Recent Acquisition: Al Oliver

I posted a while ago about an Al Oliver card I purchased to fill an empty slot in my binder; when I bought it, I think that I thought it was his rookie card because it had the All-Star Rookie trophy.  Here it is again:

1970 Topps Al Oliver.

I still have a few slots in my binder (I've reorganized and added a few pages here and there, mainly related to separating out player collections -- I'm done with the reorganization, so now there's a very definite number of spots left in the binder).  I decided to fill one of these new spots with the real Al Oliver rookie card, from 1969.

1969 Topps Al Oliver/Rich Hebner rookie card.

I've said before that I have the point of view that I'm completing my collection; I've been making a lot of acquisitions the past few months, but I don't think this will go on forever.  I could actually complete my binder in the next couple of months if that's what I focused on.  When I left my binder in 1994, to be stored for the next 20+ years, my pre-junk era cards displayed a distinct focus on Hall-of-Famers.  That was largely because of imperfect information -- in the pre-internet era, it was hard to get too much information about who was worth collecting, who to be a fan of, from the time before I was watching baseball.  It was easy to find out who was in the Hall of Fame, though.  My new, revised, 21st century internet-age take on my binder remedies this -- the old cards are all still there, but so are Al Oliver, Curt Flood, Garry Maddox, Ken Griffey, Sr., Dick Allen, Dave Kingman, Lee May, and others.  Some of the newly-added cards in the binder were in my collection the whole time, and some I have had to acquire for the purpose.

1983 Topps Rich Hebner.

I thought I would close this post by commenting on Oliver's fellow rookie from the 1969 card, Rich Hebner.  Like Oliver, he went on to have a long career, playing 1968-1985 (same years as Oliver!) with a number of teams, including two stints with the Pirates.  He was with the Pirates to be part of the 1971 championship team.  He finished with 1694 hits, a .276 average, 203 home runs, and 890 RBI.