Farewell to the home run king
Batting legend stared down racism while surpassing Ruth’s record. Obituary,
Hank Aaron, who faced down racism as he eclipsed Babe Ruth as baseball’s home run king, hitting 755 homers and holding the most celebrated record in sports for more than 30 years, has died. He was 86.
The Atlanta Braves, his team for many years, confirmed the death Friday in a message from its chair, Terry McGuirk. No other details were provided.
Playing for 23 seasons, all but his final two years with the Braves in Milwaukee and then Atlanta, Aaron was among the greatest all-around players in baseball history and one of the last major-league stars to have played in the Negro leagues.
But his pursuit of Ruth’s record of 714 home runs proved a deeply troubling affair beyond the pressures of the field. When he hit his 715th home run, on the evening of April 8, 1974, against the Los Angeles Dodgers at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, he prevailed in the face of hate mail and even death threats spewing outrage that a Black man could supplant a white baseball icon.
When he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982, his first year of eligibility, Aaron received 97.8 per cent of the vote from baseball writers, second at the time only to Ty Cobb, who was inducted in 1936.
Aaron grew up in Alabama amid rigid segregation and its humiliations, and he faced abuse from the stands while playing in the South as a minor-leaguer. Years later, he felt that Braves fans were largely indifferent or hostile to him as he chased Ruth’s record. And the baseball commissioner at the time, Bowie Kuhn, was not present when he hit his historic 715th home run.
All that, and especially the hate mail that besieged him, seared Aaron for years to come.
As the 20th anniversary of his home run feat approached in the early 1990s, he told sports columnist William C. Rhoden of The New York Times, “April 8, 1974, really led up to turning me off on baseball.”
“It really made me see for the first time
a clear picture of what this country is about,” he said. “My kids had to live like they were in prison because of kidnap threats, and I had to live like a pig in a slaughter camp. I had to duck. I had to go out the back door of the ballparks. I had to have a police escort with me all the time. I was getting threatening letters every single day. All of these things have put a bad taste in my mouth, and it won’t go away. They carved a piece of my heart away.”
Aaron was a two-time National League batting champion and had a career batting average of .305. He was the league’s most valuable player in 1957, when the Milwaukee Braves won their only World Series championship. He was voted an all-star in all but his first and last seasons, and he won three Gold Glove awards for his play in right field.
Aaron remains No. 1 in the major leagues in total bases (6,856) and runs batted in (2,297); No. 2 in at-bats (12,364), behind Pete Rose; and No. 3 in hits (3,771), behind Rose and Cobb.
At six feet tall and 180 pounds, Aaron was hardly the picture of a slugger, but he had thick, powerful wrists, enabling him to whip the bat out of his righthanded stance with uncommon speed.
The San Francisco Giants’ Barry Bonds surpassed Aaron’s home run record in August 2007 and went on to hit 762 homers. But many inside baseball and out considered Bonds’ achievement to be tainted by suspicions that he had used performance-enhancing drugs.
Henry Louis Aaron was born Feb. 5, 1934, in Mobile, Ala., one of eight children of Herbert and Estella (Pritchett) Aaron. His father worked in shipyards. His mother joined with her husband in overseeing a close-knit family. She encouraged Henry (he never liked being called Hank, as he would customarily be known on the sports pages) to consider going to college.
In March 1948, a year after Jackie Robinson broke the modern major-league color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Robinson was in Mobile for a spring training game. Aaron was in the crowd of Black youngsters who had gathered in town to hear Robinson tell them of the possibilities that would be opening to Black people.
Robinson spoke of the need to strive for a good education. But Aaron, only 14 but already a talented sandlot ballplayer, cared little for his high school studies. He idolized Robinson and envisioned professional baseball as the road to escaping poverty and segregation.
While a teenager, Aaron played as a shortstop for the semipro Mobile Black Bears. He was then signed by the Negro leagues’ Indianapolis Clowns.
After beginning the 1952 season with the Clowns, Aaron was signed in June by the Braves, who were in their last season in Boston.
Aaron emerged as a star in 1955, hitting .314, and he won his first batting title the following season, batting .328. But it wasn’t until 1973, as he chases Ruth’s record, that he finally emerged as a national figure. He appeared on the covers of Time and Newsweek.
Aaron was 39 years old that season and appeared in only 120 games. After he hit his 700th home run July 21, he said he was “kind of disappointed” over the failure of Kuhn to convey congratulations. Kuhn promised to lead the celebration when Aaron hit Nos. 714 and 715.
Aaron hit 40 home runs in the 1973 season, leaving him one shy of Ruth’s record, with 713.
When the Braves opened the next seasson against the Cincinnati Reds on April 4, before a sellout crowd, Aaron lashed a rising liner that cleared the 12foot-high wall slightly to the left of the 375-foot sign in left-center field.
No. 714 flashed on the scoreboard as a Cincinnati police officer caught the baseball on the first bounce after it had fallen into the gap between the outfield fence and a high wall fronting the stands. Aaron trotted around the bases. Moments later, Kuhn and vice-president Gerald Ford, who had thrown out the first ball, went onto the field to congratulate him.
The Braves opened their home schedule the following Monday night against the Los Angeles Dodgers, before a record home crowd of 53,775. In the fourth inning, Aaron strode to the plate. Ball one. Next came a fastball down the middle, and Aaron connected. He drove the ball 400 feet over the left-centre field fence for home run No. 715.
The fans erupted with an 11minute ovation. Kuhn, however, was not present. Aaron viewed it as a snub, and he did not forget it.
He had little interest in continuing to play for the Braves after the 1974 season. He felt he had received only tepid backing from the fans as he neared Ruth’s record. And he heard racial abuse from some fans.
“I didn’t expect the fans to give me a standing ovation every time I stepped on the field, but I thought a few of them might come over to my side as I approached Ruth,” Aaron said in his memoir. “At the very least, I felt I had earned the right not be verbally abused and racially ravaged in my home ballpark.”
The modern civil rights movement made historic gains during Aaron’s career, but he knew that the road to equal treatment remained long. Early on in his career, Black players were barred from hotels where white teammates stayed during spring training in Florida.
Aaron contributed a chapter to “Baseball Has Done It,” Robinson’s 1964 collection of firstperson accounts from baseball figures telling of their battles against racism.
“Baseball has done a lot for me, given me an education in meeting other kinds of people,” he wrote. But he added pointedly, “It has taught me that regardless of who you are and how much money you make, you are still a Negro.”