12: 1992 Upper Deck Heroes Ted Williams Autograph

Just look at that card for a minute. It is such a perfect card. Everything about it is amazing. It also helps that Ted Williams has one of the cleanest autographs in baseball history. In 1991, Upper Deck decided to add a chase element to their sets. It was a similar card of Hank Aaron. The Williams just hits different, though. It’s a cleaner card looks wise and showed that Upper Deck was willing to promote themselves as the high end brand of the time. This card was also susceptible to forgeries, with people taking the unsigned version and hand numbering and signing them. Pre-internet, it was much harder to track who had what, and it led to a number of forgeries within the industry.

Random Ted Williams Fact: By the Baseball Reference WAR metric, Williams is the 14th best player of all time. This includes the fact that he missed three full seasons while enlisted in the military during World War II. Those three seasons were during his prime. In 1942, he had a 10.4 WAR. In 1946, his first year back, he had a 10.6 WAR. If he had batted that consistently in those three years, he would be in the discussion with Ty Cobb to be one of the 5-6 best players in Major League history.