In case you missed it, Fleer/Skybox was crowned the King of 1997 by yours truly earlier this month. While their work in baseball had overlapped other manufacturers, it’s easy to forget about their other licenses if you only collect baseball. One of their many masterpieces, was a radical insert named ‘Jambalaya’, which was inserted at a ratio of 1:170 inside packs of 1997-1998 Skybox EX2001, or approximately one in every 30 boxes.
As you can imagine, Jambalaya inserts were some of the most sought after cards from the moment of their release into the wild in 1997 and still today, more than 20 years later. I’m not even exaggerating. A recent, ’97-’98 Jambalaya of Michael Jordan sold on eBay for an astonishing $14,699. Like I said, once Fleer and Skybox combined forces, they were truly an unstoppable card manufacturer.
With that kind of serious money to be made, you can expect the vultures to come around looking for opportunities to scam collectors. I’m not saying the following listings are scams but for someone like myself that has been immersed so deep in cards for 30 years, I find it odd that uncut Fleer/Skybox Jambalayas are suddenly finding their way to eBay two decades after the original versions dropped.
Below is one such Jambalaya, which the seller claims to be “authentic”. You can see the listing for yourself here. The seller, leximo2, provides several photographs of this unreleased prototype, which he calls “RARE”. Not surprisingly, he does not allow any returns but tries to ease your mind by letting you know that some of these cards have been graded by Beckett. In 2019, can we trust any grading company? No.
Personally, I want to believe these are 100% legit. It would be a nice addition and find. The seller claims to not be the original owner but hints at the possibility that these were sold at the now legendary, 2005 Fleer bankruptcy sale. Personally, if I had purchased these cards to resale, I would have obtained as much information as humanly possible to prevent suspicion in this very dirty hobby world we now populate.
We are days away from 2020 and the only absolute truth is that many collectors have the know-how and the resources to print up just about anything. If we can LITERALLY print a working 3D gun, surely, some sweaty, money-hungry collector can knock out a few, 20+ year old Jambalaya inserts for MTN DEW and Doritos money for the entire year. I may be on to something because so far, not a single copy has sold.
Upper Deck, the company that purchased Fleer in 2006, has been using the Jambalaya insert name and design for almost a decade now. Below is one such example, from their Marvel properties. Unfortunately, not even Chris Carlin could help us with these new “uncut” rarities that hit eBay because he was not working at Fleer at the time of the release. I guess we will have to wait and see but just know, you’ve been warned.
(Thank you to Tonyo for finding these)
The Baseball Card Blog 
When it comes to items like these… i’m way more pessimistic than optimistic. On the other hand, Fleer let a lot of stuff out their backdoor and into the hobby, so it wouldn’t be a huge surprise if this was legit.