Famed worldwide, Aaron was always Mobile’s legend
For a time in the early 1970s, there were more than a half-dozen major leaguers from Mobile and the surrounding area.
The greatest of them all was Hank Aaron, the legendary Baseball Hall of Famer, Home Run King and Atlanta Braves icon who died Friday at age 86. Aaron held the game’s most-hallowed record for more than 30 years, had a long career as a baseball executive and was regarded as a kind and dignified man by those who knew him.
One of Aaron’s long-time friends was Cleon Jones, who first met Aaron as a 12-yearold in 1954 when Aaron — then a 20-year-old rookie with the then-Milwaukee Braves — came to an assembly at Jones’ junior high school. Jones got to shake Aaron’s hand that day, and did so again 15 years later when they were both in the starting lineup for the National League in the 1969 All-Star Game.
“When Hank visited my school, that was the highlight of my life to that point,” said Jones, who played for the New York Mets from 1963-75. “It was at that time I realized that I wanted to be a professional baseball player. … From that day to this one, he was my favorite ballplayer. And not only that, but to play against him and be in the lineup with him for the All-Star Game, how lucky I was to be from the same hometown, and to be called his friend.”
Jones and childhood friend Tommie Agee were starting outfielders for the 1969 World Series champion “Miracle”
Mets, with fellow Mobilian Amos Otis also a reserve player on the team. The Mets squared off in the 1969 National League Championship Series with the Braves, who had Hank Aaron and his 44 home runs in the middle of the order and brother Tommie Aaron coming off the bench as a pinch-hitter and back-up first baseman.
Jones’ Mets swept past the Braves and went on to win the World Series over the Baltimore Orioles, but it wasn’t because of any failings by Hank Aaron. “The Hammer” went 5-for-14 with two doubles, three home runs and seven RBIs in the three-game series. (“We got everybody out but Hank Aaron,” Jones remembered with a chuckle.)
In addition to Jones, Agee, Otis, and the Aaron brothers, fellow Mobilians Willie McCovey (San Francisco Giants), Billy Williams (Chicago Cubs) and Jim Mason (New York Yankees) were all major-league regulars at the same time in the early 1970s. The younger players had been following Aaron since their childhood days, and looked upon him as a mentor, Jones said.
“If you lived in the Black community, every ballpark you went to, Hank had hit one there,” Jones said. “And they told you the distance and the date on which it happened. There’s a million stories about Hank I could tell.”
Five years after Jones and Aaron met in the NLCS, on April 8, 1974, Aaron hit his iconic 715th home run to surpass Babe Ruth as baseball’s all-time leader. Aaron
had famously endured racist hate mail and death threats during his home run chase, and later said he was more “relieved” than happy after he set the record.
But Aaron’s record-setting home run was a transcendent moment and source of inspiration for countless Black Mobilians, including a future mayor. Sam Jones was 16 years old at the time, and would be elected his city’s first African-American mayor in 2005.
“He brought a lot of attention to Mobile,” Jones said. “He was one of the most well-known baseball players in the world. Even though Mobile has a number of baseball players in the Hall of Fame, he was the person everybody knew, because of his international notoriety.
I remember taking a ‘Sister City’ trip to Ichihara, Japan, and the mayor there said ‘if you want to do something for us, send us an autographed ball from Hank Aaron.’ And we did. They displayed it in a very prominent place in their city hall.”
Sam Jones was instrumental in having Aaron’s childhood home preserved and moved from its original site in the Toulminville neighborhood onto the grounds of Hank Aaron Stadium — home of the Mobile BayBears minor-league baseball team — in 2010. Aaron returned to Mobile for the dedication of the Hank Aaron Childhood Home & Museum and an onfield ceremony prior to that night’s BayBears game, an event attended by numerous other Hall of Famers such as Reggie Jackson, Rickey Henderson, Willie Mays and Ozzie Smith, a Mobile native who grew up in California.