In November 1974 the Braves traded Aaron to the Milwaukee Brewers, and he went back to the city where his career had begun twenty years before. The Braves had played in Milwaukee from 1953 until they left for Atlanta in 1966. Now he returned in an American League uniform, at forty-one, to a league that let him hit without taking the field.
This is his last regular Topps card. The photograph is a posed batting stance: a blue helmet with the Brewers’ M, number 44 on a white jersey, the bat cocked over his shoulder and his eyes turned to the camera. Two colored bars at the foot of the card carry his name and his team, and in the corner a small figure of a batter stands over the words “Des. Hitter.” No earlier card of his needed that label.
The record cards tell you what he did. This one tells you how it ended.
The ending was quiet. He hit his 755th home run on July 20, 1976, at County Stadium, off Dick Drago of the Angels, and he played his last game on October 3. The numbers that season were modest, and nobody needed them to be more. The same set opens with a Record Breaker card marking his career total of runs batted in, so 1976 Topps holds him twice: once for what he had done, and once at number 550 as he was that summer.
It is the less celebrated of the two, and the more affecting. The early Aarons show a young man on his way. This one shows a veteran with nothing left to prove, doing the one thing he had always done better than anyone, in the city that first saw him do it.
Like most cards of its decade, it was printed in quantity, and condition is the whole question. Look at the corners against the white border, at how evenly the picture sits on the card, and at the edges of the two color bars along the bottom, where wear shows first. A sharp copy is a fitting close to a run of cards that begins in 1954.
