When he arrived for his meeting with Brewers management, Bud Selig and his people cultivated Henry, telling him to take the long view, to think about the years after he’d hung up his spikes. Selig spoke to Henry as an equal, with respect, as a person who possessed value beyond the limits of wearing the jersey. The Selig sales pitch was the perfect approach for a man still quietly broiling from being treated like the hired help, by people to whom he had given the past twenty-one years. By their actions over the final year of his contract, the Braves had coldly reminded him—first by not considering him as a manager and later by allowing him to leave—that in the end he was just a ballplayer, and all ballplayers were replaceable.
But Bud Selig spoke to Henry266 about being connected to Milwaukee for life. Henry was part of the Milwaukee family and had been since he arrived in 1954. He told Henry that he was returning a family heirloom to Milwaukee, and, even better, that Henry was his friend. Selig treated Henry as royalty (in the coming years, he would even build Henry a full tennis court at the Atlanta house), and discussed with him future employment opportunities: a job with decision-making authority in the organization after he retired (general manager, farm director, perhaps). The Milwaukee people even talked about the possibility of setting Henry up in business, a local or even national beer distributorship as well, with far-flung territories and autonomy. After all, the Miller family was Milwaukee and could make things happen with a finger snap.
While Bartholomay would years later forge a substantial relationship with Henry, it was Selig who was the first owner in baseball to invest in Henry Aaron, the man. The two men had known each other since sitting on the benches at City Stadium in Green Bay, watching Lombardi’s Packers, but it was the reunion in Milwaukee that began to seal their friendship. Selig, in fact, was at his most canny, his most genuine for his personal investment in Henry would pay lifelong dividends. Where his contemporaries seemed destined to underestimate Aaron, Selig immediately understood Henry’s value, in the short term by providing the Brewers with the credibility the team lacked.
“He did not have as much left267 in the tank as I had hoped, but I always knew that bringing Henry Aaron back to this city would have an immense impact,” Selig would say thirty-five years later. “We didn’t win a lot of ball games, but in his own dignified manner, he legitimized us.”
IN THE YEARS Milwaukee went without baseball, destiny had plans other than the family car business for Bud Selig, and the arrival of Henry represented something of a personal vindication. In the mid-1960s, after the Braves had left, he formed Teams, Inc., a loose organization of area businessmen and former Braves shareholders designed to attract a new ball club to Milwaukee. As a member of the generation that, in his words, “had their hearts ripped out” by the Braves departure, Selig had long vowed that he would avenge that bitter defeat. He would return baseball to the city, and make sure it would never leave again.
He first tried to attract a struggling franchise, the Chicago White Sox, by having the team play exhibition games in Milwaukee during those cold four seasons the city lost big-league ball. The White Sox ultimately didn’t bite, but during one season, the Milwaukee exhibitions totaled nearly a third of the White Sox attendance.
Selig had proven to baseball’s curmudgeonly owners that Milwaukee still had a thirst for baseball and that Selig himself could be a persistent and capable player. It was clear another round of expansion would come soon, as cities as diverse as Montreal, San Diego, Dallas, and Seattle were all clamoring to apply for franchises. Milwaukee was an earnest but hardly exotic choice. American rust-belt cities were losing franchises, not gaining them. But Selig persisted. Before long, Bud Selig had become the face of baseball in Milwaukee and slowly began entering the cloistered world of major-league baseball.
When Selig corralled the Seattle Pilots from bankruptcy court, purchasing the club for $10.8 million in the winter of 1970, he maintained a certain historical symmetry. The Pilots had been awarded to Milwaukee at a similar point in the year—during spring training—as the Braves had been awarded to Milwaukee eighteen years earlier. In 1952, the Boston Braves had officially become the Milwaukee Braves in between innings of a spring-training game in Bradenton, and in 1970, the Seattle Pilots equipment truck had literally stopped on an Arizona highway, awaiting instructions from management on whether to drive north, back to Seattle, or northeast to Milwaukee.
Selig had done it, and in the process attempted to assuage the old hard feelings by putting the band back together. Del Crandall, the old Braves catcher, was the manager, and now Henry, forty-one years old but still Henry, would anchor the lineup. There were reunions with old friends, editorials, and luncheons, like the Play Ball Luncheon at the Marc Plaza, the one that attracted eight hundred people (the biggest turnout ever), where Henry sat sheepishly while the crowd sang “Hello, Henry” (to the tune of “Hello, Dolly!” no less). Bob Uecker, another of Henry’s old teammates, was now a Milwaukee institution, a broadcaster with the club who also did funny beer commercials and told an endless stream of self-deprecating jokes.
Henry would connect to the fans (and make a little extra money) by collaborating with Uecker on “The Locker 44 Show,” a pregame interview Uecker conducted with Henry before each game. “I know there are a lot of people picking us268 to finish fifth or sixth,” Henry said when he took the microphone. “But there’s not a player on this ball club who feels we’re a fifth-place club.” The Milwaukee people even took care of Billye, setting her up with a morning show on local television to make her feel right at home.
Still, everything was a just a little bit off. Henry was back in Milwaukee, but life is never so neat. The year 1954, when Henry was a young man on a team good enough to win the whole thing, was long gone. Going home seamlessly was nothing more than a cruel mirage, no more real than a father who stares in the face of his adult son yet still sees a boy. The nostalgia, in truth, had no value, no impact on the realities of 1975.
And there was nothing wistful about 1975. The Brewers, as a team, were awful, and they had been since arriving in Milwaukee from Seattle five years earlier as a no-name cast with little future. The Brewers were a ham-and-egg expansion team, had never finished higher than fourth place (and that year lost ninety-seven games), and had never even enjoyed a winning record. Henry was now an American Leaguer, a member of a foreign, shadowy place that played by different rules in different cities with different umpires. Worse, Henry had no love for the American League, the circuit whose collective, institutional racism fueled the black players of the National League to win nineteen out of twenty-three All-Star Games during Henry’s time as a Brave.
In the AL, there was no continuity with what Henry knew. The pitching patterns were different. In the AL, they threw breaking balls in fastball counts. The umpires seemed to ignore the high strike and the low strike. The uniforms were purely 1970s god-awful: powder blue double-knit pullovers with yellow trim for road jerseys, not a button in sight, elastic-band belts, no buckles. The home jerseys were slightly better: white with blue pinstripes and block letters, and when Henry dressed, the strange jersey formed convexly around his paunch, meeting his waist.
Milwaukee was aflutter for his return, but Henry was no longer the eager, hungry twenty-year-old, green as a cucumber but armed with immeasurable talent, his future one of infinite visibility. He was forty-one, coming off a season of doubt and despair, the pedestrian numbers—.268, twenty homers, sixty-nine RBI—easily the least impressive of his career. He was playing for a team that was attracted to him, easily one of the greatest right fielders who ever lived, precisely because he would agree not to play in the outfield. The designated hitter, in existence since 1973, was the acknowledged rest home for finished ballplayers, sluggers who might still have some box-office appeal and a little pop left in their bat.
Nor was the Milwaukee of 1975 the magical place of 1954, the haven of free eggs and free gas for the players and complimentary dry cleaning, hero worship and innocence. Twain had
it right: Youth is wasted on the young. Like the rest of the country, Milwaukee had grown up and gotten a little older, a little more scarred, a little more jaded, having lived through an unpopular war, political assassinations, civil rights, and the hard, icy blade of business cutting through the supposedly happy diversion of sports. The city now was mired in the sticky, modern big-city gumbo: integration, inflation, and unemployment. Baseball did not provide much relief. Wisconsin was particularly volatile, having weathered spirited student antiwar protests. Vietnam and school desegregation were issues that dominated all others, and Henry returned to a Milwaukee in a deep confrontation with itself. The questions of the 1960s demanded answers in the 1970s, and the time had come to vocalize what everybody knew, that racial integration was impossible while social and geographical segregation still existed.
And so much of those good old days had been nothing but a mirage anyway. Henry knew it, knew that he’d been insulated from the rough edges by his talent for hitting pennant winners for the home team. The mirage—or, more accurately, the belief in it—was a reason the current realities now seemed so harsh. Father Groppi, the activist conscience of the city, knew this better than anyone. Groppi, the heroic South Side priest who had assaulted the city’s housing inequities with embarrassing protests of the city leadership—including members of his own archdiocese who preached tolerance and conciliation by day yet were members of segregated social clubs by night—found himself isolated by the 1970s, in his words, “stripped” of his parish and disillusioned by the nobility of the priesthood.
By the time Henry returned, Groppi had gone back to his old job, driving a public bus for the city for the final decade of his life. The fire for justice burned less bright. He was a weary and beaten underdog, his belief that change was possible less fervent. Nevertheless, Groppi had been more than a symbolic figure. The public protests, like the 1967 march on Kosciuszko Park, contributed to the city’s first fair-housing ordinance the following year. He had joined the legendary generation of white Catholic priests who were as much a part of the civil rights movement as the better-known, historic figures they marched beside.
When Henry arrived, the nation’s eyes rested upon the racial cauldron in Boston, which for years had first resisted the charge that the city’s schools had been purposely segregated or denied that segregation produced an inferior education for black children—old arguments both, dating back before Brown v. Board of Education, yet the cornerstones of Northeast resistance. Boston had begun court-ordered busing (forced busing, the whites called it, lest anyone be unsure of where they stood on the issue of school integration), and in the school years of 1974 and 1975, the city erupted so violently and so completely that it would never lose its reputation as the symbol of American urban racial hostility.
Boston received the attention, and the infamy, but it was in Milwaukee where the nation’s first lawsuit was filed, in 1965, challenging de facto segregation—public schools were segregated because city neighborhoods were segregated and, as such, could not be remedied without busing. It was quiet, innocuous Milwaukee that the frustrated locals, white and black, would call “the most segregated city in America.” Since Milwaukee’s neighborhoods were so clannish, the question of whether to bus the city’s students to achieve integration was inevitable. As in Boston, Milwaukee school board officials tried every stalling tactic short of the four corners defense. When Henry and Billye moved into a condominium downtown, school desegregation was the central, roiling issue in the city, on the front page of both newspapers.
BUSING TO INTEGRATE? NOPE!269
By Joel McNally of the Journal Staff
The popular expression is, “I am not against integration. I just don’t like busing.”
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund analyzed white opposition to busing differently in a study called, “It’s not the distance. It’s the niggers.”
… A majority said they favored racial integration of schools, but by an even wider margin they disapproved of busing to achieve it.
… a closer look shows … busing … is opposed only when it would lead to racial integration.
For years, Henry had sought respect. Like Jackie Robinson, he wanted to be an important voice on significant issues. But in 1975, Bud Selig noticed a different Henry, less public, more distant, and certainly less willing to engage. Selig believed the difference, naturally, was the hangover effect of chasing Ruth. Henry veered away from the desegregation issue in Milwaukee, much to the disappointment of the local NAACP chapter, which felt Henry’s voice might have made a difference. He was not hostile to the causes of integration in Milwaukee, but his kids were no longer in the public school system. The issue was not as much of a personal one. He was reticent to lend his name to the civil rights battles that had predated him. Not only did this fight seem not to be his but he did not appear to have much fight left in him at all.
ON THE FIELD, Henry had no illusions. For two seasons, sustained by nostalgia and professionalism—not to mention a healthy dose of the athlete’s refusal to face his own mortality—Henry flailed at the plate. He was a tired baseball player mentally, and an increasingly limited one physically. Nevertheless, the nostalgia maintained the fantasy, and Henry played along. At each of the seemingly endless civic luncheons before spring training, Henry set his usual goals—thirty to thirty-five home runs, a .300 average—even though he’d finished 1974 with the fewest number of home runs since Eisenhower desegregated the public schools, and he hadn’t sniffed .300 all season. What he didn’t tell the fans was that a hitter’s greatest weapon—something even more valuable than his wrists—were his eyes, and Henry could no longer see as well as he once had.
He had taken to wearing glasses, first for reading and then to drive. That meant he could not see items that were close to him nor could he see things from a distance particularly well. Most importantly, he couldn’t see the ball well in batting practice. If he couldn’t see a batting-practice fastball, it was only a matter of time until he would be exposed.
THE BREWERS TRAINED in Sun City, Arizona, a holdover from the days of the Seattle franchise. On the team, Henry would be surrounded mostly by kids, though they would be talented ones. The advantage in being awful all those years was drafting high. Slowly, sunshine began to peek out from behind the clouds. The second baseman, Jim Gantner, was a comer, they said. Gantner wasn’t spectacular and probably wouldn’t make the club in 1975, but he knew his way around the bag. And he was local, from Fond du Lac. The outfielder they drafted in the first round, back when the franchise was in Seattle, was an enigma named Gorman Thomas. Thomas looked like he should be playing third base with a can of beer by his side in the Milwaukee recreational softball leagues, but Thomas, despite his portly brawn, was oddly athletic. Even more oddly, the coaches were looking at him in center field. There was one thing in particular Thomas could do, and that was knock the hell out of the ball. The problem was, he made contact with the ball only about once a week. The catcher was the hotshot Darrell Porter, the fourth pick in the draft, who made the all-star team in his second year in the league. They were already talking about him playing for a long time.
And lastly, there was a nineteen-year-old kid shortstop from Illinois. Robin Yount was his name, and they said he had all the tools. He was a shortstop who could play anywhere and hit anything. He could even hit the ball out of the park if you weren’t careful. He was another one, a top-five pick (third overall in the 1973 draft), a can’t-miss. Yount was the kid whom, when he walked into the batting cage, everybody was taking notes about to see if the reports and the hype and the fanfare were true. Henry understood that.
Yount recalled being too nervous to approach Henry, calling him “Mr. Aaron,” even when Henry told him to cut it out. Yount immediately realized there was no pretentiousness with Henry. In the clubhouses, the phrase for acting better than the rest was to “big-league it”—with teammates, fans, friends, everybody. But that wasn’t Henry.
“He was significant.270 Ev
en though I was just nineteen, I could see how important he was, and not just in baseball, either,” Yount recalled. “He had already broken the record. I knew how big he was, but he didn’t come off that way in person. I mean, he didn’t let it get to him. We knew all he had accomplished in this game, but he acted just like anyone else.”
They were just kids, but they all loved Henry. He was spent as a player, but Crandall knew the master had a way and a warmth with people. He had also accomplished more in a season than most of them had in their whole careers. So, periodically during the spring, Crandall would gather his young team in the outfield and have Henry—the man who did not enjoy public speaking—give a talk. Sometimes the conversations would be about the game—the situations, the different pitchers, what made them big leaguers different from the cats who drifted around the minor leagues. Other times, Henry would talk to them about professionalism, what it took to stay in the big leagues once they’d finally arrived. These were the moments that deepened his conviction that he had made the right choice in leaving Atlanta. No one in the Braves front office, by his recollection, had ever sought his counsel, despite the fact that he had hit 733 home runs and collected three thousand hits.
NOW, UNLIKE 1974, Henry could take solace in breaking the record. He could be comforted by the couple of streaks that reminded pitchers to fear him. But in Milwaukee, time also kept sending him the same overdue bill.
The first notice came in Boston, on opening day, when Henry was collared, first by the remarkable Luis Tiant (a complete-game eight-hitter) and that erratic slop-thrower, Bill Lee. Then in the home opener, against Cleveland, 48,160 saw Henry knock in his first hit and RBI as an American Leaguer, only to see his old enemy, Gaylord Perry, strike him out three times two nights later. He would avenge the insult days later in Cleveland by hitting his first home run of the season off Perry, but when the Brewers landed in Baltimore for a series with the powerhouse Orioles, Henry was hitting .095.
The Last Hero Page 50