“I guess the thing I’d most rather do of all,” he said, cocking his head and biting his lower lip, “I’d rather hit four hundred. A lot of guys are hitting forty homers nowadays, but nobody is hit four hundred since Ted Williams a long time ago.”
In 1955, Henry and two other Braves players arrived in Bradenton to begin early work before spring training. Today, players are allowed to work out at a club’s minor-league facilities during spring training but are prohibited from arriving at the major-league grounds until the league-scheduled reporting date.
But in 1955, players were not allowed to use the club facilities at all until the mandatory reporting date. Commissioner Ford Frick wired the Braves and fined the players fifty dollars. Charlie Grimm alerted Henry with a note, telling him he’d been fined by Frick, and Aaron’s reply was, “Who’s that?”
The Frick story had been told many times and would become an apocryphal anecdote that would follow Henry. FRICK—“WHO’S THAT?” HENRY ASKED WHEN TOLD OF FINE, read one headline in The Sporting News.
Aaron, so the story goes, crumbled a telegraphic notice of his fine without reading it. Manager Charlie Grimm asked if Aaron knew who sent him the wire. Aaron said he didn’t.
“Ford Frick,” Grimm told him.
“Who’s that?” asked Aaron without batting an eyelash, tossing the wire into the wastebasket.
Bisher retold the Frick story in his profile.
When Manager Charley [sic] Grimm handed Aaron his copy of the telegram, Henry shoved it into his pocket unopened.
“Better read that thing, Henry,” Charley said. “It’s from Ford Frick.”
The picture of innocence, Henry looked at Grimm and said, “Who’s dat?”
As even the best hitters must, Aaron has his batting slumps. He got into one at the end of spring training, going nine straight times without a hit. “I saving up for opening day,” he said.
If Bisher was taken by Barbara, he did not spare her in his writing.
In Milwaukee, the Aarons live in a little upstairs flat at the rear of a faded brown house on North 29th Street, just off busy West Center. Two pieces of furniture eat up most of the limited space in the living room—a big leather easy chair and a large screen television set. “He just sit there and watch those shooting westerns and smoke cigarettes,” his wife says, chuckling at the chance to poke fun at her mate.
Later, Bisher asked Henry if he had been motivated to play baseball because Satchel Paige, one of the great pitchers of the day, had grown up in Mobile. “I never heard of him till I was grown,” Bisher quoted Henry as saying. “I didn’t know he come from Mobile, and I never seen him till yet.”
With language, that was all it took—a little manipulation in pronunciation here, a phonetic license there—and the desired effect could be achieved. Though both were southerners at a time when social issues were reaching the confrontation point, Bisher did not ask for Henry’s opinion of the emerging fight for civil rights. Bisher did not believe Henry to be particularly bright, and the clear picture he painted of Henry is unmistakable for any reader.
The most devastating effect of the profile would be its influence on future profiles about Aaron. A profile on him would always be some form of referendum on his intelligence. It would, however, be misleading to suggest that Furman Bisher alone created the composite that would become Henry Aaron’s public personality. He did not. It would be more accurate to say that the Bisher story legitimized that point of view, for ever since Henry’s rookie season, a certain type of scrutiny had always been reserved especially for him.
Three weeks before the Bisher’s story was published, The Sporting News took note of Henry’s batting surge and ran a two-page feature. If Bisher focused on Henry’s diction, The Sporting News article, written by Lou Chapman of the Milwaukee Sentinel, portrayed Henry as graced with natural hitting talent but insufficiently intelligent to grasp such a complicated game.
BRAVES’ BLAZING AARON BIDS
FOR BATTING TITLE113
Amazing Wrist-Action Gives Outfielder Whiplash Power
The accompanying cartoon—a montage of illustrated anecdotes that underscored the widely held perception of Aaron’s disdain for hard work or hard thinking—was more demeaning than the story itself, but one section remained with him.
Aaron was guilty of particularly atrocious base-running in one game….
… one of the veterans took Henry aside to give him some pointers….
“Henry,” he said, “you’ve got to watch the ball when you’re running the bases and you’ve got to decide whether and when you should tag up and go to another base.”
“I can’t do all that,” Aaron said, thus ending the discussion.
For years, Henry would speak about Herbert’s determined pride, and the admiration he held for his father, who had been able to carve out an existence despite his harsh circumstances. The early portrayals of Henry were painful. He had endured the taunts and assumptions of the Sally League (“Just wanted to let you niggers know you played a hell of a game”) and now was in the major leagues, beyond the reach of his expected place in Mobile, beyond the reach of the old limitations. Race was never America’s dirty little secret, for it was never a secret at all. The real secret was class, and all of its insidious tentacles. If Henry had thought he had finally escaped and was ready to be introduced to the American public as the new force on baseball’s emerging team, Bisher, with a pen stroke, brought Aaron, if not physically then at least mentally, back into the condescending caste system of the South.
A FEW WEEKS before the all-star break, Fred Haney was in the dugout, grousing about his bench. The reserves, usually the strength of a balanced team, were melting over the summer months. Pafko wasn’t hitting. Frank Torre was an excellent defensive first baseman, but he didn’t scare anyone at the plate, and Haney had already sent Covington out. The front liners—Aaron, Mathews, Bruton, Logan, and Adcock—were holding up their end and more. The starters who weren’t—Thomson and O’Connell—well, they’d been shipped out, responding to being traded from the Braves by going on hitting tears for the Giants. During one pregame bull session, a reporter asked Haney, “What would happen to your club if Adcock were to break his leg?”
It was one of those apocryphal baseball stories, surreal, ridiculous, and, of course, 100 percent true. On the afternoon of June 23, in the second game of a bitter doubleheader with the brash, contending Phillies at County Stadium, Joe Adcock broke his right leg. He would be gone until mid-September.
On July 11 in Pittsburgh, two days after the All-Star Game, Bill Virdon led off the bottom of the first with a dying quail to short center. Bruton raced in from center, Mantilla out from short, and neither slowed down. When the play was over, Virdon was on second with a double. Mantilla and Bruton were both knocked cold. When Bruton came to, he was on a stretcher, out for the year with a knee injury that would affect him for the rest of his career. Even Haney spent a week in the hospital, missing six games due to ulcers.
With Bruton gone, Haney chose Henry to fill the space in center field. To Fred Haney, acknowledging Aaron’s versatility was a compliment. Henry filled in at second base a few times. He had batted second, and now, in the middle of a five-team race, he would be the new center fielder.
But for Henry, the constant shifting hampered his development as a player. He wanted to learn how to be a great right fielder, and playing center would not help. Haney had placed him out of position in the batting order and now in the outfield.
IF THE PENNANT had been lost at happy hour in 1956, the 1957 flag was being left in the emergency room. Already Bob Wolf in the Journal crafted a preemptive epitaph, referring to the Braves as “fading.”
John Quinn made two moves. He acquired first baseman Vernal “Nippy” Jones to back up Frank Torre at first. Second, he purchased from Wichita the contract of light-hitting outfielder Bob Hazle, who then put on the greatest five-week show in the history of baseball.
And that is the other beauty abou
t the American game of baseball: There isn’t just one way to become an immortal. The gods could go to Mobile and touch Henry Aaron, giving him so wondrous a gift that he could hit a baseball four hundred feet with his hands in the wrong position, or you could be twenty-seven-year-old Bob Hazle, a guy held in such low esteem that the Braves tried to give him away for free in the draft and nobody wanted him.
That included Quinn, who told his farm director, John Mullen, that Ray Shearer, hitting .330 at the time, was the guy he wanted. Mullen convinced Quinn that Hazle was the better choice, because with Frank Torre in the starting lineup, the Braves did not have a left-handed batter on the bench.
On August 1, Conley shut out the Dodgers, 1–0. It was the kind of day Conley craved. He had started the season 0–4 but had evened his record and was beginning to see the results reflect how good he felt about his arm. The Braves were 61–41 after the win, in second place by half a game to St. Louis and two and a half games ahead of the Dodgers. Three days later, Hazle rapped two hits in another win over Brooklyn.
Then came the showdown for first place at Sportsman’s Park against the Cardinals. In the opener, Henry doubled home a run in the first. Hazle led off the second with a long homer off Lindy McDaniel. Henry hit a two-run homer in the third, and it didn’t matter that Buhl was in the middle of another heinous masterpiece (complete game, nine hits, eight walks, but only two runs), because Hazle went four for five with two runs scored, two RBIs, and a home run in a 13–2 demolition. The next day, Hazle ripped three more hits and drove in three more in a 9–0 win. In two games, Hazle was seven for nine with five RBIs and a home run, and the Braves swept. In Cincinnati, Hazle led a sweep of the Reds by scores of 12–4, 13–3, and 8–1, going seven for ten with a home run and five RBIs.
Robert Sidney Hazle was born December 9, 1930, in Laurens, South Carolina. He grew to cut an imposing figure at six one, 190 pounds, but baseball had never come easily at the professional level. After two years in the army, Hazle played two games for Cincinnati before being traded to the Braves as a throw-in as part of the deal for George Crowe. He remained in the minor leagues, with their punishing schedule and meager pay. He had often thought about quitting. At the time Quinn called him to the Braves, Hazle was hitting .289, but even the Braves front office hadn’t thought his streak was anything more than that of a mediocre player enjoying a rare hot month; thirty days earlier, Hazle had been hitting .230.
The Braves had won ten straight, and Hazle’s average was .556. In forty-one games, Hazle hit .403, and now the press was making up nicknames for Hazle. Within a year, his career would be over, a rash of swings and misses, harmless outs and feeble explanations, either for his miraculous 1957 season or his inexplicable inability ever to hit the ball safely again. For the next thirty-five years, until his death in 1992, Bob Hazle would forever be known as “Hurricane” Hazle, named by teammates and writers after Hazel, the deadly 1954 hurricane that killed close to two hundred people from North Carolina to Toronto. He would be the greatest of comets, and when Milwaukeeans would speak of the Braves years in Wisconsin in elegiac tones, he was as important and beloved a figure as Henry, Spahn, and Mathews, his more accomplished Hall of Fame–bound teammates.
For the month of August, Hazle hit .493. By the end of the month, the Braves finally had separation. Twisted in the wreckage were the Dodgers (seven back), the Cardinals (seven and a half out), Philadelphia (Good night and good luck at fourteen and a half out), and the Reds (fifteen and a half back: See you next year and drive safely!). The Hurricane rampaged, and all that was left in his wake was the inevitable clincher.
The great irony was that as the Hurricane was unleashing his greatest damage and the Braves had engineered that championship run that distanced themselves from the pack, Henry Aaron, the Triple Crown threat and MVP leader, endured his worst month of the year, hitting .255 during August.
WHEN THE HISTORY of the great ones is written, the words are never merely a mundane compendium of numbers. Somewhere, there must be a singular feat that stands as a calling card. Just being good every day by itself does not merit a ticket to Olympus. It is the reason why there is a difference between stars and superstars.
Ted Williams took his team to only one World Series, and in it he hit poorly, but people still talk about the Williams starbursts: the home run in the World Series in 1941, going six for eight over the season-ending doubleheader to hit .406, instead of sitting out to qualify for .400 at .3995, the home run in the final at bat of his career.
Ruth? Too many to count, but leave it at the 1932 World Series. Mays wasn’t just electric. He was a one-man power grid. Every great Yankee pennant run contained some DiMaggio stretch where he was the difference maker. In Clemente’s lionish pride, you could practically hear the Puerto Rican national anthem with each and every one of his raging steps. Then, lonely on the other side of the trail, was Ernie Banks, who carried that heavy and unfortunate asterisk of being the greatest player never to take his team to the World Series, of never having the moment that separated winning from losing, and him from the rest.
That’s why they were different, these millionth-percentile players. Just having one on the team meant somewhere, at some point, even if it occurred just once, there would be champagne at the end of the summer journey. They would do something that made the words sparkle when they hit the page, leaping magically, like a child’s eyes on Christmas morning.
THE OLD BRAVES modus operandi of squeezing the bat just a little tighter as the September leaves changed did not disappear without resistance—old habits die hard—and the result was a tension that could have been felt from County Stadium up and down Wisconsin Avenue. The “Slop Thrower,” Herm Wehmeier, journeyman to the rest of the world but a Walter Johnson against Milwaukee, pitched a twelve-inning complete game, striking out eight, and St. Louis beat the Braves 5–4. The losing streak hit three; it swelled to eight out of twelve when the Phillies beat Spahn 3–2 in ten innings September 15. The lead was shrinking, and that wasn’t the only part of the trouble. Two of Henry’s greatest pitching enemies were the ones threatening to steal 1957 the way one of them had taken 1956. While Spahn was losing, Wehmeier beat the Pirates in the first game of a doubleheader, and Sam Jones finished the sweep in the nightcap, cruising 11–3. The lead was two and a half games.
During the next seven days, Henry Aaron took hold of the National League pennant, wrestled it to the ground, and stomped the life out of it: two hits and an RBI against the Phillies, three hits and home run number forty-one in the eighth inning to finish the Giants, two runs scored and an RBI the next day as Burdette beat the Giants again.
And on it went: back-to-back two-hit games in routs of Chicago, the first a 9–3 win for Spahn’s twentieth, home run number forty-two in the 9–7 finale September 22, when Hazle won it with a homer in the top of the tenth. They had won six straight and the lead was now five, with six games left to play.
The Cardinals arrived at County Stadium, with the Braves needing a win for the pennant. As is so often the case in baseball, the parallels were delicious, poetic. The Braves had been here before at the end, looking at the World Series, only St. Louis blocking their view of the promised land, when the Slop Thrower snatched the title away and Fred Haney promised them a summer of hell.
The night was September 23, Burdette versus that old cur, Wilmer “Vinegar Bend” Mizell. They would play three hours and thirty-three minutes, the second-longest game of the year, topped only when Gino Cimoli had homered off Red Murff in the bottom of the fourteenth at Ebbets way back in May. Burdette had been on the mound that day, too, a twelve-inning, eleven-hit, six-walk no-decision. Koufax was the winner.
Forty thousand came to County to witness the completion of the mission. One, a twenty-three-year-old history major at the University of Wisconsin named Allan Selig, was faced with a difficult choice: go to a night class or go to the game, with the hope that the Braves could clinch it that night. In later years, Selig would recall that the choice was n
ot such a difficult one after all. He bought a bleacher ticket. In the first, Burdette escaped the first two batters before giving up an opposite-field double to Stan Musial, who would be stranded at second. Schoendienst singled in the bottom of the inning, only to have Logan kill the momentum with a double play.
Henry pulled a single to lead off the second. Adcock, back from his broken leg, and Pafko followed as the crowd fidgeted, eager for a reason to explode. Covington drove Henry home with a sacrifice fly that sent Fred Hutchinson out of the dugout. After one inning, Mizell was finished.
Into the game came another Aaron nemesis, head-hunting Larry Jackson, the same Jackson whom Henry had accused of throwing at him back in his rookie year, the same Jackson whom Chuck Tanner would refer to only as “that right-handed son of a bitch.”
But Jackson was good this night, quelling the insurrection. He would pitch the next seven innings on a wire, dancing into trouble as Milwaukee waited to erupt. In nine of ten innings, the Braves would put a runner on, and yet there would be no celebration. In fact, the place was at times monastery-quiet.
With one out in the sixth, Wally Moon singled and Musial doubled again. This time, Alvin Dark bounced a two-run single to center and Burdette would not escape.
In the seventh, Schoendienst singled. Logan sacrificed him to second and Mathews doubled him home to tie the score. Fred Hutchinson’s next move made clear Henry’s influence. With none on and one out in a tie game, the Cardinal manager intentionally walked Aaron—the go-ahead run—with another right-hander, Adcock, on deck to face the lefty Jackson. Adcock bounced into a rally-killing double play.
The Cardinals increased the pressure. Moon singled in the eighth and Musial knocked him to third with his third hit of the game. Irv Noren grounded to short and Logan threw out Moon at the plate.
The Last Hero Page 24