Baseball legend Hank Aaron, 86, passes into history
Home run king racked up records, broke color barriers on and off field
ATLANTA — In March 1954, with his place in the major leagues far from assured, Hank Aaron was granted a start in a Milwaukee exhibition game versus Boston, only because Bobby Thomson, the regular left fielder and Aaron’s idol, had just broken his ankle.
Already possessed of dramatic timing at the age of 20, the rookie promptly drilled a ball that carried beyond the wall, flew over a row of trailers parked outside the Sarasota park and reverberated so loudly in the Red Sox clubhouse that the great Ted Williams emerged, as Aaron recalled, “wanting to know who it was that could make a bat sound that way when it hit a baseball.”
Over the next 23 years, a nation of fans would join in Williams’ wonder, as Aaron was transformed from a raw, cross-handed line-drive hitter into the game’s most prolific force. A Hall of Famer, Atlanta’s first professional sports star, and, in a soft-spoken way, an agent of change in the post-Jim Crow South, Aaron came to embody the city as he embodied the Braves.
Baseball’s home run king died Friday at the age of 86.
“We are absolutely devastated by the passing of our beloved Hank,” Braves Chairman Terry McGuirk said in a statement released by the team. “He was a beacon for our organization first as a player, then with player development, and always with our community efforts. His incredible talent and resolve helped him
achieve the highest accomplishments, yet he never lost his humble nature. Henry Louis Aaron wasn’t just our icon, but one across Major League Baseball and around the world. His success on the diamond was matched only by his business accomplishments off the field and capped by his extraordinary philanthropic efforts.
“We are heartbroken and thinking of his wife Billye and their children Gaile, Hank, Jr., Lary, Dorinda and Ceci and his grandchildren.”
According to the Braves, Aaron passed away peacefully in his sleep.
“I don’t think too many people got a chance to know me through the years, and that was something that was my own doing, because I’m actually kind of a loner, a guy that has stayed to himself,” Aaron said in a 2006 interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “A lot of people thought they knew me, but they really didn’t.
“They pretend that they know me, but I travel alone. I do just about everything alone. I have associates, but I don’t have many friends. I would just want to be remembered as somebody who just tried to be fair with people.”
In a funhouse way, Aaron could be viewed differently from varying angles. To a 19-year-old kid breaking in with the Braves in 1968, Aaron was not a star, but an “extra parent.”
“I’ve always loved the guy,” said Dusty Baker, an Aaron teammate for eight years long before he became a three-time National League manager of the year. “He’d cut those eyes at you, and you knew you had to straighten up and stop doing wrong. He was always full of honor and dignity.”
To a Milwaukee auto dealer’s kid, who came to know Aaron while arranging loaner cars for the 1950s-era Braves, he was a fellow lover of the game.
Bud Selig said that though he and Aaron had little in common, they forged a life-long friendship because of their love of baseball.
“He’s just been held with such reverence by everybody,” said Selig, who in 1999 established the Hank Aaron Award for the yearly offensive leader in both the National and American Leagues. “He got over all of that horrible, horrible hatred of the 1970s when he was breaking Babe Ruth’s (career home run) record, and he was so classy and so dignified through it all and afterward. I run into people who don’t know him as well as I do, and they just say, ‘Wow, what a wonderful person.’”
Aaron’s record of 755 home runs hardly does justice to his extraordinary career, for he retired with 23 major league records. The all-time RBI leader (2,297) also racked up the most extra-base hits (1,477) and finished in the top three for atbats (second with 12,364), runs (second with 2,174 in a tie with Babe Ruth), games (third with 3,298) and hits (third with 3,771).
Yet for such slugging, he averaged only 63 strikeouts per season and retired with a career .305 batting average. A 20-time All-Star, he won the 1957 NL Most Valuable Player award and was rushed to Cooperstown on the first-ballot in 1982.
Though he had come to the game seven years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, Aaron was in the first wave of new black stars, many of them from the Deep South. Like Aaron, Mays, Willie McCovey and Billy Williams all came from Alabama and all broke into the majors in the 1950s. Only Aaron would stay in the South.
“His coming here opened up the town significantly,” Young said. “That actually was (then-mayor) Ivan Allen’s plan, that big league sports would bring a bigleague attitude to the city of Atlanta. And it was right about that time that we started the campaign of ‘the city too busy to hate.’ So I’ve always said that Hank Aaron made a huge contribution to the successful desegregation of Atlanta. He did so very quietly and very effectively.”
Born into poverty Feb. 5, 1934, in segregated Mobile, Henry Louis Aaron was the third child of Herbert and Estella Aaron. In high school, he mostly played softball.
Aaron never totally abandoned his oldest habits, even while ascending in the corporate ranks in Ted Turner’s old empire, and later as a successful car dealer. He was prone to fry fish and eat it on the porch of his southwest Atlanta home. A lifelong Cleveland Browns fan, he occasionally would fly to northern Ohio on game days and sneak into the old Dawg Pound in disguise to watch his team play.
But Aaron’s connection with one number — No. 715 — would bear no disguising. It was the home run that surpassed Ruth’s alltime total of 714. It marked Aaron forever, for better and for worse. And if he were to need any refreshing of his dark memories of his relationship with breaking Ruth’s record, he only needed to climb the stairs to his attic, where he kept a box of the worst of his hate mail, filled the worst racial epithets people could conceive to spit at him.
“Since I was so close to Hank, I had to look at a lot of that stuff,” Baker said. “It was terrible, but he was still carrying himself with honor and dignity. He treated white kids and Latin kids as well as he did the black kids. He treated everybody good, regardless. That’s why it bothers me when I hear people say, ‘Well, Hank was bitter.’
“And if he had any bitterness, which I didn’t really see, he had plenty of reason to be, brother. You hear what I’m telling you?”
As with so many baseball careers, it almost never happened. Aaron nearly baled out before ever reaching the majors. In 1952, the Braves signed the skinny second baseman away from the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro American League for $10,000. Playing 87 games (.336, 61 RBIs) for Eau Claire, Aaron was recognized as the Class A Northern League rookie of the year.
But then came 1953, when the Braves shipped Aaron to Jacksonville, where he was forced to battle more than just breaking pitches and runners sliding spikes high into second base. As one of the first black players in the Class A South Atlantic League, Aaron saw Jim Crow from a more sinister angle, his white teammates afforded meals and lodging he never saw.
One night, a guard fired a gun at him when he returned to training camp after hours.
Still, the stats never wavered; he hit .362 that season as the Sally League’s MVP. Ticketed in 1954 for the Class AA Atlanta Crackers, his spring plans changed when Thomson, hero of the 1951 New York Giants, broke his ankle shortly after being traded to the Braves.
The Braves’ first game during Aaron’s rookie year was in Cincinnati, the home of baseball’s first professional team. It is a proud city that always treats Opening Day as a religious holiday, and such was the case on April 13, 1954. There was the traditionally loud and colorful parade that moved through downtown to an absolutely stuffed Crosley Field. And, before long, there was Aaron, walking to home plate for his first time in the majors to face the Reds’ Joe Nuxhall. With parts of the overflow crowd literally standing around the outfield, and with his heart skipping more than a few beats, the rookie contemplated making a U-turn back to Mobile.
“I was scared. I was scared. I was scared,” said Aaron. He barely had enough strength in his wobbly legs to chase fly balls in left field, he said. And he was a disaster in the batter’s box.
Not until the Braves returned for their home opener did Aaron get his first hit, a double off St. Louis’ Vic Raschi. Eight days after that, Aaron faced Raschi in St. Louis to slam the first of what would become 755 home runs.
Where the Great Bambino had created his record with a New York-hyped flair, Hammerin’ Hank did so in a small market, quietly chipping away at the game’s most prized mark, which had stood since 1935.
He never finished with more than 47 home runs in a season (1971). But Aaron had eight seasons with 40 or more home runs, the last coming in 1973, when he finished the year with 713 homers and an estimated 930,000 pieces of mail. Much of it was racist. There also were enough death threats for the FBI to get involved. Aaron received personal protection through the off-season.
As interest bubbled over in the first week of the 1974 season, Aaron homered off the Reds’ Jack Billingham, 20 years to the date and in the same city as his debut. Mathews, then Braves manager, decided to rest his 40year-old star for the next two games before the Braves went home for their Atlanta opener.
But Aaron eventually went hitless, setting up his date with history the following night at soggy Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. Pearl Bailey sang “The National Anthem.” Sammy Davis Jr. was in the stands, and so was Gov. Jimmy Carter. Aaron’s parents, Herbert and Estella, made the trip from Mobile.
The moment came in the fourth inning. After Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Al Downing threw a low slider toward the middle of the plate, Aaron carved another of his economical swings and watched the ball land over the fence in left-center field. He glided around the bases despite two young fans jumping in his way. He was met at home plate by a mob that included his mother, and a large smile eased across his normally stoic face.
During his AJC interview in 2006, Aaron recalled the moment with a renewed sense of pride.
“Really, I’m not as in awe of the moment as I used to be,” Aaron said. “It’s to the point where I look back and I think to myself that I played the game the way that I wanted to play it for 23 years.”