The Last Hero

by Howard Bryant

  On April 24, at home against St. Louis, the Braves faced their old nemesis Herm Wehmeier, the man who in 1956 first snatched away Henry’s twenty-five-game hitting streak (after dropping him with cheek-high fastballs during his rookie season), then beat Spahn and ripped the pennant away that fateful final Saturday. Wehmeier lasted just four innings, giving up home runs to Adcock, Aaron, and Mathews before departing. Yet Wehmeier escaped with a no-decision. Crandall bombed the winning home run in the bottom of the ninth.

  The Braves played three straight extra-inning games to start May, once at the Polo Grounds over the Giants and twice in Pittsburgh, and won them all. Tied at 1–1 in the tenth against the Giants, Henry drove in the game winner that gave Spahn a ten-inning, complete-game win. The next night, Henry went five for six against Pittsburgh. Burdette was up 5–2 in the bottom of the ninth, only to give up a pinch-hit, three-run homer to John Powers (.195 average, six homers for his career). The Braves scored three unearned runs in the tenth, the second coming when the Pittsburgh right fielder, Roberto Clemente, allowed Henry’s single to skip past him to win, 8–5. The next night, Henry doubled in the fourth to score Gene Conley, smoked a two-out, three-run homer off Bob Friend in a six-run sixth, and scored the winning run after tripling to lead off the eleventh. Henry was muscling his way onto the big stage, armed with a sudden and complete command of his game. His teammates thought of him as a gifted hitter, if not a bit aloof, but during the first weeks of 1957, he took on the look of a superstar. The surge of confidence went back to the first days of spring training, when Henry arrived in Bradenton convinced not only of his own ability but that 1957 would be the year when his talent and self-confidence would intersect. Moreover, he had begun to force the writers and his teammates to view him as a leader.

  DURING HIS FIRST three seasons, Henry had escaped the criticism leveled at the rest of the Braves. He was portrayed mostly as a comet, a player too talented to miss as a prospect but too green to be part of the Braves cultural problem. He was just reaching his potential as a player and was asked only to let his play provide his leadership. The press had not yet collectively come to a conclusive opinion of Henry. He was twenty-three, entering his fourth season, and while the Braves did not appear to have the experience of the Dodgers, they were a veteran team, whose leaders were all in their thirties. Spahn was thirty-six, Logan and Burdette were thirty, and Bobby Thomson was thirty-three.

  Henry was not quoted often, and when the paper previewed the Braves, it talked about the psyches of Spahn, Mathews, and Burdette as keys to the Milwaukee season. In later years, Henry would see these characterizations as subtle forms of the racism he had dealt with his entire life. He would take the writers’ underestimation of his influence as proof of their cultural reluctance to position a black player ahead of established white stars—even in the late 1950s, when Robinson had already retired and proved that a black player could lead a club without the visible on-field fissures baseball people had long feared.

  More than simple racism, the uncertainty of the press with regard to Aaron seemed to prove another vexing phenomenon: the inability of the writers close to Henry to read him properly. Had one, whether it was Bob Wolf of the Journal or Lou Chapman of the Sentinel, been able to connect with him, he would have seen Henry’s confidence upon his arrival in Bradenton as obvious. Henry told the Defender he saw the National League Triple Crown as a goal, and that Willie Mays was one player who could keep him from leading the league in average, home runs, and RBIs. If he could stay ahead of Stan Musial for the batting title, he figured, he would have a chance. The story may have been one of many light spring-training features, that time of pastel optimism. Henry’s comments could have even been considered reckless for a young player, and quickly dismissed. Expecting to have a good year was one thing; talking about surpassing Mays and Musial was quite another, even for a defending batting champion. But in Henry’s case, it was indicative of his emergence as a star player, emblematic of his circuitous method of revealing just how sure he was of his ability. Just a year earlier, it was Henry who had barnstormed with Mays, outperformed other star players, only to be enveloped, swallowed whole, by Willie’s aura.

  In just a year, he no longer considered his abilities with deference toward other players, even Mays or Musial, who had won his first batting title when Henry was nine years old and had won six batting titles before Henry turned eighteen. They were great players. Musial had been his idol, true enough … but now they were his peers.

  SUNDAY, MAY 5, with the Braves playing the Dodgers at Ebbets Field up a game in the standings, Haney gave the ball to Bob Buhl, the same Buhl who had beaten Brooklyn eight times in 1956. This night, a heavy bag would have taken less punishment than the shots leveled at Buhl. He recorded just two outs, gave up five runs in the first, and was gone. Before he left the shower, Brooklyn led 7–3.

  But it didn’t matter, not with Henry flying. With one on in the top of the first, Henry singled up the middle off Sal Maglie, but the ball got past Duke Snider and rolled 410 feet to the wall. O’Connell scored easily and Henry raced around the bases and scored all the way from first. In the third, Henry doubled to right and scored again. In the fourth, he lashed a two-out, three-run homer over the fence in right to cut the lead down to a manageable 7–6. By the end of the fifth, the Braves led 9–7.

  Henry capped the evening by singling off Sandy Koufax in the eighth. He had rattled Snider in the first and then strolled home from third when Koufax chucked a wild pitch. The Braves had won, 10–7, and when the smoke finally cleared, Aaron had gone four for five, with a home run, a double, two singles, four runs scored and three batted in. His average was now .417.

  Then there was the frigid forty-degree afternoon of May 18 at County Stadium, when Henry pounded two homers against Pittsburgh, first off Vern Law in the third and then, in the next inning, a two-out, three-run backbreaker that did in Bob Smith, fueling a three-for-four, four-RBI day and a 6–5 win. Henry was now leading the league in home runs and RBIs, and close to the top in everything else. During the first week of June, Haney realized that a hitter of Henry’s gifts couldn’t be a two guy, a power hitter in a Punch-and-Judy role. On June 7, Haney finally came to his senses. He made the switch and restored Henry to cleanup.

  The machine was coming together. A year earlier, Eddie Mathews had been dying at the plate, hitting .250 on a good day, under .230 when things went sour. But now he battled Henry for the home-run lead and was hitting over .300. Spahn, Burdette, and Buhl were all winning, and then there was the Kid, twenty-year-old Juan Ramón Cordova Pizarro, the lefty phenom from Puerto Rico, who made the team out of spring training and already was being called the next Warren Spahn.

  The Braves played like a team still smarting at having given away a golden opportunity the previous year. There was, thought Johnny Logan, no joy in the chase, as there had been in the years before, that spark of titillation when the writers would put the Braves in the same class as the Dodgers, the Giants, and the Yankees. Instead, Logan recalled, there could be only one outcome that would satisfy the players. “You have to remember.101 We had been close for probably five years. We felt it was our time. We had earned the right to think that way.”

  The beauty of winning is that it always provides a soft landing during the rough spots. The problem with losing is that no one lets you forget it, ever. When the Braves surged, The Sporting News reminded them of their old nemesis, running a forty-eight-point headline above the fold that read JACKIE’S RAP NO SPUR TO BRAVES’ SPURT, in reference to Robinson’s contention that the Braves drank themselves into second place in 1956. “Did Jackie Robinson’s blast at the Milwaukee Braves last winter fire them up and send them away flying in the National League Pennant race?” read the lead paragraph of the story. It was a charge that more than fifty years later still burrowed into Johnny Logan.

  “Ah, that was complete bullshit.102 When we went to the bar, it was to talk baseball. When we won, it was to enjoy getting the job done. When w
e lost, it was getting the guys together to see how we could win the next day. Total BULL-shit!”

  If they had been criticized in the past for not playing their best against the league’s best, the Braves now sent the message to their National League rivals that they weren’t gorging themselves only on the cupcakes. Against Cincinnati, they mashed the Reds the first six times they met and seven of eight, and even started a row with Reds manager Birdie Tebbetts, who railed against Burdette and his spitballs. Haney responded that he was “tired of this spitball wrangle,” and said that maybe the Braves routine coldcocking of the Reds was the real reason Birdie had a beef with the Braves. But there was something special about Cincinnati. The two second basemen, Johnny Logan and Johnny Temple, waged their own little private war, jawing and spiking. Adcock had no love for the Reds, the team that gave up on him. Milwaukee beat St. Louis and the Dodgers both five of eight. The Braves played with the kind of angry drive that vindicated the common belief that Milwaukee was the best team in the National League. These ingredients were supposed to fuel the engine for the whole 154 games.

  And yet … and yet … Milwaukee was just as close to the pennant as they were to fifth place. During the first week of June, five teams were separated by only a game and a half. The Dodgers were supposed to be fossils. Newcombe was down, but Koufax, Drysdale, and Johnny Podres entered June a combined 14–6. The writers said the Cardinals would compete, maybe the toughest out in the league, but in the end didn’t have the horses, or so went the conventional wisdom. But the Cardinals were trading afternoons in first place with the Braves. The same was true for the big-hit, no-pitch Reds. Even the Phillies, who could pitch with Brooklyn and Milwaukee but couldn’t hit off a tee, were in the race.

  The Braves were hungry and angry and focused, playing each day with a singular intensity, but it just wasn’t possible for a club to get mad and thrive off that rage for the entire season. Baseball is a game of stoic concentration, requiring a maestro’s sense of timing for knowing when to get mad, when to clown, when to floor the accelerator or to forget an especially tough loss and just let the tide pass.

  Beyond the star players were real problems. Covington (.143), Pafko (.143), and Thomson (.156) weren’t hitting. Chuck Tanner was swinging—and missing—at .192. Haney had already benched Thomson in May after starting the season three for his first thirty-four. Conley was 0–4. On May 15, Haney shipped Covington back to the bushes, to Wichita, of Class AA ball. Haney had already been victimized by the left-field situation in 1956, vowed it wouldn’t happen again, and yet his left fielders combined to hit .163.

  The writers knew Haney wanted to make a deal, and they sniffed around to find out what the Braves next move would be. Haney did his best to play coy, but the little general wasn’t so good at this. Despite the fact that Milwaukee had paid a quarter million for O’Connell, who was still hitting .230, it was rumored that the old hand Red Schoendienst would be traded to Milwaukee to stabilize a position that, in truth, had been an expensive disaster.

  “Now there’s a funny one,” Haney told The Sporting News the day Covington was sent out. “I have been asked about Schoendienst for months.” Haney added, “In short, there has been a lot of player trading—in the newspapers. I am not beefing. It doubtless makes interesting reading, and it’s no hair off my thinning noggin. I think we have a fine ballclub, and if you get the impression that I think it’s good enough to win as it stands, you have caught my sentiments.”

  Haney had had two targets for his anger since the spring: they were Bobby Thomson (“I can’t play a guy hitting .235”) and Danny O’Connell (“He hurt us a lot”). Haney had told just about anyone with a press card that second base and left field would either cost the Braves the pennant or win it. Exactly one month after Haney laughed off the Schoendienst deal, O’Connell and Thomson were shipped to the Giants for Schoendienst, the hard-driving nine-time all-star who at twenty-three had won a World Series title with Musial in St. Louis.

  The baseball life would be a bittersweet one for O’Connell. After placing third for Rookie of the Year with Pittsburgh in 1952, O’Connell would never hit better than .266 after being traded from Milwaukee. He hated playing for San Francisco manager Bill Rigney, who, he said, destroyed his confidence. After the Giants moved west to San Francisco, O’Connell played two more years, ceasing to be an everyday player. He played two uninspired years in the cellar with Washington and was finished in baseball after the 1962 season. He caught on as a coach with the Senators. On the night of October 2, 1969, O’Connell’s car skidded off a rain-slicked street near Clifton, New Jersey, and hit a telephone pole, the crash killing him. He was forty-two years old.

  For Bobby Thomson, the trade from Milwaukee would be an especially bitter one. For the next fifty years, he would be an American hero, but words like hero and icon could be savored only when the playing stopped. Thomson would have one good season with the Giants, but the broken ankle he suffered his first year with Milwaukee effectively ended his career as an impact player.

  AT THE NATIONAL LEAGUE All-Star Game played in St. Louis July 9, 1957, three future immortals were unanimously voted to start the game: Stan Musial, Willie Mays—and Henry Aaron. Normally, the fans did the voting for the eight starting lineup spots, while the manager voted for the reserves and the pitching staff. The All-Star Game was, after all, the fans’ game. But Commissioner Ford Frick stepped in and took over the voting after an exuberant ballot-stuffing campaign in Cincinnati threatened to hijack the integrity of the Midsummer Classic. Ten days before the game, the Cincinnati Times-Star added 550,000 new ballots. Had the coup succeeded, Cincinnati would have started all eight positions. In later years, both the league and the individual teams would encourage the kind of ballot stuffing Frick believed it was his duty to stop. And if the commissioner had had much of a sense of humor regarding the matter, he would have concluded that the Cincinnatians deserved credit for their moxie, if nothing else.

  Without Frick, Wally Post, who trailed Aaron by fifty thousand votes before the flood, would have started. Henry’s old teammate George Crowe would have beaten Musial, and Gus Bell would have toppled Mays. The new starting outfield for the game was a bit more representative, especially for posterity: Frank Robinson in left, Willie Mays in center, and Henry Aaron in right.

  Henry had gained more fan votes for the game than Mays. Henry batted second behind Johnny Temple and in front of Musial and Mays. Frank Robinson hit sixth. Henry didn’t do much in the game, going one for four against Jim Bunning, Billy Loes, Early Wynn, and Billy Pierce.

  If Henry’s arrival as a player was undeniable, the greater problem was in understanding him as a man. That would be infinitely more difficult, because it required considerably more introspection on the part of the writers and Henry’s teammates than watching his mechanics or marveling at his bat speed.

  The local Milwaukee reporters didn’t quite know what to make of him, because they didn’t quite know anything about him, and often they restricted their commentaries to Henry’s latest game-winning hit. His leading characteristic off the field was to be the first person dressed in the clubhouse, often gone from the room before reporters arrived.

  From the time Henry arrived in Milwaukee, the more complicated task of confronting the social customs of the day, all of their uncomfortable layers and Henry’s level of acceptance, required skill. In the eyes of the traveling Milwaukee writers, considering the Braves as anything other than belonging in mind and spirit to Spahn and Mathews meant veering from the expected script, one that had been anticipated since the Braves arrived in Milwaukee from Boston.

  Henry forced a change of thinking. Outside of the Dodgers and Giants, no team had yet possessed a black player who was not only the most talented player on the team but also its emotional core. The Braves were a raucous and rowdy team. The leaders of the team were Burdette, Spahn, Mathews, and Logan. All were big drinkers, and few took the time to consider Henry as anything but shy. Shy was the operative word.

>   “You had to drink to hang out103 with that crowd. That wasn’t Henry’s way,” Johnny Logan recalled. “He never did stay around much. He kept to himself104 in what was the colored part of town.” Logan reflected a common attitude among white ballplayers, which suggested that Henry and other black players did not socialize with their white teammates merely by choice. So much of it was a question of knowing where you stood. The reality was that in American society, there were too many layers of negotiation. There were no clear rules, no road maps to follow in 1957 about asking a black player to join his teammates for a drink, or inviting him over to the house for an off-day barbecue. An invisible line cut through American society—and a major-league clubhouse was no different—one that nobody was quite sure how to cross. Henry was not a big drinker, it was true, but he wasn’t often invited to join the crowd, either.

  Frank Torre, the Milwaukee reserve first baseman, was one of the few white teammates to spend time with Henry, and what he saw was a man who was sensitive to slight but who also kept his emotions regarding segregation buried. Henry did not want to be a burden to his teammates, Torre thought, so he often remained solo, preferring to spend time alone. “He went through terrible times.105 We used to go to the Milwaukee Athletic Club, used to go there all the time, and people would make a big stink because he was a Negro,” Torre recalled. “And that was here, where the Braves were heroes.”

  Alcohol provided a subtle yet vitally important subtext of race relations. Black players were often wary of drinking around whites because of its potential dangers. The clubhouse, a relatively controlled environment, was one thing. Being away from the park, in bars that may not have been friendly to blacks, when players unwound and released their inhibitions, was quite another. It was when the alcohol flowed that the real danger lurked, and all it took was one drink, one shot too many, for a potentially explosive situation to develop. The writer Roger Kahn recalled that when Jackie Robinson was playing cards with his Dodger teammates, Hugh Casey, a big right-hander from Georgia, said he fought losing streaks—both on the field and at the card table—by “rubbing the teat of the biggest, blackest nigger woman I could find.” Scenes could be bad enough among teammates when a player got drunk, but add to it the simmering tensions and resentments that existed just under the surface during the first decade of integration and the decision on the part of many black players not to mix socially seemed a wise one.