Henry Aaron (1934-2021)

Friday, January 22 2021 @ 05:00 PM EST

Writing about the Cardinals a couple of years ago, I wondered if there had ever been as great a player with less flash to his game than Musial. Henry Aaron may be the guy. Aaron, born on my own father's second birthday in February 1934, was a contemporary of Roberto Clemente, one year older than Frank Robinson and just a few years younger than Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle (both born in 1931.) He wasn't like any of them. Aaron didn't crowd the plate like Robinson, daring pitchers to throw at him - which they did - and get his revenge by sliding viciously into their infielders. He didn't make spectacular - did you see that? - plays in the outfield while complaining non-stop about everything under the sun, like Clemente. He wasn't Mickey Mantle, hitting home runs so far you'd think they ought to have counted them twice - from both sides of the plate, no less. And his game didn't have the unbridled joy of Willie Mays, who played like a kid wrapped up in the delight of discovering all these amazing things he could do that the other kids couldn't do. Henry Aaron was a guy who went to work.

There was never any doubt about how great a player he was - that was blindingly obvious all along. But he wasn't as colourful or as memorable as the other guys. He snuck up on you, the way he snuck up on Babe Ruth. For most of his career, Aaron was an after-thought in the discussion of who, if anyone, was going to catch the Babe's famous career homer mark. Mantle and Mays both had a three year head start. Aaron's own long-time teammate, Eddie Mathews, older than Aaron but younger than Mantle, actually made it to 500 career homers before Aaron.

Mind you, Henry Aaron's idea of going to work, for most of his career, generally involved hitting around .320 with some 35 or so HRs and 120 RBIs. Seriously.  He was a great player for nineteen seasons and over those 19 seasons, per 162 games he hit .312/.380/.574 with 40 HRs and 118 RBIs. That was his average season. He never had a bad year and he never missed significant time with an injury. after the broken ankle that cut short his rookie year.  His worst year among those nineteen seasons was probably his sophomore year, at age 21, when he hit .314 with 27 HRs and 106 RBI. He was still good enough to make the first of his 25 All-Star appearances and finish ninth in the MVP voting.

Still, it's hard to romanticize a guy going to work. Clemente and Robinson both played the game with enormous chips on their shoulders. They had something to prove. They were going to show you how great they were, that they were not men to be messed with. Mays - as smart a baseball player as ever stepped on the diamond - still managed to play with the wonder and delight of a child. And Mantle - haunted by ghosts, cursed by injuries, and possibly the most gifted of them all - is a novel asking to be written.

Aaron's career, and his life, changed when the Braves moved from County Stadium in Milwaukee to the Launching Pad in Fulton County Georgia. Aaron's homer totals, rather than gently declining as he eased into his mid 30s, stayed level. At some point, he said, it became clear to him that he had a real chance to catch Ruth and made a conscious effort to start hitting more home runs. That's what the man said, and indeed his single season career high is the 47 HRs he hit in 1971, when he was 37 years old. It's what the man said, but his 1971 season looks exactly like his 1957 season and his 1963 season. If he was sacrificing any other part of his game in the quest for Ruth's record, it's hard to see what it was.

He went to work so long and so well that he overtook everyone. When Aaron retired, only Ty Cobb had more hits. No one had played more games. No one had batted more often. To this day, no one has driven in more runs. No one has had more extra base hits. No one has accumulated more total bases.

And by the time he retired, no one had hit more home runs. His reward for this long act of sustained greatness was a campaign of personal vitriol, aimed at this quiet and dignified man, that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that America's Civil War was a long way from being over. Aaron was not unacquainted with racism - he grew up in Alabama and hid under his bed when the KKK rode through town - but he wasn't prepared for this. It shook him to his very core, taking the joy out of baseball and life itself for a time. "They carved a piece of my heart away" he said. I don't even want to think about it.

The Blue Jays owe him one. It was Aaron who kept his old roommate Cito Gaston in the game, after Gaston's career had fizzled out.

15 comments

https://www.battersbox.ca/article.php?story=2021012216413614