Vintage 1980s MLB World Series Champ Hall of Famer George Brett KC Royals Postcard ⚾ NOS

Remember George Brett? ⚾ Vintage 1980s Hall of Famer KC Royals Postcard, NOS

Size: 5 1/2" x 3 1/2"

George Brett in his Royals cap and jersey, grinning at the camera like he knows something you don't. This is a 1980s color postcard of him, and every one I have is new old stock - never mailed, never written on.

Turn it over and it tells you who made it: George Brett, Kansas City Royals in the corner, CL/Sports #12 and SC18422-© Kansas City Royals at the bottom, Published by Coral-Lee, P.O. Box 314, Rancho Cordova, CA 95670 up the divider, and Mike Roberts Color Productions, Oakland, CA 94623 with the Mike Roberts trademark. It's the standard postcard size.

⚾ The only one to do it in three decades

George Brett played his whole career for Kansas City, won the World Series with them in 1985, and went into the Hall of Fame on the first ballot in 1999. He's still the only player ever to win a batting title in three different decades - 1976, 1980 and 1990 - and he finished with 3,154 hits, one of the best third basemen the game has seen. In 1980 he flirted with .400 into September and finished at .390. And then there's July 24, 1983, the Pine Tar Game at Yankee Stadium: a ninth-inning home run taken away because of how far up the handle the pine tar went, Brett charging out of the dugout, and the league putting the homer back on the board. In the '80s he wasn't just a ballplayer, he was a fixture of American sports.

✉️ Coral-Lee, the First Lady of postcards

Coral-Lee was the publishing name of Coralie Sparre, a retired California schoolteacher. She'd collected postcards since the 1960s and used them as teaching aids, and when she retired in 1976 she decided somebody ought to be making postcards of what was going on right now - history while it happened. Her first project was the Carter presidency. It started as a 12-card set and grew to 72 cards by the time Jimmy Carter left office, and in January 1981 she handed him a bound album of them in the Oval Office - then made the photo of that into a postcard too. Roy Nuhn of the American Postcard Journal gave her a full page in late 1977 under the title Coral-Lee, First Lady of Postcard Publishing, and said she might turn out to be one of the most important postcard publishers ever. Her CL/Sports line is how ballplayers like Brett ended up in her catalog.

📸 Mike Roberts, America's Postcard King

Mike Roberts came to the Bay Area in 1934 and started out as a photographer in Berkeley. He took to Kodachrome soon after Kodak brought it out in 1936, and by 1941 he was a partner in the Litho Screen Company in Oakland. He founded Mike Roberts Color Productions around 1949 - some accounts say the early '50s - and turned out many thousands of color postcards of just about everything, which is how he got called America's Postcard King. In 1981 he took over printing the National Baseball Hall of Fame's postcards. He died in 1989.

⚾ About these

They're 5 1/2 by 3 1/2 inches. Frame one with a Royals pennant, slip it into a sleeve in your baseball binder, or give it to somebody who grew up listening to the Royals on the radio. The supply is finite - nobody's printing Coral-Lee's George Brett card again, and once these last unmailed ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.