There are four Cubs cards in the 40-card Fleer Famous Feats set. No team had more (though three teams had just as many). I think it's safe to consider these feats as famous because none have ever been repeated or topped.
The second series of the Wide World Sports set for the Smithsonian came out in 1987. Like the first series, it consists of 60 cards. The only design difference is that series two cards do not have a logo in the bottom righthand corner.
Below are the three Cubs included in series two. Can you name them??
In the mid-1980s the Smithsonian Institution had an exhibit called "Baseball Immortals." It featured the photographs of Charles Conlon. And of course, you can't have an exhibit without having merchandise to sell. The institute had Wide World Sports produce a set of cards that included some of the Conlon pictures that were in the exhibit.
The set was issued in five series over three years. The cards were all the standard size of 2½" x 3½". The front was a full-bleed picture with career stats and a write up of the player on the back.
Set one, made up of 60 cards, came out in 1986. There is a Babe Ruth logo in the bottom left front of each card. That logo was only on the series one cards.
Two Cubs were in the set. Both were also in the 1984 postcard set and in fact, the same pictures were used in both.
Marketcom put out another Sporting News Conlon set in 1984. The set included both over-sized cards and postcards. There are 60 cards in the sets, though not 60 players. Several players (Ruth, Cobb, Matthewson, among others) have multiple cards. The same players are pictures are used on the cards and postcards.
There are three Cubs players included, each with one card.
The backs were that standard postcard design.
The All-Star game celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1983. The Sporting News and Marketcom collaborated to produce a set that commemorated that first game. The set consists of 60 cards featuring both major league players along with twelve All-Stars from the Negro Leagues.
The cards were sized even bigger than the 1981 set, coming in at 4½" x 6⅛" .
According to the Standard catalog the set has cards for all the players that were on the 1933 All-Star rosters. But that is not correct. There were three Cubs on that first All-Star team, Gabby Hartnett, Lon Warneke, and Woody English.
Only Warneke has a card in the set.
Years ago I collected all of the Cubs cards in the Megacards Conlon Collection set that was released from 1991 - 1995. Charles Conlon was a New York-based photographer who worked from 1910 through the early 1940s. The rights to his photos were owned by the Sporting News and Megacards worked with them to produce the set of 1430 cards.
Megacards wasn't the only company that the Sporting News licensed. In the 1980s they produced some cards by themselves and later partnered with Marketcom and World Wide Sports. It took me a while but I've finally got all of the Cubs cards from these various sets. I'll be showing them over the next several days.
The first Sporting News Conlon set came out in 1981. It was a 100-card set and it was available only though the Sporting News. It wasn't cheap as the complete set sold for $50 (that's $150 in today's dollars). The cards were big, measuring in at 4" x 5".
There are just three Cubs cards in this set.
I've got 19,735 Cubs cards from 298 different brands listed on a spreadsheet. A random number generator picked five cards, one each from the past several decades.
