Neat Ichiro Find, I think.

 After writing my last post about the fake 1994 Calbee Hokkaido/Kyushu/Sanyo Ichiros I flipped through my pile of "vintage" Calbee Ichiros from the mid-90s.  I had some paranoid thoughts running through my head about whether they might be fake too, though I've never heard of any of his other Calbees being counterfeited.

In that frame of mind I had a bit of a collector heart attack when I noticed something amiss with my 1995 Calbee Choco Snack Ichiros.  As I mentioned in a post in February, I bought that entire set complete in their original transparent packs.  I love that set. It has two Ichiro cards, numbered C-4 and C-32.

As I also mentioned in that post, purchasing the entire set gave me a double of one card, one of the Ichiros which I had purchased individually about a year ago (highlighted in this post here).

I put the Ichiros I have doubles of in the above photo.  Exactly the same, right?  But this is what the backs of those two cards look like:

Somebody in this picture doesn't belong here!!!  The one on the left (which is the one I purchased as a single last year) is number C-32, while the one on the right (that came with the set) is number C-4!  But they are the same card on the front.

The one on the left is the odd man out here, C-32 has a different picture.  This is what it looks like here, the card on the right, which is a totally different picture (these are the two Ichiros I got in the complete set):

At first I thought this might be an extraordinarily unlikely wrong back, but the likelihood of a wrong back which coincidentally had the same player on it was way too low to be realistic.  I also considered the possibility that it might be a fake, but also discounted that: if someone was going to go to the trouble of making a perfect fake that looks identical to the real one and even somehow get it into an identical sealed pack, they'd probably not have made such an obvious mistake as putting the wrong back on the card!  Also this is the black letter version which isn't really valuable enough to make it worth a counterfeiter's while like the 94 Calbees are.

Finally after frantically scouring the internet I hit upon what seems to be the correct explanation for the discrepancy.  According to the Collecitng Ichiro website, there was a Chiba Lotte Marines Stadium promotional giveaway in 1995 in which a specially made Ichiro card featuring the front design and photo of C-4 from the regular set, and the back design (and number) of C-32 on the back was used.  

So the card that I bought as a single last year would seem to have been from that promotion and not from the regular set, even though except for the switched photo it looks exactly like a regular 1995 Calbee Choco Snack card.  

Looking around the Japanese internet and auction listings the variation seems to be a lot harder to find than the regular card, which I guess makes sense.  Kind of a neat find, I had no idea this existed even though I've owned one for a year now, it can be fun to discover random things in your collection like this you never knew existed.

(Also, excuse the lousy photo quality.  My scanner (which ironically I placed these on top of to photograph) no longer works and I lost my camera during my trip to Canada last month so for the time being all my pics are with a semi-functional old iPad that I have!)

Fake 1994 Calbee Ichiro Cards really are Everywhere

A board member over on Net54 just drew my attention to the latest Prestige Collectibles Auction which has a really useful listing that I think is worth drawing everyone's attention to.  They have a 1994 Calbee Ichiro, card C-37 which is one of three Ichiros in the set, all of which are his first Calbee cards and all of which were regionally issued and are quite rare.

The reason I wanted to draw the listing to everyone's attention is that it includes by far the best explanation of the differences between real and fake 1994 Ichiros that I've seen anywhere on the internet.

Fakes of these three cards are everywhere, I even have one (the one pictured at the top of this post, C-39 from the set).  They are extremely hard to distinguish from legit copies because they are almost perfect, made on the same cardboard and particularly on the front they are identical.  The only way to distinguish them is to look on the backs, the color of ink used by the fakes is not a perfect match and Ichiro's face has a bit of a purplish hue to it on the fakes (and the orange boxes with his biographical details are a bit darker).  Go to the Prestige auction to see what I'm talking about because me just explaining it in words doesn't help much, they have side by side photos that lay it out so its super easy to spot, something which didn't exist on the internet until they put it up (at least as far as I'm aware).

Another intriguing detail mentioned in the auction description was that the grading companies weren't aware of the fakes and graded a bunch of them, meaning that even a PSA holder isn't a guarantee that they are legit.  I was curious how much of a problem that was here in Japan so I looked up the Yahoo Auctions listings since I remembered these are one of the few cards out there that routinely appear in PSA slabs here.  Sure enough, looking through the auctions I couldn't find a single legit one among all the ones which had photos of the backs.  Like this one here, a PSA 10 for 30,000 Yen but which has all the telltale signs of being a fake on it.  And here is an ungraded fake with a starting bid of just 1,000 Yen that will be interesting to see how much it goes for.

The Prestige auction says that 99.9% of the 1994 Ichiros out there are fakes and that it would be virtually impossible for anyone to assemble all three.  I would quibble with both of those assertions - I don't disagree that a majority of the Ichiros out there seem to be fakes but I doubt its 99.9% (just doing the math if we estimate there are just 100 copies of each Ichiro, there would have to be 300,000 fakes to account for 99.9% of the total, and I don't think there are anywhere near that many).  Also while difficult I have no doubt that there are collectors out there who have put together all three of the legit ones (sadly, not including me).  But those are minor points of disagreement as the main point they make is absolutely correct: fakes of these cards are everywhere and its buyer beware.

Actually I might add another minor point of contention.  They and everyone else calls these the "Hokkaido" Calbee set, but it wasn't just issued in Hokkaido, it was also issued in the Kyushu and Sanyo (around Hiroshima) regions as well. Its pretty rare nonetheless!

Puzzle: Why are Yamakatsu cards always minty while Calbee ones are always destroyed?

I am currently trying to put together the 1978 Yamakatsu set (along with the 1979 and 1980 ones).  Jay, a member on Net54 who I have a trading relationship with (I send him Japanese cards, he sends me American ones, mostly Expos), kind of got me started on them a couple of years ago when he was putting his set together and asked me to find some.  Looking for cards for him got me into them as well and now I sit here exactly one card short of finishing the set.

If you ever work on that set, the last card you will need to get is of Isao Shibata.  That was the last card Jay needed too and it took him forever to find one.  Now its my white whale, I guess it was short printed as they are quite hard to come by.

The thing I want to talk about in this post though is an odd detail I've noticed as I collect both Yamakatsu and Calbee cards from the late 70s.  When buying Calbee cards from that era the vast majority of the ones you find are in low to mid grade condition.  They are almost all "well loved", with rounded corners, creases and sometimes even kid's names written on them.  I'm not a condition sensitive collector so this doesn't bother me much, all my pre-1990s Calbee sets probably average between vg and ex on the condition scale.  If you were the PSA registered set builder type though you'd probably go mad trying to put together a vintage Calbee set - even the ones with sharp corners usually have some discoloration on the back (the result of existing in an extremely humid country!)  The surviving cards are probably similar in condition to the population of surviving American cards of the 1950s.

Yamakatsu cards on the other hand are the exact opposite.  Almost all of my Yamakatsu cards are in the ex-mt to near mint or even mint range.  This isn't because I've been picky about buying them, its just because almost all of the Yamakatsu cards I've come across are still in pretty pristine condition compared to the Calbee cards I've found.  Without risk of exaggeration I think I could describe my 1978 Yamakatsu set (minus 1 card) as being in near mint condition, with nothing below exmt.

I find this to be kind of mystery.  My Yamakatsu and Calbee cards come from the same era and depict the same subject matter, yet they were obviously not collected by the same people back in the day.  Calbee cards got a lot of love back then from kids, while Yamakatsu cards seem to have been treated much like adult collectors treat their cards today - in a way that preserves their condition.  Which itself is odd since the modern hobby didn't exist in Japan (and barely existed in the US) back then.

With Calbee cards, it isn't until the late 1990s that you notice an uptic in the number of cards that have been treated with care, and even with more recent cards from the 2000s its not unusual to buy a lot and find that half of them have obviously spent some time in someone's pocket getting their corners rounded.  But even in the 1970s Yamakatsu collectors weren't doing that.

I haven't come up with a convincing theory as to why that is.  Yamakatsu cards were definitely marketed towards kids and not to adult collectors back in the day.  The main difference between them is simply that Calbee cards came with bags of chips while Yamakatsu cards were sold as a stand alone product not attached to anything else.  But that doesn't get us very far in explaining why they have survived so well in comparison to their Calbee contemporaries.  Another thing is that some of the Yamakatsu cards on the market today are probably the remains of "dead stock" packs that nobody bought back in the day and thus they survived well.  Some Calbee card packs also survived that way but probably in much smaller proportions than Yamakatsu ones.  That is probably a partial explanation for why there are a lot of minty Yamakatsu cards around, but it doesn't tell us why there are almost no low grade ones, surely somebody bought some of these cards and played around with them back in the day?  So where are those cards?

Anybody have any clues as to what is going on here?

1946(?) Menko Uncut Sheet!

 Another cool thing I picked up on Yahoo Auctions recently arrived in the mail yesterday, an uncut sheet of baseball menko!

I love these cards, the caricatures are quite amusing and colorful (very similar to these cards I picked up a few years ago, but not the same set).

Does anybody out there have any info on these?  They depict players from NPB teams rather than college players, they have the team names on the back:

The teams are:
Tigers (Tora Gun)
Kinki
Giants (Kyoujin Gun)
Gold Stars (Kinboshi Gun)
Hankyu
Chunichi
Taihei (Taiheiyou?)
Senators

I am tentatively dating this to 1946 since the card on the upper right side is the "Gold Stars" team (Kinboshi), because the Daiei Stars went by that name in the 1946 season only. Also the one in the lower right is using the kanji that were (I think!) briefly used as a nickname for the Nishitetsu Senators (this is a tentative conclusion I am not 100% sure I'm right about this).  The other team names are easier to figure out and square with what they were called in 1946 (and the late 40s in general).

I'm curious about the caricatures on the front, they all have distinctive faces and I am curious if they are modelled after actual players.  They are quite similar to this similar set here which did feature caricatures of players who were identified by name on the back.  This set though doesn't list any names and it doesn't have any of players like Betto who are instantly recognizable so I'm not sure but hope to look into it more.

Anyway, this is a kind of cool find (and I actually got more than one of these as it was a "dead stock" purchase!  So if anyone wants to trade let me know!)

Nippon Ham Sausage Set: Where are the Nippon Ham Fighters at?

The 1975-76 Nippon Ham Sausage set is one of the hardest vintage Japanese sets to track down singles for out there.  In 5 years of collecting them I only have 11 (the nine pictured above and these two here).  You can read some of the basic information on the set over on Dave's site which has an excellent write up here.  Despite having way fewer cards, this set is probably harder to complete than the much larger monster 1975-76 Calbee set that I am also working on (1472 cards in the latter, 351 in the former).

There is a really odd mystery about this set which is unconnected to its scarcity which I thought I'd use this post to draw everyone's attention to.  Its related to the fact that Nippon Ham, in addition to making this set, also owned (and still owns) an NPB team: the Nippon Ham Fighters.

Now look at the cards I have - no Fighters.  This isn't a coincidence, the set doesn't actually seem to have many Fighters cards in it and the few that do exist are much more expensive than the average cards, suggesting they were short printed (this absolutely beautiful card of Toshizo Sakamoto for example has a starting bid of 20,000 Yen right now for a mid grade copy).

I don't have a checklist of the set handy, but do know that when you scroll through auction listings you will find a lot of cards of Giants players, and a fair number of Carp, Dragons and Tigers players.  Players from other teams, including the Fighters, are way less common.

This is not unique to this set, the Calbee sets from the 1970s are also dominated by Giants players and to lesser extents those other Central league teams which were popular at the time (and now).  But Calbee didn't own its own baseball team, Nippon Ham did!

So my question is why Nippon Ham didn't bother to put more emphasis on its own players in the set.  I don't even mean over-representing them, but simply putting as many Fighters cards as they did Giants or Carp cards.  It makes no sense.  This is especially the case since in Japan the whole purpose of owning a baseball team is to promote the parent company, so logically you would think the same thinking would apply to producing a baseball card set.  But it didn't, at least in this case.

This is made all the more puzzling since Nippon Ham in recent years has rekindled its baseball card sets (in collaboration with BBM) and these sets ONLY feature Fighters players!

This remains one of those minor things that irritate my logical brain when I look at them.  I do love this set, I think its quite beautiful.  But I really want to know why they didn't put many players from their own team in it!  Possible explanations are:

1) Division rivalries within the company.  Maybe the guys in charge of the cards didn't like the guys in charge of the team.

2) Utter incompetence.  Maybe the guys in charge of the cards didn't even think to put more cards of the company team in. Or maybe the people in charge of the team didn't even know the company was making a set and thus couldn't suggest the idea of putting more Fighters players in.

3) Closet Giants fans rearing their ugly heads again.  So many people in the business world are Giants fans that its entirely possible this included the Nippon Ham employees in charge of the set who made the deliberate decision to flood it with Giants players despite the obvious conflict of interest at work.

Not sure if there might be other explanations but any of these seems about equally plausible to me!

1975-76 Calbee Red Helmet Fight and Defend Series?

I reached another major milestone with my 1975-76 Calbee set today with the addition of the above card, #636 featuring a gaggle of Hiroshima Carp players and their manager on the mound.

This card is a milestone for me since its the first card from the 赤ヘル攻防シリーズ series which runs from cards 609 to 644 and was only issued in Hiroshima. I'm not sure how to translate the title of the series as it provides the perfect demonstration of why when you read English that has been translated directly from Japanese it often sounds very awkward.  The first part of the title can be cleanly translated as "Red helmets" and the last part as "series", but the middle 攻防 translates into "offence and defence" or maybe "fight and defend" which as you can see can be written with just two characters in Japanese but requires several words in English.  "Red Helmet Fight and Defend Series" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue in English but I guess it will have to do.

 I have had some luck in getting cards from the other two regional issues in the set (one from Hiroshima, the other Nagoya), but these ones have been quite a bit more elusive. I have come to the conclusion based on my experience that these are probably in fact the hardest to find of all the cards in the entire set.  

This is contrary to what my copy of Sports Card Magazine (which is a few years old now) suggests as it lists these as the cheapest of the three regionals (commons at 5,000 Yen each, compared to 7,000 and 8,000 for the other two series).  While all of the regional issues are hard to find, singles from this series seem to pop up about half as often on Yahoo Auctions and get higher prices than from the other two. I paid 2000 Yen for this one, which is the cheapest I've seen a card from this series go for, while I've been able to get cards from the other two (commons at least) in the 1,000 to 1500 Yen range.  The 40th series in the set (cards 1400 and up) are also hard to find despite not being regional issues, but I've been getting singles for them in the 500 to 1000 Yen range so they are a bit cheaper.

Anyway, it looks like cards from this series are likely going to be among the last I find for the set, which is coming along nicely.  I've added a few dozen singles from the easier to find series so far this year and I think I must be at around 1,000 cards out of 1472 so far, though I haven't counted!

Why Graded Cards are Stupid: 1995 Calbee Ichiro Edition

I picked up my first graded Japanese card this week.  Its a 1995 Calbee/ Choco Snack, card C-32 in the set.

I actually picked up this entire set just two months ago so I already have this Ichiro, but not THIS version of it.  This is the harder to find gold parrallel version, which has his name written in gold rather than black letters.  These generally sell for about double what the black letter regular versions of each card go for.

I feel bad for the guy I bought this card from because I got an insane deal.  The cheapest BIN prices or starting auction prices on this card (and the gold version of the other Ichiro from the same set) is 9,000 Yen right now, which is about normal.  This one popped up with a starting bid of just 1700 Yen which I put in and won the card without anyone else bidding. It was an insane bargain.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, graded cards are pretty rare in Japan, the hobby just isn't anywhere near as obsessed with condition as the American one is. All the other copies of this Ichiro card I've seen are raw rather than graded.  I didn't buy this card because it was graded, but rather in spite of the fact that it was graded.  Its cool to see that its in nm/mt+ condition but I could see that from the photos anyway.  Its an almost perfect card - the front is flawless and the only thing that I can see which may have prevented it from getting a "Mint" grade is some microscopic flecks of white on a bit of the edge on the back.

But the cost of having it graded by the seller must have cost almost, or maybe even more than, the amount I paid for it.  It just makes so little sense that I can only imagine the guy is kicking himself for having gone to the expense.

In the US I guess getting cards like this graded is kind of like playing the lottery that you'll get a Gem Mint grade and hit the big bucks.  So you might take the hit on stuff you got with lower grades.  But in Japan I don't think it works like that. It makes no sense that I got this card in this condition - its basically perfect - for this price.  I don't know if Japanese buyers were avoiding it because it was graded and they just don't know what that is or how to value it, or if I just lucked out.  Or is it like the US, where once it is established that a card has an insanely minor flaw and won't get a Gem Mint grade, the bottom falls out of the market for it.  I find the latter really doubtful given the way the market works here.

Anyway, I'm happy with this card in my collection.  I don't think I'll go for the entire gold parallel version of the set because...why would I?  But its cool to have a sample of one and that sample being an Ichiro!

Picking over the remains of a dying card shop gets: 1976 Pepsi Cola Chunichi Dragons Cards

 One of the big stores in Nagoya, Caps, is closing up shop and recently I've been taking advantage of their online liquidation sale to pick up some neat oddball items.  The best so far are these Pepsi Cola Chunichi Dragons circular menko which I am completely in love with.

I've seen various Pepsi Cola Dragons issues like these over the years, it seems they had some sort of promo deal with the team in the late 1970s.  Not all of them are circular, some were rectangular like these ones.

The lot of seven I bought has a pretty decent player selection - Yukitsura Matsumoto, T. Martin, Kenichi Yazawa, Hisato Aoyama, Hiroaki Inoue, Yasushi Tao and a gold embossed Dragons team logo one.  The colors are quite striking (especially Matsumoto's) and the gold embossing is quite cool for cards of this era.

The backs are cool, featuring the player's name, number and position, a trivia question about the rules of baseball and a rock-scissors-paper (janken) symbol.

Usefully they also tell us the player's age, which allows me to date them to 1976 since it says Yasushi Tao was a mere 22 years old when this came out!

I'm not sure what the checklist for these is (buying a copy of Engle is still on my to do list) but I might add them to my list of things I'm collecting.

I have a few more things I have picked up from Caps recently which I'll highlight in future posts. I have mixed feelings about their liquidation.  On the one hand I love getting bargains on neat stuff.  On the other seeing a card shop go out of business brings back memories of me and my dad's store closing down way back in 1993 and all the sad memories that accompany that!  So much effort into making a shop work that it kind of hurts to see it all getting broken apart, even if it isn't your store.

More Menko! 1948 JRM 26 Pinwheels

I thought I'd take a break from posts about what I found in my parents' house and return to the normally scheduled Japanese baseball card content of this blog.

In addition to my beloved Calbee and Yamakatsu cards from the 70s and 80s another hobby area I've been exploring lately are post-war menko cards.  They are just so colorful and simple that it is hard not to love them.

These three are from the set catalogued as JRM 26 "Pinwheels" issued in 1948.  Its a pretty good lot in terms of player selection, you've got:

Michio Nishizawa: Kind of an early Japanese version of Shohei Ohtani (or Babe Ruth), he excelled as a pitcher - compiling a 2.23 career ERA, winning 20 games in 1939 and pitching a no hitter in 1942.  Injuries he suffered during the war forced him to give up pitching, but he came back after the war as a position player and became one of the league's best hitters, belting a (then record) 46 home runs in 1950 and winning the batting and RBI titles in 1952. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1977.

Masayasu Kanada: He played 15 seasons between 1942 and 1957, all for the Tigers.  He won the batting title in 1946, also leading the league in hits that year and set a CL record with 18 triples in 1951.

Hideo Fujimoto: In a career lasting from 1942 to 1955 he became one of the most dominant pitchers in Japanese history.  He currently holds the record for lowest career ERA (1.90!!!!) and lowest single season ERA (0.74!!!!).  He finished his career with exactly 200 wins against only 87 losses,  a 0.697 winning percentage that is also a record. He was also elected to the Hall of Fame in the 1970s.

I'm not entirely certain what game this set was meant to be used to play - the numbers in the playing card suits on each (800, 1500 and 600) are obviously there for a reason but I don't know what it is.  For a set that is over 70 years old this one is one of the easier to find, despite having big name hall of famers the individual cards can be found in the 300-600 Yen each range ($3-$6US) on Yahoo Auctions, even less if you buy them in lots or stumble onto deals.  They look pretty cool too!

The 1990 Dodgers Starting Rotation was Unusually Kind to me that Year

In the summer of 1990 my family spent a lot of time in the small village of Rawdon, Quebec which is where my family comes from and my grandmother, aunt and cousins lived.  Being less than an hour drive from Montreal my dad took us to a few Expos games that year at the Big Owe.  We saw the Expos play games against the Dodgers, Giants and Padres that summer and at each of them I brought along a stack of baseball cards (mostly 1990 Donruss) to try and get some player autographs.

I found the autograph collection I put together that summer while on my recent trip o my parents' house and thought I'd devote a few posts to it, this one being about the Dodgers.

For some reason during most of those games I spent more time huddled around the visiting team's dugout than the Expos.  Probably this was because I knew I only had one chance with the visiting team but always had the feeling I could get the Expos player autographs some other time and thus gave them lower priority.  The result is that I have way more autographs of players from other teams than of Expos players.

When the Dodgers came to town I seem to have been unusually succesful at getting their staring pitchers to sign for me, I don't have any autographs of their position players that year but have three of their top starters (only missing Fernando really).

Its hard to remember but there was a time when Ramon Martinez was by far the most famous of the Martinez brothers and 1990 was his peak - he won 20 games that season, was named to the All Star team and came close to winning the NL Cy Young award.  I remember being totally blown away when I got his autograph, he was like a god at that time.

I also got Mike Morgan that day.  He was nowhere near the same level of star as Ramon was, but he was having a good season with the Dodgers (he pitched 4 shutouts that year).  The next year he had his best season, being named to the All Star team, and I remember being quite excited about that since I had gotten his autograph the previous season.

The real big name though was of course Orel.  He was even bigger than Ramon - a bona fide superstar who looked like a lock for Cooperstown.  I remember he was injured at the time and wasn't in uniform when he came onto the field (he was wearing some sort of generic sports clothing) but the throng of kids I was standing in immediately recognized him and started begging him for his autograph way more than we had for the other players.  "Mr. Hershiser!!!!!"

He was a total class act.  He walked past us (we were huddled along the wall of the walkway players entered and exited the field from) then stopped as soon as he reached the astroturf.  He turned around and said to us "I'll come back later and get you" and then walked onto the field to talk to some players and do some stretches.

I remember the group of us random kids being crestfallen at having missed his autograph and thinking we had been given the brush off.  But then true to his word about 10 minutes later he made a point of walking right back to us.  We all thronged to him and he told us to relax, promising he would sign for everyone.  And he did.  I remember giving him my card and pen and thinking "Holy crap!  Orel Hershiser is right in front of me signing my card!!!!!"  That instantly became the most treasured card in my collection, one I would show to all my friends that summer and totally embellish my interaction ("Me and Orel?  Oh yeah, we go way back.")

Someday I'm going to have to track down Fernando Valenzuela and Tim Belcher and get them to sign their 1990 Donruss cards so I'll have a full Dodgers pitching rotation signed.  For now though I'll settle for the memories these bring back.

Hank Aaron: Approaching his Excellency in 1992 (and hating every minute of it)

Setting: Summer of 1992.  Baseball card show at Toronto's Skydome.

His holiness enters from stage right, followed by the King's Hand two paces behind and to his left, and a lowly squire, 4 paces behind and to his right, carrying the Imperial Regalia and a box of glossy photos.

"His excellency Mr. Aaron is holding Court" a page announces, "Let all those who would obtain his signature pay the 25$ levy and form an orderly and silent qeue to the left."

He sits behind sheets of luxurious blue satin, the squire taking his scepter and crown and placing them under the table.  The King's Hand, adorned in the traditional garb of vertically striped collared shirt and green golf slacks, takes his place standing next to the throne.

"Those that shall approach His Excellency shall do so in silence" he bellows to the huddled masses clutching various items worthy of signing.  "Eye contact shall not be made, remind thyselves of thy mortality in His presence.  His Excellency shall enter a state of complete meditation for the duration of this session in which he must not EVER be made aware of the presence of any of you.  I need not remind you of the presence of the Praetorian Guard who shall severely deal with those who fail to heed this rule and seek to have any sort of interaction with Him." (Sound of clanging armor reverberates through the Skydome as members of the Guard stand to attention, autograph seekers nervously exchange glances).

"So it is spoken, so let the Signing begin!"  Gong crashes, signaling the beginning of the signing.

The queue begins to move, the seekers approach.  To each a eunuch is assigned to whisper into the ear of the supplicant:

"Memento Homo, Memento Homo. Remember that you are only a man, Remember that you are only a man."

Upon arrival at the head of the queue, the supplicant parts ways with his  eunuch and provides to the squire, adorned in an unbuttoned Braves jersey, the item to be presented to Him.

A fifteen year old boy with a baseball thus appears before Him.  The boy dare not speak nor gaze directly upon Him, lest he break the meditation that was so vital for Him to carry out his task.  And He likewise does not look up or in any way acknowledge the existence of the boy before him, as was the way since time immemorial.  Nay, as per custom, he signs the ball that the squire passed to him and places it on the table before him, that it may be removed by some unknown force, while the squire was already handing him the ball of the next supplicant.

The boy, picking up the ball, retreats posthaste lest he incur the wrath of the King's Hand, who looks on from his McDonald's Big Mac set with suspicion. Once a safe distance away, back with the common people and no longer posing a threat to disturb the aura surrounding Him, the boy looks at the ball and did on reading the signature proclaim:

"Who the hell is Stan Aaron???"

Thus endeth the story.

Postscript 2019

Among the things I found at my parent's house on my recent trip were these photos that my dad took of me getting Hank Aaron's autograph at a show in Toronto in 1992.  I mainly remember it being an absolutely miserable experience, driving 5 hours to get there, shelling out 25$ that was a massive amount of money for me at the time and then Aaron not even so much as looking up at me when I got to the front of the line to get his autograph.  I couldn't even hand my ball directly to him, everyone had to give it to the guy sitting next to him, who would hand it to Aaron, so as to avoid him having any sort of interaction with any fans whatsoever.  I get the fact that he is a big star and probably gets swamped by fans all the time and wants to avoid that as much as possible, but at the same time I couldn't help but thinking that if he is putting himself out there and charging that much for an in person autograph the least he could do was maybe say hi or do something to acknowledge the person standing in front of him who had travelled for hours for the privilege. 2 seconds of kindness from him would last a lifetime for the person on the receiving end, but nah, its more comfortable and profitable to completely de-personalize the operation so screw that.

Two other points really drove this sense of having been ripped off by Aaron home for me.  One was the fact that Brooks Robinson was also signing at that show, I think he only charged 5 or 10$ per autograph.  My experience with him was the polar opposite of Aaron.  My friend Mike and I got his autograph together and he greeted us with a big smile, shook our hands, chatted a bit and invited us behind the table to get a picture together:

Brooks Robinson has basically been my favorite player from the 60s since that day, Hank Aaron is now way down the list.

The other thing that annoyed Mike and I at the time was looking at Aaron's autograph afterwards and noticing that he wrote his first name in a way that looked like "Stan" instead of Hank or Henry.  It was just a lousy autograph (again, compared to Brooks Robinson's which reads "Brooks Robinson" and is really nice and polished.  Brooks also personalized  mine "To Sean" which was cool).

And 27 years later, to add injury to insult, I fished the Hank Aaron ball out of storage at my parents' place and noticed that he had used a crap pen to sign the ball, so the ink has faded a ton over the years and is now barely legible (despite not having been exposed to sunlight, etc):

So the moral of the story is, if you are ever in Toronto in 1992, don't bother getting Hank Aaron's autograph.