30 Day Baseball Card Challenge

Monday, April 8, 2024

Time Playing Tricks On Me

Time has a way with messing with my head.  On this date back in 1994, baseball fans celebrated the 20th anniversary of Hank Aaron breaking Babe Ruth's MLB home run record.

At the time... two decades literally felt like a lifetime ago to this twenty-one year old collector.

My memory of this historic home run came from baseball highlight videos and baseball cards like his card #1 in the 1974 Topps baseball set or his home run records card in the 1979 Topps set.

Unfortunately... it's a school night and today was one of those long days where the hobby got pushed to the side.  So I don't have the time to dig out those cards and scan them.  What I do have is a card that I have had sitting in my scan folder since last summer:

1994 Topps Gold #715

I purchased this card on April 7th of last year for a dollar on COMC... and have been patiently waiting to use it in this anniversary post.  


Anyways... getting back to the "time" thing... it's been thirty years since this card was inserted into packs of 1994 Topps.  Obviously thirty years is much longer than twenty years... yet 1994 feels like yesterday to this fifty-one year old collector.

Like I said... time has a way with messing with my head.

Happy Monday and sayonara!

10 comments:

Sean said...

I know that feeling. Baseball cards are a good way of measuring how badly time is messing with your head.

Part of my brain also still thinks of 1994 Topps as a relatively recent set.

That part of my brain hates it when the other part of my brain that handles math tells it that the 1994 Topps set is now as old as the 1964 Topps set was when it came out. All parts of my brain agree that the 1964 Topps set is old.

It gets even worse when we move it back to sets from the 80s which, if you do the same thing, you discover they are as old as some truly ancient pre-war sets were when the came out.....

John Bateman said...

I know what you mean it took a hell of a lot longer to get from 1974 to 1994 than it did from 1994 to 2024. I was always warned about this - time flies

Chris said...

I actually has this same thought not long ago re: 20 years. When I started collecting, the oldest cards I could get my hands on at an LCS were from 1968 Topps. 20 year old cards seemed ancient.

2004 Topps cards don't feel old to me. Maybe they'd feel old to an eight or nine year old. and the 2004 World Series is still fresh in my mind even though a whole lot has happened since. I recently thought of 1994 as well, as it's been 30 years since Kurt Cobain died.

Nothing like core memories (good or bad) to mess with your perception of time, huh?)

Matt said...

I don't even like to think about how fast time has flied by. It makes me sad.

Great Hank Aaron card, one I will always remember when I was younger.

Nick Vossbrink said...

Definitely feel this. The weirdest part of the junk era is reminding myself that when my kids are opening packs from 1989 that that would be like me opening packs of 1954 Topps in 1989.

Johnnys Trading Spot said...

:) and think is just keeps getting faster and faster :)

night owl said...

Here's something I thought of yesterday regarding Aaron's mark:

Ruth's record seemed so long ago when Aaron broke it. 39 years!

But if Aaron broke Ruth's record in 2024, he would have been breaking a record Ruth set in 1985. Yikes.

Uncle Charlie's Shoebox said...

Completely relate to time flying by. 14 years ago I was blessed with the birth of my oldest son. We looked at pictures of him tonight from 14 years ago and it is incredible how little he once was

sg488 said...

I still remember Tom House catching the ball and bringing it back to home plate and handing it to Hank,very classy thing to do.

SumoMenkoMan said...

All I can say is Time Flies! The 1990s seemed like yesterday!