Collecting (or trying to) Henry Aaron

 

Baseball has a lot of magic numbers.

            Or should I say milestone numbers?

            500 home runs.

            3000 hits.

            3000 strikeouts.

            300 wins.

            (But good luck seeing that one again.)

            Individual players have sent benchmarks that may never be reached again. Cy Young with his 511 wins. Nolan Ryan with 5,714 strikeouts. Pete Rose with his 4,256 hits. Rickey and those 1,406 stolen bases. Ted Williams being the last guy to hit .400 in a season. 60 home runs in a season. 61. 70* home runs. 73* home runs. 714 home runs in a career. 715.

            755.

            762?

            This is not a blog post about Barry Bonds.

            I’ve said it here before, but when I was a kid, like most of you other collectors out there, I wanted my collection to be not only made up of the current players, but peppered with players who came before my time. Being a kid from Pittsburgh, I obviously would give my left arm for a Clemente card back then. I did manage to get some, and thankfully, none of them cost me a limb. But there were other players I wanted. Willie Mays. Frank Robinson. Guys like Brooks Robinson and Lou Brock, both of whom played long enough that their cards actually were tangible to a kid using paper route/birthday/holiday money to purchase them.

            But there was one guys whose cards I wanted more than any other…even the great Roberto Clemente.

            This guy.

            I don’t know what it was about me and Henry Aaron. I’d obviously never seen him play. He went into the record books the actual day before I was born. I know I revered home run hitters as a kid. A player who hit 500 home runs was more impressive to me than a player getting 3,000 hits. This was obviously before I became aware of the how much of a daily grinder one had to be to amass 3,000 hits in a career. No, I was in it for the spectacle. The long ball. The walk-off to win the game.

            And no one seemed to do it better than Henry Aaron.

            At least that’s what the archive tapes showed me.

            As a kid I always lived in a world where Henry Aaron was the home run champ.

            He still is to me…despite my firm belief that Barry Bonds should be in the Hall of Fame.

            755 home runs not 762.

            And Henry did it never having it more than 45 home runs in a season.

            Take that Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire.

            I’ve even read a couple of really great books on him.

           When I was a kid, I wanted Henry Aaron cards. But with my cash flow I wasn’t getting Henry Aaron cards. I had to settle for cards like these.

            And those were cool...I guess.

            I was lucky enough that I still collected into my later teenage years, when the paper route job morphed into the job working sports retail at the mall. This would be 1991. Cards were the rage, only getting bigger, heading toward out of control and collapse. The mall I worked in (if you’re a George Romero fan you know the mall very well) did the occasional weekend card show. Because I was teen labor, I was always working the weekend. When these card shows happened, I’d get to the mall an hour or so before my shift and peruse what the dealers had.

            I got myself this as an impulse purchase.

...and yes, it’s certified.

            It was at one of those shows that I bought these two cards.

            They were the first and only Henry Aaron cards I ever owned during my original collecting years.

            In fact, they are the same cards I bought back then. I’ve often told the story on this blog about how when I quit collecting, I gave all of my cards to my younger brother, save my Pirates team sets. That wasn’t 100% correct. Or I simply forgot. Along with the Pirates team sets, I also kept my Roberto Clemente cards and the two Henry Aaron cards I bought at the mall card show. The Clemente and Aaron cards spent years in a storage box that I used for keepsakes like letters from friends (remember those?), physical concert tickets (remember those too?), and all the other sundry ephemera from my own life.

            Eclectic tastes, I have?

            They may have only been three Clemente cards and two Henry Aaron cards, but when I got back into collecting in 2019, it was nice to know that my new collecting would have a foundation in my old one. And in almost three years back to collecting, I’ve managed to add a couple of Clemente cards via trade, and a couple of Aaron cards via a trade and my delusions of grandeur that I was actually going to be build my birth-year set of 1974.

           Hahahahahahaha!

            Not that I don’t massively admire the folks who do that.

            But most of the Henry Aaron cards that I’ve attained since 2019 have looked more like these.

            Or these.

            Not a big A&G man....with a few exceptions.

            That said, I was super-excited to get this in a random pack of 2021 Update.

            And I’m coming for that 2022 SP.

            I’m not slouching off those Aaron insert cards, etc. I enjoy them very much. I guess I just thought at this point I would’ve added some more of his playing day cards (no, not league leader cards) to my collection. But I really haven’t. I know there have been factors like, I don’t know, a plague upon the earth. And NYC just doesn’t get too many card shows. The one we got this January coincided with a winter storm so…

            And, yes, I know there’s eBay, SportLots and ComC.

            It’s just…well…the cost.

            I might be an adult with a professional degree, but I’m still a thirteen-year-old paper boy when it comes to my purchasing choices. I’m also an idiot. I’ll sit there and buy two hobby boxes of current base cards, blow $200, get no inserts that I want, build a base set that I can eventually purchase for a third of the money, get PC guys that I can get on SportLots on the cheap, and then look longingly at Henry Aaron cards on ComC that I could’ve bought had I used common economic sense in the first place.

            But those days are coming to a close.

            This is the quality vs. quantity year, remember?

            I plan on slowing building a nice Henry Aaron PC.  Maybe 2-3 cards a year. A little less when I start getting into the early 60s/1950s cards. I know the ones I’m really interested in getting first. 

            For some reason everything 1964 is calling to me. 

            I don’t even expect to own a Henry Aaron rookie card, unless it looks like it went through a meat grinder.

But, hey, a guy can dream right?

Thanks for reading! Happy collecting!

NEXT FRIDAY: If there’s a chance I can get Henry Aaron playing day cards, there’s no chance in hell of me getting any for Jackie Robinson. So let’s talk Jackie Robinson cards, specifically the ones I do have, and maybe why cards made after a player’s playing day are kind of cool.