“Of course it hurt his chances for the batting championship. He made the sacrifice for the good of the team.”
Henry produced magnificent results in 1957—his forty-four home runs led both leagues, as did his 132 RBI; Musial beat him out for the batting title, .351 to .322. There was that famous publicity shot with Henry and Mantle posing in their batting positions, but Henry was not instantly propelled into a leading role at the dawn of the World Series. That said more about the times than it did about Henry Aaron. The common response to his relative lack of public notoriety in contrast to his offensive achievements was attributed to his demeanor and his desire for fame. Henry was ill-equipped for the hero’s role. He was not quick with a verbal jab or glib with the writers. He chose to avoid the spotlight. He did not want publicity. These were simple elements of a more complicated equation. While each description of Henry was true to varying degrees—as was the very real fact that Henry often contributed to his own misrepresentation with sarcasm or evasion during interviews—the image of the Milwaukee Braves was a loud one. The public image of the club reflected more the personalities of Burdette, Spahn, Mathews, Logan, and Charlie Grimm, even though the latter had been gone for over a year. To a large extent, that image steered the press and the public away from Henry Aaron.
Most importantly, 1957 was still years away from the time when a black player would represent the public face of a franchise with all of its unspoken facets. That meant being the player who would speak for the club during winning and losing streaks, the player who held enough clout in the clubhouse to criticize elements of the team’s or an individual player’s performance. It meant being the highest-paid player on the team, the player upon whom management would rely, not only by offering kind words but by fortifying rhetoric with financial investment. Black players led on the field, by the examples of their play, but in 1957 did not do the talking.
In 1957, Henry Aaron held none of these titles. He was arguably the best player on the team, and even at twenty-three years of age, it was clear to the Braves that he was the most versatile player and possessed tremendous long-term potential. As the Series approached, Henry was not an underestimated talent by the press. Frank Finch, the longtime Los Angeles Times baseball writer, called Henry “already one of the game’s great hitters.” The New York Times referred to Henry as “Milwaukee’s answer to Mickey Mantle.”
For all of Henry’s potential, the personality of the Braves belonged to Eddie Mathews. By 1957, Mathews was nearly two hundred home runs ahead of Babe Ruth at a comparable age, and it was Mathews, not Aaron, who was considered the best candidate (if there ever was such a thing) to break Ruth’s career home-run record.
Henry did not have particular influence in the clubhouse, a domain belonging to the rugged, moody Mathews, the diffident Spahn, and the other veterans on the team. As a black player, his locker was not centrally located, but in the far corner of the home clubhouse, geographically sealed away, along with those of the other black players, from the mainstream areas of the clubhouse. During spring training, the most important bonding time for a team, Henry and the black players did not even stay with the team at the Dixie Grande Hotel. In later years, when the rigid line between the sports world and the real world would be effectively erased, it would have been impossible for a player of Henry’s status to escape discussing the current events of the day, especially during the World Series, when baseball lived on the front page in every American city.
But as the World Series commenced and the violence during the dramatic integration of Central High School in Little Rock intensified, dominating the front pages of newspapers across the country, at no point did an interview with Henry on the subject appear in either the Milwaukee or the New York papers.
In regard to political issues facing black players, such as lodging and dining concerns during spring training and the regular season, it was Billy Bruton, not Henry, who held sway in the home clubhouse and the front office. Outside of macro predictions (“I think we’ll win the pennant this year”), Henry did not often discuss in print the direction or mood of the club.
Henry earned $22,500 in 1957, nearly three times less than Spahn and slightly more than half of what Mathews was earning. Burdette, Schoendienst, and Logan ($25,000) also earned more than Henry. Moreover, the sport was far from reaching the point (which would be common in the future) when one of the youngest players on the team, regardless of ability level, could command the kind of salary that gave him instant credibility in the clubhouse. Young players were still expected to play and not be heard.
Given that perspective, it seems wholly appropriate that Henry played a secondary role on the Braves outside of the batter’s box. The day before the Series began, he did his part in turning the crank on the hype machine by posing for the newsreels with Mantle, but in general, he left the publicity to the more established stars. In a sense, it was a position that reinforced his own sense of isolation, a belief that he could spend 180 days a year with people and still not have them know or understand him. He was not invisible, but his persona was shaped in the papers and, to a lesser extent, in terms of his teammates solely in the field of play, beginning with his stride at the plate, ending when he made contact. In later years, as Henry grew more comfortable with himself and his heightened stature, he would admit he had not helped very much when it came to letting people know him.
Periodically, a precious nugget of information would appear—for example, that one of Henry’s sisters, eleven-year-old Alfredia, was living with Henry and Barbara and attended the Phipps School in Milwaukee. His contemporaries seemed fuller, more three-dimensional: Mathews brooded with hunger for drink and women, quick-tempered and protective of his turf, desperate to be known as a truly great player. Spahn was the single-minded, often distant intellectual on the mound. But both were quicker to reveal their emotions. Henry was not without opinions, but they remained in him, grounded. “Henry didn’t volunteer what he thought about you,”125 Felix Mantilla recalled. “But that didn’t mean he didn’t have thoughts about who you were.”
IN THE YANKEE scouting meetings, however, Henry was far from anonymous. He was central to every discussion about pitching to the Braves. The scouting reports were sparse, and at times they reflected the traditional condescending Yankee attitudes toward their opponents, but they were of questionable benefit anyway, because Henry was an unpredictable hitter. As pitchers would say in later years, a scouting report on Henry Aaron was of lesser value than the paper on which it was printed.
In the first game, in front of an overflow, sun-splashed crowd of 69,476, Ford was masterful, beating Spahn 3–1. While Spahn labored early and was finished in a sixth-inning flurry, Ford pitched a five-hit complete game. Henry knew at once that the Yankees did not regard him lightly. Though only twenty-eight, Whitey Ford was an October veteran of four World Series. Throughout the first game, Ford gathered information on Henry, testing his patience in his early at bats. Young players, especially run producers, liked to hit when they knew they were being challenged, so Ford took a different approach, waiting out Henry. Henry’s first three at bats were emblematic of the great duel taking place between two future Hall of Fame players. Henry led off the second by seeing the first of an afternoon’s worth of curveballs. Ford, the left-handed master of pace, stayed on the outside corner without challenging in the at bat. Henry waited for Ford to challenge him inside, a challenge that never came. Frustrated, he bounced weakly to second base.
In the fourth, after a one-out walk to Mathews, Ford started Henry with another curve on the outside corner, which Henry pasted to right for a single, and the scouting report went into the garbage. For the rest of the series, Ford would pitch to Henry according to the feel of his pitches. With runners on the corners and one out, Ford then jammed Adcock, forcing a double play.
In the sixth, Henry faced his first controversy of the series. Trailing 1–0, with two on and none out, Haney chose not to have Henry bunt, opting instead to give Henry a
chance to break the game open. “No way,” Haney said fiercely to the writers afterward, “am I going to bunt with my best hitter up.”
Henry looked for the same slop on the outside corner, and Ford obliged, but Henry fouled the pitch. Ford’s next pitch was a beauty, a shoulder-high curve that sloped down and in over the middle of the plate, belt-high for strike two. The third pitch was a throwaway. Ford hadn’t challenged Henry inside all day and threw a nothing curve inside and down around Henry’s ankles.
Henry, who flailed and checked, was fooled that Ford had finally come in with a soft, hittable curve. Home plate umpire Jocko Conlan said Henry did not hold up, and called him out, a call that left Henry fuming in the clubhouse to Conley and anyone else who would listen afterward. “It isn’t often that Aaron squawks,” Ollie Kuechle wrote with local pride in the Journal. “But he squawked here, and he had a right.”
The Yankees had struck first. The skipper, Haney, was unbowed. “No complaints. We just didn’t get the hitting we needed and they whipped us in a good ball game,” Haney said afterward. In the opener, the Yankees won all the key points, plays that went their way by a sliver, plays that always seemed to go their way by a sliver in October. Hank Bauer hit a two-out, run-scoring double to center, which Henry could not reach and which the writers believed he should have been able to catch (“No way,” Haney said). In the sixth, with Spahn gone and Ernie Johnson pitching, with one out in a 2–0 game, Jerry Coleman dropped a squeeze bunt. The crowd gave a resigned roar, thinking that Coleman had tapped it too hard to the pitcher, leaving Berra doomed at the plate. But Johnson opted to retire Coleman at first, and another run scored, leaving Haney to defend not just Henry’s defense but Johnson’s decision not to throw home. And there was Henry’s check-swing strikeout. Ford had won the first round. “I’ve never seen so many curveballs in my life,” Henry said.
Game two, another perfect day in New York, the luster of the bunting having worn off. The Braves and Yankees traded runs early in the second game, which featured less pomp and more fight. Bobby Shantz, the five-foot-six lefthander who in 1952 had beaten out Mickey Mantle for AL MVP, was going against Burdette, the pitcher the Yankees did not trust because of his reputation for decking hitters and wetting the ball, not always in that order. For his part, Burdette still seethed at the Yankees for trading him from the organization in 1951. From the start, it was clear the second game would be more intense than the opener, when Ford had cast a spell on the Milwaukee hitters. Henry led off the second with a triple over Mantle’s head in center and scored on Adcock’s single. The Yankees tied in the bottom of the inning on consecutive two-out singles by Kubek and Coleman and nearly broke the game open when the Braves made their first decisive play of the series, with Shantz nailing a two-out fastball from Burdette into the left-field corner. Kubek and Coleman dashed for the plate. Wes Covington sprinted toward the left-field corner, where the low wall narrowed sharply. With his back to the infield, Covington stretched his glove in the direction of the fence and caught the ball, saving two runs.
Pushed back to even in the second, Shantz immediately gave the lead back, with Logan tagging him for a long, quick home run down the skinny left-field line. Bauer counterpunched, taking Burdette out of the park in the bottom of the inning. In the top of the fourth, Adcock and Pafko led off with singles. Covington followed with another hit, a run-scoring single that Kubek mangled in left for an error and another run, and it was 4–2, with nobody out.
Then, suddenly, the fireworks stopped, and game two turned tough and nasty. Stengel, bowlegged and annoyed, removed Shantz after just three innings. Art Ditmar entered the game and first decked Crandall with a fastball, then Aaron in the fifth, forcing a warning from home-plate umpire Jocko Conlan.
Burdette held on to his two-run lead. The Yankees got close in the sixth, putting runners on second and third, with one out, but Burdette, growing irascible and working faster as he neared victory, retired Kubek on a grounder. The Yankees put two more on in the ninth but did not score. After Ditmar dusted Henry, Burdette waited patiently for his chance, then sent Coleman into the dirt.
The Braves won 4–2 and headed home for three games. Afterward, Burdette and Haney were terse. Henry, who had been decked by Ditmar, said, “We don’t worry about such things.” If the Braves had seemed unable to match the Yankee toughness in the opener, Burdette had evened the scales, and the all-slug, no-field Covington—who spent the postgame interviews apologizing for the irony of a power hitter changing the day’s momentum with his glove—had provided the unexpected magic.
FRANK ZEIDLER munched on a sandwich from a box lunch as he waited for the team charter plane to arrive at General Mitchell Field. The mayor was not, by any account, a rabid baseball fan, but as a politician he understood how to connect with his constituency. When Zeidler arrived at the airstrip to greet the Braves, a policeman notified him that the team flight would be late. He used the extra time to eat, crushing a box lunch.
Zeidler noticed something of an oddity: The crowd of a few hundred diehards waiting to welcome the Braves home had swelled to more than a thousand. As the gathering increased, Zeidler told Emil Quandt, the Milwaukee police chief, to add additional officers. Instead of buses, Dan Fegert, a local auto representative, arranged for thirty convertibles to meet the team plane and carry the players and their wives from the airport. The team had not won the World Series. They did not even have a lead in the Series. They had played only two games, but the welcome for the Braves had turned into a full-on motorcade. When the American Airlines DC-7 touched down, airstrip officials rolled out a red carpet leading to the waiting fleet of convertibles. The Milwaukee police estimated the crowd had grown to as many as 7,500.
For eleven miles, out of the airstrip grounds and along the streets of the city’s south side to the Eighteenth Street viaduct, the sound of cowbells collided with that of banging pots and pans and yells and screams. The next day, city officials estimated the gathering at 200,000. Zeidler called the greeting “the biggest spontaneous celebration in the city’s history.”
BRAVES WELCOMED AT AIRPORT126 BY
THOUSANDS OF WELL-WISHERS
The turnout, it should be remembered, was not for an elaborate parade, with bare-kneed majorettes and marching bands. It was for a bunch of tired baseball players who are still on the short end of the odds in an unfinished competition for the baseball championship of the world.
Over the years, after the Braves had long since left town, Henry would be known in Milwaukee for three major things: the home run off Billy Muffett, the way he carried himself, and his unwavering position that Milwaukee owned a greater piece of his heart than any place he’d ever visited.
At 11:25 a.m., the Yankees seventeen-car sleeper pulled into Milwaukee to a great and unwelcome surprise. A delegation of Milwaukee civic and political leaders greeted the Yankee officials with booklets titled Milwaukee USA and welcomed the Yankees and the World Series to the city. The players walked with no small degree of annoyance past the congregation and silently boarded a Greyhound bus, which would take them to County Stadium. Stengel had slipped onto the bus and refused to come out, despite the pleadings of Judge Robert Cannon and the civic group, who wanted Stengel to say a few words. The Yankees were here for a World Series, not a banquet. Cannon, the Milwaukee circuit court judge who would precede Marvin Miller as head of a fledgling players union, remained on the bus as it peeled off, and the welcoming gesture fell about as flat as Mantle’s crew cut. According to the Journal, “the Yankees hurried off. The fans and welcoming committee moved forward, smiling. A cheer was heard. The Yankees ignored the reception. Heads down, faces grim they walked rapidly to the three chartered Greyhound buses east of the station.”
“This,” a Yankees official was quoted as saying as he boarded the team bus, “is strictly bush league.”
FOR THE THREE games to be played at County Stadium, six thousand standing-room tickets were made available. Art (“Happy”) Felsch slept in a tent for ten days t
o guarantee he would be first in line. The ballpark, draped in bunting even along the outfield fences in front of the Perini pines, was sold out, with 45,804 there for the first World Series game ever played in Wisconsin. On a fifty-three-degree afternoon, Saturday, October 5, the Yankees responded to the pageantry by beating the tar out of Bob Buhl in the third game. For the first time in the Series, the Yankees showed off their vaunted power. Mantle, leveled by a bad back and ineffective for the first two games, ripped two hits, including a home run, and drove in a pair. Kubek, coming home, hit two homers, including one in the first inning as a nervous hum flitted through the stands. The Yankee first four in the order went seven for seventeen with three homers, eight runs scored, and eight more driven in. For a brief moment, it appeared that the Braves would have an easy time, as Bob Turley, the New York starter, gave up three hits and four walks and couldn’t get out of the second inning. The only problem was that Buhl couldn’t get out of the first. Don Larsen was staked to a 5–0 lead after two innings, on the way to a 12–3 final. Down 7–1 in the fifth, Henry laced a Larsen fastball for his first home run of the Series.
In the fourth game, when the blustery lake winds laced a chilly fifty-degree day, the Braves came face-to-face with the Yankee mythology. Spahn was brilliant, avenging the opener when he couldn’t escape the sixth. He gave up a run to start the game, then settled, retiring eleven straight Yankees at one point. His counterpart, the knuckleballer Tom Sturdivant, held a 1–0 lead until Logan led off the fourth with a walk and Mathews followed up with a double. Stengel walked to the mound. Not particularly interested in facing Aaron with two on, nobody out, and first base open, Sturdivant suggested walking Henry. Loading the bases wasn’t great baseball strategy, but perhaps putting Aaron on would solve two problems. The first was that Sturdivant wouldn’t have to face Henry; the second was that the on-deck hitter, Covington, might hit into a double play and minimize the damage.
The Last Hero Page 26