choice - he's simply not someone for whom I'm well-versed.
Like the other two team sets I've previously reviewed from 2006 Fleer Greats of the Game, the Cubs set is a solid little set to construct. The player selection seems good enough for the "greats" title and the cards do like nice all together in a binder page. I still wish Fleer had made each team set only 9 cards each so that they'd all fit on one 9-pocket page but I get the feeling that card companies rarely consider set collectors when they produce their sets (especially their insert sets - otherwise we wouldn't get so many insert sets of size 10 cards)!
I give this particular set the same 8/10 score as the other two team greats set. I see nothing here that rises the Cubs above the other two sets, nor below the other two.
Bottom Line: 8/10
It's interesting that they didn't include anyone from before the fifties. No Gabby Hartnett, Three Finger Brown, or Hack Wilson--certainly not players that casual collectors would know (unlike some of the Yankees old-timers, for example), but great players. Given that limitation, having Hundley isn't that bad a choice, but maybe they should have put Bruce Sutter instead.
ReplyDeleteCool set. Shame they didn't make an A's Greats insert set.
ReplyDeleteIt looks like they had a certain time frame in mind when choosing the players. Hundley is probably the #2 catcher in Cubs franchise history, only behind Gabby Hartnett. It's still early, but I'm hopeful Willson Contreras will move past Hundley at some point.
ReplyDelete