In 1956 Aaron won the National League batting title at .328, his first, and led the league in hits and doubles. He was twenty-two. The Braves finished one game behind Brooklyn. Outside Milwaukee he was well regarded and not yet a headline.
Topps kept the sideways card for 1956 and improved it. There are 340 cards in the set, each with a large portrait on one side and a painted action scene on the other, a real ballpark behind it this time instead of a blank color. On card 31 the portrait is Aaron in his Braves cap, close, looking past the camera. The scene beside him is a runner sliding into home plate, the dust coming up and an umpire bent over the play.
The runner was taken from a photograph of Willie Mays. Nobody at Topps seems to have checked.
The runner is not Aaron. The painting was made from a photograph of Willie Mays, with the uniform changed to look like a Brave’s, and nobody at Topps seems to have checked, or perhaps to have minded. The card was never corrected. So the batting champion of the National League shares his own card with the best player in the other dugout, and the two of them, who would finish their careers with 660 and 755 home runs, are on the same piece of cardboard in the same year.
It does not show on first look. You need to know what Mays looked like in 1955 to catch it. Once somebody has pointed it out, though, it is very hard to look at the card any other way.
The card comes in two backs. The first half of the set, through number 180, was printed on both gray and white stock, so Aaron’s exists both ways with the same front. The fronts themselves hold their color well. As with every 1956, the trouble is the white border: a soft corner shows at once against it, and the centering wanders from one side to the other on a great many copies. A sharp, square one is uncommon.
