Aaron finished the 1973 season with 713 home runs, one short of Babe Ruth. He was thirty-nine, he had hit forty that year, and the winter between seasons was the longest of his career. The record would wait until April. Topps did not.
The 1974 set came out in January, and for the first time Topps released all 660 cards at once instead of in series through the summer. Card number one gave Aaron a title he did not yet hold. Across the front, under a small crown and his name in large letters, runs the line “New All-Time Home Run King.” The card is turned on its side, and the photograph beside the lettering catches him laughing, eyes nearly shut, in his Braves cap at the ballpark.
It is a card made in confidence, and the first week of the season proved it right.
He tied Ruth with his first swing of the season, on April 4 in Cincinnati. Four days later, at home in Atlanta, he hit number 715 off Al Downing of the Dodgers. What the card had announced in January was simply true by the second week of the season, and it has read as a statement of fact ever since. The anticipation is easy to forget now. At the time it was a small act of nerve on a piece of cardboard.
Topps gave him more than the first card. Numbers 2 through 6 reproduce his earlier Topps cards, four years to a card, in a run back through his career to 1954. Together they make a small retrospective at the front of the set, and number one is the cover of it. The later cards in that run are easy enough to find. The first one is the card people look for.
It is a common card in the sense that Topps printed a great many of them, and an uncommon one in fine condition. The white outer border shows every softened corner, and the colored frame inside it makes any miscut plain at a glance. A sharp example with the frame sitting evenly is the version worth the search. The picture itself asks for nothing: a ballplayer near the end of a long road, laughing as if he already knew.
