Henry hit thirty-seven points higher than Adcock, fifty-six points higher than Mathews, and was more consistent than both. Adcock was certainly the signature clutch player on the team in 1956, but Henry had shown, as he did in the Philadelphia doubleheader, that he was not frightened of the moment. Mickey Mantle won the American League Triple Crown in 1956, but Henry was the only player in the majors with two hundred hits, a twenty-five-game hit streak, and 340 total bases.
Thus, he sent the contract back to Milwaukee blank. Two hundred hits had to count for something, and on January 26th, a two-paragraph Associated Press brief hit the wire, filling a corner of the next day’s Chicago Tribune. Henry was home in Mobile and spoke by telephone to John Quinn, who by the end of the conversation understood Henry’s idea of his own market value. He didn’t just ask Quinn for a pay raise; he wanted his salary doubled.
BRAVES’ AARON ASKS PAY
BOOST93 OF 100 PER CENT
MILWAUKEE, JAN. 26 (AP)—A report tonight said that Henry Aaron of the Milwaukee Braves, the National League batting champion for 1956, is asking for a 100 per cent salary boost—or $35,000.
“I think I deserve it, after the year I had last season,” Aaron said in a telephone interview from his home in Mobile, Ala.
The Braves had the reigning batting champion, but little sentimentality existed in dealing with John Quinn during contract time. The salary figures offered to players were hard, for lesser players usually final, and for the more gifted, a higher number was merely far below what a player was actually worth. In those days, there were no agents and no lawyers negotiating deals, no salary arbitration, and no ability to attract interest from another team. And what if you didn’t like the numbers that were being offered? Well, there was always bartending. The big leagues—or O.B., which stood for Organized Baseball, as the clubs liked to be called collectively—even negotiated a lockout deal with the independent leagues in Mexico and the Pacific Coast League, blocking a player who did not sign his contract from playing ball anywhere else.
The Players Association was still two decades away from power. Players walked into the front office, virtually always undereducated and, lacking the leverage to play for another team, always overmatched. Quinn understood management’s inherent advantages and did not hesitate to flaunt his power. The front office turned making players sweat for a few extra pennies into a sadistic little sport.
“I was making ten grand one year94 and Mathews was holding out. Logan was, too. Quinn was a good baseball man but tough with the negotiations,” Gene Conley recalled. “One day, he calls me over to his office right as my kids are having a birthday party,” Conley said. “He’s got a couple of cups on the table and a bottle of whiskey. He says to me, ‘I’m not giving you what you want.’ I tell him I’m not signing, that if this is the offer, then I have no choice but to go back and play basketball. He pours a couple more cups, and says, ‘You’re going to get it, but you’re not worth it.’ And then he starts asking me about the family again. He knew the highest number I was asking for was low, but he wanted to make me fight for that. The next day, I saw him and he was all smiles, and asked me about my family and the birthday party, like nothing ever happened. Still, he knew baseball.”
Three days after his twenty-third birthday, on February 8, Henry signed his contract for 1957. The papers said he would be making between $25,000 and $30,000, and that Henry’s tough stance with Quinn had gotten him close to the seventeen-thousand-dollar raise he sought. Throughout the season, the papers would refer to Henry as earning $28,000. The actual figure was $22,500. Henry had won the batting title, and a measly raise of five thousand dollars was his reward.
“I think back then we all realized95 just how powerless we were,” Henry said. “I didn’t have any great strategy. Nobody taught me anything about how to negotiate a salary. A lot of times, you had to take what they gave you. But I figured I would ask. They never gave any of us what we were worth.”
THE ROBINSON sentiment that the Braves were underachieving echoed in a Milwaukee press corps that began to reflect the subtle changes in coverage that would be a harbinger for the contentious years ahead. Traditionally, the writers allowed the explanations for winning and losing to remain within the field of play, but the evidence that the Braves were simply not focused enough, not driven enough, simply not tough enough to be champions was an angle too obvious to ignore.
The Braves were leaving the pennant in the bar, and Milwaukee fans began sending anonymous letters to the local papers in Milwaukee and Chicago, listing the favorite haunts of the players.
The attitudes of the players were one part of the discontentment, and the national writers followed. “The National League pennant has been a mirage96 for the Milwaukee Braves the last three seasons following their second-place finish in 1953, the year they left Boston,” Edward Prell wrote in the Chicago Tribune. “Haney realized he had a discipline problem when he succeeded Charlie Grimm as manager last June.” What was jarring to the players was the speed with which the Milwaukee writers—and, to a lesser extent, the fans—had be come so jaded.
Chuck Tanner recalled the difference in the coverage of the Journal and the Sentinel. “Bob Wolf always kept it to the game,97 whether we won or lost,” Tanner said. “But that Lou Chapman at the Sentinel, he wanted the story. He wanted to know who was getting along with whom. He wanted a spark. I remember when they traded me to Chicago, Lou used the old trick to get me to say something bad when I walked out the door. He came over to me and said, ‘Chuck, got a pretty raw deal, didn’t you?’ The fact was, I was grateful to the Braves because they gave me the chance. But you could see the change starting then. Talking about the game on the field wasn’t enough. Now look at it.”
The transformation had begun the previous year, when the Braves had been embarrassed by the Dodgers during a June home stand, but in 1957, the press had begun intensified scrutiny of the franchise. Since Perini’s arrival in Milwaukee, his leadership had not been in question. With attendance soaring and competitive teams close to a pennant, the Braves were the model for franchise relocation, but now the scrutiny was as much about whether Quinn and Perini had chosen the right players as it was about when the players were going to perform.
O’Connell and Logan were to form the top double-play combination and more: Together they would give the Braves the toughness and fire the team had always lacked. “Danny was to be the holler guy who would make the club seem less placid on the field,” wrote the Tribune. “The Braves have no quarrel with Danny’s vocal enthusiasm, but the chunky Irishman has fallen short of their expectations as a player.”
Bobby Thomson suffered similar wrath. He had been acquired from the Giants for Johnny Antonelli and hit but .235 as an everyday left fielder. The Thomson injury had expedited Henry’s path to the big leagues, but now another key and expensive deal was starting to look like a failure.
In turn, the manager tightened the screws. This was a championship team, he said. The team didn’t make any moves in the offseason, Haney said, because the Braves were already good enough to win. What they needed was more discipline. Wanting to win wasn’t enough. Relying on fundamentals to buttress talent was what Haney believed separated a championship team like the Dodgers from his own team.
There could be no greater difference between Haney and Charlie Grimm than in spring training. A half century later, Gene Conley recalled Grimm with a reminiscent lilt in his voice. “Jolly Cholly,”98 he said. “Charlie ran us out there and let us play.” Grimm drank with his players, and gave them plenty of free time in the spring, relying on their professionalism instead of using a hammer. Players brought their golf clubs to Bradenton. Charlie brought the banjo. Chuck Tanner recalled a spring training when Grimm cut workouts short because he had a special surprise for his team. “We were working out and Charlie Grimm called us over because he had invited one of the most famous banjo players in the country over. Here it was, spring training, and we were sitting there listening to this guy play
the banjo.”
Haney was different.
Haney instituted two practices per day, plus meetings, and the golf clubs disappeared. Spring training was not to limber up the muscles and get ready for the season, but more a clinic, with repetition of the most mundane baseball drills. Haney used spring training to redraw the rules. Under Grimm, Bruton had been free to steal bases. Grimm had told him to follow his instincts and ignite the ball club, as a leadoff hitter should. Haney announced that no player would steal without his command, or any who did could expect a heavy fine.
Grimm had given Charlie Root, the pitching coach, the authority to make pitching changes. Haney stripped Root of that responsibility. Haney, however, followed the growing trend of the 1950s by managing from the dugout, allowing his third-base coach to wave or hold runners on the base paths. Grimm had managed in the Durocher style, from third base. By 1957, a manager positioned on the coaching lines neared extinction. Only Bobby Bragan, the Pittsburgh manager, managed away from the dugout.
If Grimm had enjoyed being one of the boys, Haney forged a clear line of authority: The Braves were his team. While Charlie Grimm had not criticized his players in public or exposed them to management, Haney, it seemed, used every spring-training interview to expose a player he believed had not performed for him in 1956.
When Arthur Daley of the New York Times came to see him in Bradenton, Haney offered the Times columnist strike one: “We came close to winning the pennant without anyone having an outstanding year. I’m discounting Henry Aaron, who won the batting title, because he’s a kid just starting to develop as a great hitter.” Then came strike two: “Joe Adcock, Bill Bruton and Johnny Logan all had average years. And you can’t tell me Eddie Mathews isn’t better than a .272 hitter.” And finally, in talking to the Associated Press about Thomson, came strike three: “I can’t play a .235 hitter in left field.”
When the Chicago Defender showed up, Haney took a few more hacks at his club, this time taking aim at Danny O’Connell: “He hurt us a lot.” There was one player, though, who made the craggy, five-foot-five-inch Haney’s lips curl into a smile.
“No one on our team had a really big year. Not even Hank Aaron, though he led the league in hitting,” Haney told the Defender. “Aaron’s the best hitter in our league. Yes, better than Willie Mays. He’s easily capable of bettering his 1956 figures.”
IN LATER YEARS, when the power of the player (and in the 1990s the general manager) would eclipse that of the manager, what Fred Haney had done with Henry Aaron on the first day of spring workouts would be the kind of move that got managers fired. Aaron had won the batting title hitting cleanup. Henry had been the cleanup hitter since midway through his rookie season, but Haney told him he would be the subject of a radical experiment: Henry would be batting second.
His reasoning was simple: The top of the order was not producing, and no one in baseball hit more than Henry. O’Connell couldn’t be trusted in the second spot in the order, yet Haney decided to bat him first. Bruton, normally the leadoff hitter, had been demoted by Haney during the previous year. That left Henry as the most versatile hitter on the team. Haney believed that having Henry hit second would give O’Connell better pitches to hit. The move would also give him more at bats, as he was guaranteed to hit in the first inning of every game. Mathews would remain in the third spot and Adcock would move up to cleanup.
The second spot was usually reserved for crafty batsmen, the ones who weren’t expected to hit the ball over the fence. Henry may not have been in Mathews’s category as a slugger, but he was a run producer. Hitting second would limit his opportunities: In the first inning, he could hit only a two-run homer at best, and later in the game, he would be hitting behind a leadoff hitter, the pitcher and eighth hitter.
But the real reason Henry did not want to hit second was because he knew that being in the two-hole, where you hit behind the runner, wasn’t where the money was.
“Hell, I’ll never drive in one hundred runs hitting second,” he said one day.
Henry set the Braves camp afire. March 11, against the Dodgers in Miami, Aaron yanked a fastball over the left-field fence off Sal Maglie. The next day, against the Cardinals, he hit another. Two days later in Bradenton, against Cincinnati, he hit his third home run of the spring. Against the Dodgers again the next day, Aaron took a fastball from Don Elston and blasted it over the four-hundred-foot sign in dead center, over the center-field fence, with seventy-five feet to spare. The Times called it the “king-sized wallop of the day.” March 16, against the Phillies in Clearwater, Aaron pounded another home run.
It was, thought Gene Conley, as if Henry had decided to focus on another element of his game—power hitting—just for fun.
And that was just the thing about being in the one-millionth-percentile club: It wasn’t hyperbole, for the great ones could do just that. In baseball, you could separate the good ones from the great with your eyes closed—literally, to the veteran baseball ear, it was often that easy. Contact with the ball just sounded different—clearer, cleaner, sharper. When a hitter like Musial or Williams stepped into the cage, there was simply the sound of perfection. The bat didn’t graze the pitch, but caught it flush, not just once every four or five swings, but a dozen times in a row if they found their groove. Teammates would tell stories about Henry choosing which field—left, center, right—he would drive the ball into. Against the fastball, Henry could fire his hands and wrists and hips through the strike zone without hesitation, level and deadly, unleashing the perfect power swing against the sport’s ultimate power pitch.
On breaking balls, the best ones did not shift their bodies too quickly, anticipating a fastball, only to be struggling woefully out of hitting position. They were different. Henry was one of them. He could defy physics and not be caught unbalanced. They could rattle off that mental checklist before the ball reached the plate. They could do what sounded so easy—see his release point … look fastball, adjust to the curve … don’t pull your head off of the ball … stay tight … shoulder in … wait on the ball … be quick!—and make it look like cake. Everybody else in baseball told themselves the same thing before the pitch, and yet they were the ones walking back to the dugout.
And when all else failed, when the pitcher made a great pitch in a great location—and with a different pitch than expected—a fooled, beaten hitter like Henry could simply summon the gods, weight heavy on the wrong foot, looking for the wrong pitch, and still tag it. With Henry, the wrists were already becoming legendary, but unlike the great power hitters, Henry had still not taken to pulling the ball. His power still remained in the right-center-field alley, which meant he could still swing a fraction of a second late and generate tremendous power.
It was true that at times he could look funny, for, unlike Musial or Williams, he did not possess classic mechanics. His teammates and coaches wondered how he could generate such power when finishing on his front foot, instead of his back leg or at his waist, yet they immediately found themselves in awe of just how technically sound he truly was at the actual moment of impact. One day, he tried to explain it to The Sporting News. “Whether I’m hitting good or not99 depends on my timing,” he said. “I never have any trouble seeing the ball. I can’t even say I see it better when I’m hitting good than when I’m not. When my timing is off, I have trouble, and when it ain’t, I don’t.” To veteran hitting experts, it was something of a remarkable admission. Normally, slumping hitters would decide they were picking up the ball leaving the pitcher’s hand just a fraction too late.
Upon contact, everything was in perfect place, as if Henry were a model: His head was down, his eyes focused on the ball. His hands were back, clearing through the strike zone at the same time his hips whipped through, steady and then lethal. On contact, the ball jumped, spring-loaded.
When Henry stepped into the cage for batting practice, players marveled at his bat control, how he could lash line drives to any part of the ballpark. “I remember it probably better than
anybody,”100 recalled Frank Torre. “I am left-handed, and many times I had to throw batting practice to Henry. He damned near killed me. He was the scariest guy.” During the six weeks of spring, Henry seemed intent on tearing through the league, retribution for stalling in 1956, payback for Herm Wehmeier. He slid into second base against Washington, sprained his ankle, and missed a week, but by the end of March, he was still leading the Braves in runs driven in. When he returned, and the Braves began making their way back north, the rampage continued. He hit a home run in Tampa against Cincinnati, and again April 5 against the Dodgers in San Antonio. When he was finished, and the Braves completed the exhibition season against Cleveland at County Stadium, the Braves were playing with the kind of furious purpose that Haney had long craved.
HANEY, BRAVES SURE 1957 WILL
BE THEIR PENNANT YEAR
The headlines followed along similarly, all dwarfed by one that appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, quoting Mr. Warren Spahn, who declared three days before the season started that the Braves would not only win the pennant but would play the Yankees in the World Series, and beat them.
At no point during the 1957 season did Henry’s average drop below .308. He homered in every park, against every team, home and away. If he hit when the Braves were ahead, he gave them insurance. He hit when the game was close. He did not steal bases in large numbers, but he stretched singles into doubles, doubles into triples. While Haney had credited him for being a consistent player in 1956, from the beginning of the season in 1957, Henry exuded a special star power that at once elevated him into the elite class of the league.
Take the second game of the season, the home opener in front of 41,506 at County Stadium April 18 against Cincinnati: Burdette and the left-hander Hal Jeffcoat pitched briskly, as if they had a plane to catch, trading fastballs and sliders and double-play balls for five innings. In the bottom of the sixth, Aaron caught a Jeffcoat fastball and golfed it into the Perini pines, the high row of trees that stood between the outfield fences and the miles of parking lot, for the only score of the game. Burdette closed his own deal, forcing the mighty Ted Kluszewski to ground into a double play in the eighth, sealing the 1–0 win. The Braves mashed the Redlegs three straight, and won their first five games.
The Last Hero Page 21