The Hammer

 1934-2021

Today marks another passing of a legend.  Sometimes an over-used term, but not in this case.  Hank Aaron was a hero of my youth.  Unlike some other heroes, I never later learned of a dark side.  My opinion was not tainted over the years.  He was as great off the field as on.

I happen to be tinkering with another project, and had he makings of this card ready.  My project is how Topps got their All-Star cards wrong.  We've all noticed how Topps All-Stars didn't match the actual All-Stars or even The Sporting News All-Stars. So I'm working on correcting that.  In 1969, Hank Aaron was named a Sporting News All-Star, and was a starting outfielder in the 1969 All Star Game.  But Topps left him out of the subset.

I wanted to include this actual card here as well.  I started collecting in 1974 and this card contained two if my favorite players.  Great pictures, too.  It is a shame that they both recently passed.  

I've made countless Cards That Never Were of Hank Aaron.  Here are as many as I can remember at this time.  I'm sure that I'm leaving out a few.

Barrier Breakers: 1947 Larry Doby - Cleveland Indians

We all know Larry's story. Second to Jackie Robinson in the MLB and the second MLB manager behind Frank Robinson.  He also played in Japan in the early sixties. He has been one of my favorite subjects in this blog. I've made a few cards of him already. Here is a '55 Bowman, a 1963 Menko, an Alt-Topps MLB Dream Bracket card and a 1978 Topps manager card.  These all made appearances on my blog going back as many as 9 years.

I had floated the idea of the 1947 Bond Bread card on Twitter. Most liked it and thought it captured the era accurately.  The only complaint was the photo I had originally used.  Someone pointed out that it was already used on a  1979 TCMA card.  It actually was used by TCMA  again in 1984 and 1986.  In all, I found over a dozen cards that used that same photo, including several from Fleer and Topps. This version uses a magazine phot from that era.  I can't tell if it was colorized or just the print quality of the magazine.  At least I haven't found it on any other cards. Yet.

Dick Allen

 1942-2020

It is with great sadness that I learned earlier today of Dick Allen's passing.

This one really stings.  I grew up a Sox fan in the '70s.  Dick Allen was a hero to me.  I had a homemade baseball bat that was just ridiculously way too big.  We called it the "Dick Allen" bat.  I could only use it playing sandlot ball because it was obviously not legal for little league play.  If you follow this blog, you know that I have used Allen as the subject of many posts. The 72 "In Action" was one of my first fake cards. Here are as many others that I can remember making:

1968 Topps Joe Morgan Game Insert

  

I decided to pay tribute (although belatedly) to Joe Morgan by adding him to the 1968 Topps Game Inserts.  He was on the Astros at that time and Topps was in a dispute with Monsanto over the Astros trademark.  So many Houston players appeared hatless or with the logo airbrushed. 

This was actually called out in the comment section when I had made a 1969 Topps Deckle card for Joe Morgan.  I had to agree with the accuracy of the comment and made a second version:

Of course Morgan's superstar status in the '70s made him a frequent subject on this blog. Here are some of the other Joe Morgan Cards That Never Were from past blog posts. 

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Just a side note:  I fought with this posting for hours.  The new google blogger is just awful.  I couldn't get the cards to line up properly.  So after a long battle, I gave up and stacked them.  Then my post wasn't showing up on other feeds.  I deleted it the re-made it, thinking all the reshuffling of images might've messed it up.  Still nada.  Finally it's showing up on others' blog rolls but it randomly used the 4th image instead of the 1st. I am so close to switching to a new platform.  Any recommendations?