Aaron defied racism on the way to home run crown
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
Henry Aaron, who died this week at age 86, had to contend with hate mail, various threats as he chased and passed Babe Ruth for the home run record.
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 ballfield. 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.
Aaron’s Braves won only two pennants and a single World Series championship, those coming long before he approached Ruth’s record.
When he was elected to the
Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982, his first year of eligibility, Aaron received 97.8% 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 minorleaguer. 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. He won the National League’s singleseason home run title four times, though his highest total was only 47, in 1971. Matching his jersey number, he hit exactly 44 home runs in four different seasons.
At 6 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 right-handed 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.
A PATH AWAY FROM POVERTY
Henry Louis Aaron was born Feb. 5, 1934, in Mobile, Alabama, 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 majorleague 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. They assigned him to play for their farm team in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and he was named the Northern League’s rookie of the year that season.
He was promoted in
1953 to play second base for the Jacksonville team of the South Atlantic League, or the Sally League, becoming one of the circuit’s first five Black players.
Aaron led the Sally League in hitting and was voted its most valuable player. But he was a poor infielder, so he learned to play the outfield in Puerto Rican winter ball and in 1954 earned a trip to spring training with the Braves, who were in their second season in Milwaukee.
HISTORIC CAREER BEGINS
When outfielder Bobby Thomson, newly acquired from the New York Giants (less than three years after his celebrated pennantwinning homer at the Polo Grounds), broke an ankle during the exhibition season, Aaron took his place.
Aaron emerged as a star in 1955, hitting .314, and he won his first batting title the following season, batting .328. When he was voted the National League’s most valuable player in 1957, he came close to capturing the batting triple crown, leading the league in home runs (44) and runs batted in (132) and finishing in a tie for third place in hitting with a .322 average.
The Braves won their first pennant in Milwaukee in 1957. In the World Series, Aaron hit .393 with three home runs as the Braves defeated the New York Yankees in seven games. Milwaukee won the pennant again in 1958, this time losing to the Yankees in a seven-game World Series.
With the Braves no longer pennant contenders and attendance declining, they moved to Atlanta in 1966. But they returned to the top of the standings in 1969, capturing the National
League West after a divisional alignment and the playoff system had been put into place.
Aaron became the ninth player to achieve the 3,000-hit milestone, on May 17, 1970. In February 1972, he became the highest-paid player in baseball history, signing a threeyear, $600,000 deal (about $3.7 million in today’s money).
As Aaron chased Ruth’s record in 1973, he finally emerged as a national figure. He appeared on the covers of Time and Newsweek.
Aaron received some 930,000 pieces of fan mail, but among the good wishes were numerous racist letters. Some contained threats, and those were turned over to the FBI. The Braves hired two Atlanta police officers to sit in the stands while off duty, overlooking Aaron in the outfield, in the event of trouble.
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 against the Cincinnati
Reds on April 4, before a sellout crowd, Aaron lashed a rising liner that cleared the 12-foot-high wall slightly to the left of the 375-foot sign in leftcenter 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 received a standing ovation as his teammates swarmed out of their dugout to greet him. Moments later, Kuhn and Vice President Gerald Ford, who had thrown out the first ball, went onto the field to congratulate him. A member of the Reds’ grounds crew retrieved the baseball from the police officer, and it was presented to Aaron.
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-center field fence for home run No. 715.
The fans erupted with an 11-minute ovation.
But when Aaron hit homer No. 715, Kuhn 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 first-person 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.”
Following his recordbreaking 1974 season, Aaron was traded to the Milwaukee Brewers of the American League. He signed a two-year contract at $240,000 a season that enabled him to close out his major league career in the city where it began. In those two years, he hit 22 home runs, his 755th and final one coming July 20, 1976.
That same year, Aaron was named the Braves’ vice president in charge of player development, overseeing their farm system. He held that post until 1989. He was later a senior vice president of the
Braves and worked on behalf of the Hank Aaron Chasing the Dream Foundation, which helped gifted children develop their talent.
The Atlanta Braves retired Aaron’s No. 44 in April 1977 and unveiled a statue, depicting him swinging, at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium in 1982. They moved it to their second home, Turner
Field, in 1997. The address of that facility, now known as Georgia State Stadium, is 755 Hank Aaron Drive.
On the 25th anniversary of Aaron’s 715th home run, MLB created the Hank Aaron Award, given annually to the players with the best overall offensive performances in each league.
Aaron received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, from President George W. Bush in 2002.
Aaron’s survivors include his wife, Billye; sons Lary and Henry Jr., and daughters, Dorinda and Gaile, all of whom he had with his first wife, Barbara.