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A rare souvenir postcard picturing Hank Aaron as a rookie with the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro Leagues sold for nearly $200,000 at a baseball memorabilia auction on Saturday that also included a $528,750 sale of Ted Williams’ 1946 AL MVP award.
The Aaron postcard from the scrapbook of scout Ed Scott, who discovered Aaron, went for $199,750 following a bidding war that soared past the pre-sale estimate of $5,000 to $10,000, Hunt Auctions said.
Aaron joined the Clowns in 1952 when he was 18 years old. The late baseball great often recalled that he had two changes of clothes in a duffle bag, $1.50 in his pocket and a ham sandwich made by his mother when he left Mobile, Alabama, on a train to Indianapolis.
The Howe Sports Bureau credits Aaron with playing 26 games with the Clowns, hitting .366 with five home runs, 33 RBI and nine stolen bases before his contract was acquired by the Boston (soon to be Milwaukee) Braves, who sent him to their Minor League Baseball franchise in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
Aaron played in the Major Leagues from 1954 to 1976 and slugged 755 home runs, a record that stood until 2007. He died in 2021 at age 86.
The Clowns won the Negro American League championship in 1951, 1952 and 1954, typically playing their home games at the old Victory Field (later Bush Stadium) on West 16th Street.
Saturday’s auction also included 280 items from Williams’ personal collection that had been held by his daughter, Claudia, who died last year. Among the other items were a silver bat awarded for his 1958 batting title, which sold for more than $270,000, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom presented to him by fellow naval aviator George H.W. Bush, which went for $141,000.
The sale also included items from the collection of Rutherford Hayes Jones, the business manager of the Washington Giants, one of the earliest Black baseball teams. The trove was discovered in 2001 in a suitcase, where it had been unseen for 40 years.
A first batch of items from Claudia Williams’ collection went up for auction in 2012 at Fenway Park and garnered more than $5 million.
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A few years ago, I wrote a story about Henry Aaron’s brief but formative stint with the Indianapolis Clowns. In his autobiography, Aaron said he couldn’t recall ever playing a game in Indianapolis. The Clowns were mostly a barnstorming team, playing only a few games in Indy each season. They first played throughout the South, then East before heading to Indianapolis for the first time in June of 1952.
This was the same time Aaron’s contract was sold to the Major League Boston Braves . He was sent to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where he played with Boston’s minor league team, the Bears, for the remainder of 1952. He might have played one double-header against the Chicago American Giants in Indy on June 10, before moving to Eau Claire. The Indianapolis Recorder, the weekly Black community newspaper, noted Aaron’s signing by the Braves and that this would be the only chance to catch the rising star in Indianapolis. No mention can be found if Aaron played, but the Recorder briefly mentioned in its next issue that the Clowns lost both games.(Aaron was allowed to rejoin the Clowns after Eau Claire’s season ended, and he led the Clowns, which had won the first half of the season when he was with the team, to the Negro League World Series championship against the Birmingham Black Barons which had won the second half of the season. That best-of-13 series was played totally in locations in the South and ended in New Orleans.)
The Clowns also held its 1952 spring training in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which Aaron also wrote about. There’s a famous photo from April 1952 of Aaron at the Mobile, Alabama, train station with a duffle bag — when he had $1.50 in his pocket and the ham sandwiches his mother made, which the article noted. But he was apparently heading to spring training in North Carolina, not to Indianapolis.