Saturday, March 27, 2021

Closet Discoveries

 I've been on a cleaning/reorganizing/purging binge lately and I attacked my hobby closet earlier this week. I opened four boxes from the upper shelves and had a lot of fun. Absolutely the best thing in any of my boxes was this Hank Aaron foldout I got the night he hit homer #712 in the Astrodome in September of 1973.

It opened up to a full four page home run log. There were spaces to fill in  homers 711 thru 715.


 


I filled in the slots (sorta) beginning with the dinger off Dave Roberts we witnessed that night. Jerry Ruess is the missing victim of #713. Jack Billinghan served up #714 and, of course, #715 was smacked off Al Downing. You can see that I underlined Jack Billingham in the listings. I believe I'd noticed his name a few times and was counting them up. Without Baseball Reference in those days we were on our own. BTW...Billingham gave up five Aaron homers thru the years, not early the top mark. Here are Hank's favorite pitchers:

Don Drysdale 17 homers
Claude Osteen 14
Bob Friend 12
Larry Jackson 10
Don Cardwell 10
Roger Craig 10

There was also a career summary that covered a couple of pages and a statistical summary of his career to that point.


I had no idea that this thing had survuved in my storage boxes. I was happy to see it. I still don't have the little paper certificate we received but finding this was a kick.

This piece is just the tip of the iceberg of what I dug out of these boxes and is currently stacked in my home office/hobby room. I've been busy scanning some really off-the-wall items which willkeep me posting for a while.


9 comments:

  1. I actually never realized there was a whole offseason between 713 and 714. That's crazy.

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    1. Oh yeah! There was a big controversy in that offseason because the Braves were scheduled to open the 1974 season on the road in Cincinnati. The Braves' management wanted to sit him out for that first series so he could (they hoped) hit his record tying and record breaking homers at home in Atlanta. The commissioner had to step in and insist that they start him in at least one of the games in Cincinnati. They did and he hit number 714 in Cincy. He did manage to hit the record breaking number 715 in Atlanta.

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  2. What do the pitchers who surrendered home runs 713, 714 and 715 have in common besides giving up a home run to Aaron? They were all Dodgers at one point or another.

    Also three of the five pitchers who gave up the most home runs to Aaron were Dodgers. I probably shouldn't like Aaron as much as I do! (FYI, the list doesn't show up unless you highlight it).

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    1. Fixed, removed formatting. That was weird. Showed up on my laptop just fine, not on desktop.

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  3. That's fantastic, even better that it's yours.

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  4. Very cool piece of memorabilia. Can't wait to see what else has been hiding out in those boxes.

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