Hank Aaron The Natural Home Run King Dies

[jerrym]

Hank Aaron, arguably the best baseball player ever, died yesterday. The true home run king. No steroids. Not bad for a guy who was listed at 6'0" and 180 lb, but was almost certainly closer to 5'10".

He was my first sports hero. I remember reading article after article about him in the late 50s and early 60s saying he hit 35 home runs, batted .320, drove in well more than 100 runs and scored well above 100 runs, that went on to say he wasn't Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays, that he was a very good player. Part of this was he played in Milwaukee and later Atlanta, not in the media capital of the world, New York and partly it was he did things so easily that it looked so easy to everyone and he never did played it up for show. That's why I loved him. I remember reading a book by what many considered the top baseball writer at the time in 1963, Arthur Daley, discussing the greatest baseball players of all-time with a chapter on Mantle and another on Mays and that at 398 home runs Mays had a real shot at breaking Babe Ruth's record. The book never mentioned Aaron. I immediately looked up his home run total, 298 home runs but he was 29, three years younger than Mays. I thought when are they going to recognize how great this guy is. So I started keeping track of his home run totals. However, the next year he only hit 24 home runs. I thought I was wrong about his chances of breaking the record. He ain't going to do it. He's hit 30 and he's slowing down like a lot of players at 30. I stopped paying attention. Boy, was I wrong! The next year he hit 32 and then 44. I started counting again. He had 398 at the same age that Mays reached that level.

In 1969, I finally got to see him play by travelling to Montreal to watch him the play Expos. He didn't disappoint, hitting a home run and getting another couple of hits. As he approached 600 home runs and the question of breaking the Babe's record started to dawn on more and more people, he began to be recognized for how good he was.

Waiting six months for the start of the 1974 season was agony with Hank so close to the record. I had to go to a bar to see his games, although I'm not much of a drinker, often just drinking coffee.

However, the greater agony was hearing about the massive hate mail and threats on his life because he was breaking the greatest record in sports, a record owned by a white man for almost half a century, all the more real because he was doing in Atlanta in the South. How serious were the threats? There were police in the stands with orders to shoot to kill if anyone jumped on the field. Incidentally, two white fans jumped on the field and ran up and slapped Aaron on the back as he rounded the bases, which he once again handled with grace. Fortunately, the police couldn't or wouldn't shoot, so the fans survived. Yet Hank handled it all with public grace despite the hell it made his personal life.

I remember reading an article about him by a sports writer who discovered that he regularly went to see sick kids in hospital but asked the writer not to writer about that because he felt it would be showing off. He was a true five tool player who could hit, hit for power, field, run and throw with the best of them. When someone asked why although he stole bases, as he never was a 30-30 (HRs and steals) man, he answered that was they style of his team and if he knew people would make such a fuss about it today, he might have tried. The Braves have historically been a home run hitting team that ignored base-running, something they paid dearly for in the 1990s long after Aaron retired, when they failed to score needed runs against the best pitchers in must-win situations during their fourteen year playoff run.

What I have said is not a knock on my part on players who do things with flare. I love Pinball. The Argos likely wouldn't be alive to do without his flare for doing things. But I also loved Hank's style.