The True Home Run King!

As part of my most recent COMC shipment, I was fortunate enough to have three vintage Hank Aaron cards counted among it's contents. Two of the three were gotten during a fire sale for fairly low prices (low by eBay standards), although once you see those two you might understand the reason for the heavily discounted prices.

This '59 Topps is one that I have wanted for awhile now, even if it didn't feature Hank Aaron and Eddie Mathews, I still would have wanted any card from that era of baseball that had been titled "Fence Busters". Somebody in the past appears to have not been overly concerned with Eddie's side of the card, as he seems to be a little more worse for wear than his fence busting counterpart.

Even though I'm not the biggest fan of the 1959 Topps set, I'm going to start putting a little more effort in trying to get all of the multi-colored rising sun cards, including an upgrade of this one at some point.

Hank's '57 season was so impressive, and apparently still relevant enough at the time, that they were still talking about it two years later.

This is my first all-star card for my glacially slow 1960 set build. For some of the lesser names on the all-star checklist I will aim for a higher condition, but seeing as how much better conditioned examples of this card can go for, I might no be upgrading this one very soon... if ever.

Three years later and they were still going on about his '57 season.

Another set need, and by far the nicest one (condition wise) of the trio, also the most expensive. Even though I have stopped working on a number of the vintage baseball sets, for reasons that are too long to explain here, I feel like I have an obligation to complete the '69 set.

Thankfully twelve years later, Topps wasn't still comparing his most recent season's numbers to those of the '57 campaign, although that might've only been because there wasn't enough room to squeeze in another comparison. It's kind of interesting to see that as of 1969 there were only eight guys in the 500 HR club, while currently the list stands at 27. Scrolling through the names, I counted six that shouldn't even be allowed on that list due to their known cheating (steroids, HGH, etc.), and two more that are highly suspect. So in a theoretical perfect world, that club would probably be considered even more exclusive, with a membership of just 19.


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