New Arrival: Willie Mays, of, San Francisco Giants

I have been following a couple Willie Mays autographs, but hesitant to pull the trigger since they were all ~$200. Then this one popped up for half the price, so I jumped.

I really dig it. It’s in blue ballpoint pen, and bold. The best thing is that its old–it looks like its from the 1970’s–so that autograph it not going to bleed or fade much moving forward. The only possible problem with it was it was paper was clearly extracted from an autograph album, so there are some indentations of past autographs on the page. But it does not detract from the autograph at all.

One of my inspirations to buy this was Facebook of all things. I ran across a guy on there that I used to know in Omaha. An autograph collector. And it reminded me of a story.

One night we were at a game and got to talking about baseball card collecting. I mentioned how neat I thought the mid to late-90’s Topps Mantle/Mays/Aaron reprints were.

He rolled his eyes and said that he did not understand why they would do Mays, since he was overrated.

I was…confused. Willie Mays is not overrated.

He went on about Mays did not hold any career records like Aaron (HR) or hits (Pete Rose). I was going to argue with him…but the people sitting around me decided to jump on him instead. One guy–another collector–was like “Cy Young? Are you saying that Nolan Ryan is overrated since Cy Young holds the all-time wins record? Who wants to see a Cy Young set? NOBODY!”

This got heated. I just sat there listening. These were people with very clear opinions. What they all agreed on? That Pete Rose should get the same treatment at some point from Topps.

And this is where I disagreed…but was smart enough (that time) to keep my opinions to myself.