Henry Aaron died today. Most of us fans knew him as Hank, but he preferred Henry, and so Henry it is.
I guess we should take care of the baseball part first. My dear friend Joe Posnanski did an incredible series, soon to be a book, on the 100 greatest baseball players of all time. Joe ranked Aaron no. 4, behind Willie Mays, Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds. Joe loves baseball more than anyone else I know, and understands far more about baseball than I ever will. But he got Henry Aaron three places too low.
The most monumental achievement in baseball history was when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. The second most monumental achievement in baseball history was when Henry Aaron — despite the hate mail, the death threats, the pressure of a changing South and a changing country — chased down Babe Ruth, and caught him, and surpassed him to become the home run king.
Robinson is more important to history, but not by much. And Aaron had a greater career, by a lot.
Aaron summed himself up as a player perfectly: If you could go to just one baseball game, maybe you’d want to see somebody more flashy, but over a three-game series, he’s the one you’d notice. As odd as this sounds, he hit 755 home runs without really trying to — he just hit the ball hard, over and over, and that’s how many left the park. He hit at least 24 home runs every season from when he was 21 years old to when he was 39.
You can reduce a hitter’s job to two things: Get on base and drive in runs. Aaron is the all-time leader in both total bases and runs batted in. No one else who has ever played baseball was so good for so long.
That’s why he is the greatest of all time. But why he is MY greatest of all time goes beyond the stat sheets. It’s about growing up. It’s about the South. And it’s about heroes.
***
The first baseball game I remember watching was August 1, 1970. I was six. It was the Saturday afternoon NBC game of the week between the Pittsburgh Pirates and Atlanta Braves. I watched it at the JM Fields department store in Brunswick, Georgia, my hometown. My mom and dad planted me in the TV department while they shopped. They knew I wasn’t going anywhere with the game on. I know the date because I was able to look it up many years later on the Internet, which has the details of every Major League game every played. This game was easy to find because of the score: Pirates 20, Braves 10.
That day Aaron batted third and played right field for the Braves. He went 3-for-4 with two homers and five runs batted in. It was a fantastic day but not nearly enough. It was rarely enough back then. The Braves were mostly terrible when I was growing up — they didn’t make the playoffs a single time in the ’70s. They had occasional lightning strikes: a Rookie of the Year catcher named Earl Williams, a one-year wonder of a pitcher named Buzz Capra. But most seasons, there were just two reasons to follow the Braves. One was the ageless knuckleballer Phil Niekro. The other was the relentless Henry Aaron.
Well, there was also a third reason, at least for me: The Braves were the team of the South.
When Aaron started his Major League career, the Braves were in Milwaukee. He was on a team that won the World Series there, beating the Yankees in 1957. Back then, the South didn’t have a team in any major pro sport. When the Braves announced that they were moving from Milwaukee to Atlanta for the 1966 season, Aaron at first said he wouldn’t go. He had very good reasons.
In 1966, every football team in the Southeastern Conference was all-white. In 1966, George Wallace was governor of Alabama. In 1966, civil-rights activist James Meredith started a trek across Mississippi called the March Against Fear. On the second day of the march, a white man shot him.
This is the South that Henry Aaron arrived in when the Braves came to Atlanta.
He had grown up in that South, in Mobile, loving baseball so much that he skipped school to play, so good at the game that he was a star even before he found out he had been batting cross-handed for years. But when he started playing, the big leagues were all-white, too. When Aaron was 13, Jackie Robinson changed that for good. The next spring, Robinson’s Brooklyn Dodgers came to Mobile for an exhibition game. Aaron went to hear Robinson speak. He set a goal for himself: He would make it to the majors before Robinson retired, so they would be in the big leagues together.
Robinson played until 1956. Aaron’s rookie year was 1954.
By then, Aaron had already played as a minor-leaguer in Jacksonville. The white fans of the South Atlantic League heckled him from the stands. Aaron remembered how Robinson had handled the hate, and he handled it, too. Still, he worried about what it would be like in Atlanta. He had a wife and kids by the time the Braves decided to move. Black leaders in Atlanta met with him, wrote him letters, told him how much he would mean as a symbol of progress.
Not everyone in the South was ready for Henry Aaron. But by the time he got there, he was ready for the South. In that first year in Atlanta, he led the league with 44 homers and 127 runs bated in.
He kept playing on those terrible teams, and kept stacking homers — 39 homers, 29, 44, 38, 47, 34, 40. By the end of the 1973 season, he had 713 — one from tying Babe Ruth’s record. By then, most of the country was rooting for him. Even much of the South. But the ones who weren’t were vocal and vicious. They wrote him letters calling him all the names you would imagine, demanding that he quit, threatening his family, wishing he would die of sickle cell anemia. Baseball was America’s biggest sport then, and Ruth’s record was its most sacred milestone, and those racists did not want a black man to break it. Aaron had a bodyguard. He spent lonely sleepless nights on the road.
The hate mail came in all through the winter before the Braves opened the 1974 season in Cincinnati.
In the first game, in his first at-bat, on his first swing, Aaron tied Ruth’s record.
Four nights later, in the Braves’ first home game, he broke it.
Two white boys, 17 years old, ran onto the field after the ball cleared the fence. They caught up with Aaron as he rounded second and ran with him almost all the way to third. Aaron was kind when he spoke of those two kids over the years. He even reunited with them a couple of times. They seem to have had the best intentions. But I’ve always wondered what Aaron really thought in that moment. Two white people coming out of nowhere in the heart of the South, where so many people like him had been ambushed and beaten and killed. In the stands, Aaron’s bodyguard thought about reaching for his pistol.
If it had been 1966, maybe that moment would have landed differently. But it was 1974, and while the South was not cured, it was starting to change, in part because of Henry Aaron.
Aaron lowered his head down and kept going. The white kids peeled away. He finished his journey and touched home.
***
I can’t honestly say I’ve ever had heroes. I admire lots of people, and love lots of people, but I think I’ve spent too much time trying to understand people at ground level to put anyone on a pedestal. The closest people I’ll ever have to heroes are my mom and dad.
They clawed their way from the cotton fields of south Georgia into enough of a middle-class life that my dad could buy a used bass boat and my mom could trade in one old VW Bug for another. One of the reasons they worked so hard over the years is so I wouldn’t have to. But another reason, I think, is that they believed in the value of doing something day after day and doing it well.
Today, on the day Henry Aaron died, I was thinking about the time my dad and I built a car port. The posts were old railroad ties, maybe 10 feet long and 100 pounds. I was probably 17 then, playing basketball every day, about as strong as I’d ever be in my life. My dad was in his mid-60s. I could not for the life of me tote one of those railroad ties across the yard. I’d pick one up, it would get unbalanced, I’d drop it and cuss to myself and dig splinters out of my forearms.
My dad would walk over and swing it up on his shoulder and stroll across the yard like he was going to get the paper.
Now, when I think about that, I think about Henry Aaron at the plate.
It was hard to criticize Aaron when it came to baseball. But some people used to nitpick that he never seemed to hustle. His hat never flew off like Willie Mays, he never plowed into the bases headfirst like Pete Rose, he never screwed himself into the ground swinging like Mickey Mantle.
What they didn’t understand was the thing I didn’t understand about my dad until much later: It takes so much effort to look effortless. It takes so much concentration to make something hard look casual. And it takes so many years of greatness to create something that doesn’t look like greatness. That type of greatness comes to feel ordinary, because we get so used to it.
Henry Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s record with one swing. But he became the best baseball player ever, and a black superstar in the South, and my favorite athlete of all time, because of all those other moments over all those other years that got him there. He swung and he swung until his swing was so nice and easy, it was almost a surprise when you looked up and the ball had cleared the fence.
–TT