Throwback Month: 2001 Fleer Showcase

A personal favorite for my last post of the weekend.  Fleer put out a bunch of base sets during this time and a bunch of them looked the same.  It was a huge problem and they were not the only ones who had rampant problems with duplicating sets, card concepts, and designs across their product line.  The Showcase set could probably be fairly compared to several other Fleer products from 2001, but I like this set for several reasons.  Let's start off with the regular cards in the base set.

First, you have Jeromy Burnitz looking like this.  Sure he's looking up, but the ball is probably 30 feet over the wall or it's in the catchers mitt behind him.  One of my favorite late 90s non-Cardinals players.  Honestly, it's all because of the swing.  I'm pretty sure that he is tearing up some beer league softball right about now.  I also love the Fernando Tatis card in the blue pinstriped Expos uni.

The design on the base set is clean and typical of Fleer cards from this era.  You don't get to see much on the card outside of the design concept and the player.  What team is Fernando playing?  What stadium is Jeromy Burnitz hitting in?  You will never know on a Fleer card, unless you are looking at the Ultra set.  Then maybe.  Despite the flaw, in my opinion, this was about the best Fleer did with this style of card.  The design is clean and all of the important information such as team, position, player name are all visible.  There were also short prints.....

  

It's hard to tell from the scan, but this card actually has a frame and the center picture has a pretty nice finish.  Reminds me a bit of the Topps Gallery cards.  There are also rookie cards done in this same fashion.  

The prized rookie card from this set is the Albert Pujols, but I do not own it.  It's one of the few Pujols rookie cards that I have not tracked down over the years.  Maybe someday, but it still has not happened.  The best of this set is the autographs.

I have put up copies of the autographs from this set before.  They are really cool and feature some really great names like Derek Jeter, Willie Mays, and Albert Pujols.  Again, I own none of them.  They are out there though.  There are also plenty of really affordable names in the set, at the time many were prospects, but they turned out to be solid Major Leaguers.  Furcal, Glaus, Brian Giles, Ben Sheets just to name a few.