The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (20 page)

Once in Brooklyn, the end came quickly. In the opener, Friday night, June 15, Perini watched from the Ebbets Field press box during the game and was pelted with questions by the blood-smelling reporters.

“Are you prepared to say that Grimm
⁷⁷
is your manager for the rest of the year?”

“I am prepared to say nothing.”

“Are you thinking about making a change?”

“I’m not prepared to say anything about that, either.”

B
URDETTE STONED THE
Dodgers for seven innings, up 4–2 in the eighth. But with one out, Rocky Nelson (batting average, .208) homered and Hodges walked. Grimm sent for Dave Jolly, who walked Campanella and gave up the game-tying single to Furillo. In the bottom of the ninth, Lou Sleater got Pee Wee Reese, but Duke Snider doubled. Randy Jackson was walked intentionally and Nelson grounded out.

If Perini was still unsure what to do with his manager, what happened next sealed the fate of Charlie Grimm. With Snider on third and Jackson on second and two out in a tie game, Grimm ordered Charlie Root out to the mound to replace Sleater with Ernie Johnson. With forty-one years in the game, Grimm’s logic was sound: Campanella followed Hodges, and the left-handed Sleater would not face the right-handed Campanella.

Except that Rube Walker, the lefty, had already replaced Campanella in the top of the inning. Now, with the losing run on third, Grimm had put himself in the disadvantageous position, his right-handed pitcher facing the lefty Walker. Root was halfway to the pitching mound and Johnson had left the bull pen when Grimm pulled the fire alarm, yelling frantically for Root to get back to the dugout. But the switch had already been signaled to home plate umpire Artie Gore. Grimm caught a lucky break when Gore allowed him to rescind the switch, leaving the lefty Sleater to face the lefty Walker. The Dodger manager, Walter Alston, went ballistic, telling Gore he was playing the game under protest. But it didn’t matter. Lefty or righty, protest or not, brain cramp forgiven, fate still had other plans for Charlie Grimm. Sleater threw a first-pitch fastball, which Walker ripped for the game-winning base hit. The Braves lost anyway, 5–4.

After the game, Perini left the press box, muttering, “We’re not getting as much out of this club as we should.”

The denouement came the next afternoon, with Roger Craig shutting Milwaukee down again, 2–0 in the eighth. Adcock banged a pinch homer to make it 2–1 and Mathews singled to tie it. The Dodgers did it again in the bottom of the inning when Snider homered off Ernie Johnson. The Braves put two on in the top of the ninth, but Bruton grounded out to second to end it. In the span of two weeks, the Braves had lost twelve out of seventeen, and against their rivals, the Dodgers, the team they knew they had to beat in order to be considered big-league, championship-level, Milwaukee was 1–5.

When the game ended, Perini invited the Milwaukee writers to his suite at the Commodore Hotel for a drink. Shortly after they arrived, Grimm walked in and told the group he was finished. “I’ve decided to give someone else a crack at this job.”

He was out. It wasn’t Durocher, however, who walked through the clubhouse door the next night, but one of his old disciples, white-haired, five-foot-five-inch Fred Haney. Haney had joined the Braves as a coach to start the season, after having managed the Pirates the previous three years, the same Pirate team whose success against the Braves in 1955 had cost them the pennant. Haney was now the boss.

As for Perini, he lamented how his little mom-and-pop baseball operation had succumbed to the sudden hunger of the fans and a flash flood of expectations.

“I can’t understand the people,” he said. “We get two or three games behind and they want Charlie to be fired or they want him to resign. I think it’s a terrible thing.”

The truth, as always, was quite different. The fans wanted Grimm’s scalp, in no small part because it was Perini who had whipped up the expectations in the first place. It was Perini who had told anyone who would listen that these Braves were nothing less than pennant winners.

Bob Wolf pecked out his column for
The Sporting News
, and concluded that Grimm had never been able to overcome his banjo-playing, roll ’em out and let’s drink image. He was too close to his players. They wanted to laugh with Charlie and drink with him, feel safe with him, win or lose. But camaraderie was one thing. Not being able to beat the Dodgers had proven something else: With a pot of gold in the middle of the table, the Braves didn’t know how to collect. The Dodgers had been dizzy, reeling, and instead of a kayo, six games against the Braves were what had gotten them straight. The Braves had Burdette and Spahn and Mathews and Adcock and Aaron, Wolf wrote, and still didn’t know how to reach across the table and bring the money home.

Why did Grimm fail to produce the pennant winner Perini and the fans of Milwaukee thought they should have had? The consensus is that his easy-going manner got the best of him, just as it apparently had in his two terms with the Cubs. The club appeared to lack the competitive spark.

For the papers, Charlie gave Milwaukee one last smile. Sporting a polka-dot shirt and cream-colored blazer, a cigarette in his left hand, Charlie mugged for the cameras, shaking Fred Haney’s hand with his right.

A
LTHOUGH
F
RED
H
ANEY
knew a Cadillac when he saw one, he knew he wouldn’t have it for long if he didn’t learn how to drive, and fast. Haney had been around the Braves enough to know his wasn’t a 24–22 team. His first act as commandant was to crush the element on the Braves that preferred barmaids to first place. Over the first weeks of his tenure, Haney would manage quite differently from the way Grimm had. Haney called frequent meetings, if for no reason other than to give the drinkers on the club something to think about. He promised to deal with the “two or three playboys” on the club. One, of course, was Mathews, but he wasn’t going anywhere. Mathews had trouble even when he wasn’t exactly involved. Take the night of May 12, when he hit his fourth homer of the year in a 10–6 loss at Cincinnati. Mathews showed up at the ballpark for a doubleheader the next day sporting cuts on each side of his face. It turned out that a woman had thrown a glass in his direction and shards of glass were now deeply lodged into his face. No matter, Mathews went four for eight in sweeping two from the Redlegs, but too many times the edge the Braves needed was being left in the bar.

Jim Pendleton, the versatile utility man who was also Henry’s roommate, was another story. Pendleton, who possessed a big appetite for long legs and drink but couldn’t hit his weight, was sent out to Wichita the day Haney was hired. Felix Mantilla, the infielder from Puerto Rico who had been Henry’s teammate in Jacksonville, was called up. The two would room together.

There was something else about Haney that differed dramatically from Grimm. Haney had no problem pointing out a player’s mistakes in front of the whole team. He was, after all, a Durocher man, and he knew the value of peer pressure, of being embarrassed in front of the club. Mental mistakes would not be tolerated. A ball getting by or a throw coming in low was one thing, but not knowing how many outs there were or not taking the extra base was quite another. Under Fred Haney these types of errors would definitely cost players money. The difference was that Durocher was a better psychologist than Haney. Durocher knew that he needed Willie Mays to win and never embarrassed Willie. To do so would have sent Mays retreating into his shell. On the Braves, Henry was the rising star. Even at this juncture in his career it was clear he possessed the most all-around talent.

Yet Haney had no problem criticizing Henry. Or anybody.

In the Braves first test under Haney, a doubleheader at Ebbets, Adcock won it in the ninth with a home run that went over the roof. The
New York Times
photo caption said it was the first time anyone had hit a ball out of Ebbets. In the nightcap, Adcock hit another, this time off Don Newcombe, and the Braves had not only swept the day, 3–1, but done something they hadn’t done all season. They’d beaten the Dodgers in consecutive games.

And so it went for Fred Haney, two months of rolling sevens. As they headed into Forbes Field for four games, it wasn’t lost on any of the Braves that no team gave them more trouble than the Pirates, but Haney handled his former club. Spahn and Burdette won the first two games, and the Braves broke the Pirates for a five-run fifth in winning the third, and Henry’s first-inning triple started a rout in the finale for a four-game sweep. The Braves went back to New York for four with the Giants in Harlem, and it was more of the same. Mathews bombed a home run to win the opener. The Braves rallied for two in the ninth to win the second and swept a doubleheader for their tenth win in a row. In Philadelphia the next night, Pakfo started a three-run eighth with a bunt single and the Braves won 8–5.

The streak ended the next day in Philadelphia, but after Grimm was fired, the Braves had catapulted four teams in the standings, suddenly playing .600 ball and leading the league over an upstart Cincinnati club as well as the Dodgers.

O
N
M
AY
8, the Milwaukee cleanup hitter, Henry Aaron, went zero for four, struck out twice, and made an error in a 5–0 win against Pittsburgh. His average dropped to .167. He’d started the season with three hits in his first seven at bats, including demoralizing the Cubs with a home run on opening day, but over the next nine games, Henry could do next to nothing. The average wasn’t there, and neither was the power. He went thirteen games before hitting his first double of the season. He had three home runs up to that point. The consolation was that Milwaukee was in first place without its cleanup hitter doing anything at all.

The trouble with Henry was that there were few signals his teammates could point to that suggested his problems were over. Some slumping hitters got themselves out of the dumps by taking more pitches, by walking more and cutting down on their strike-outs. Not Henry. A low number of strike-outs would always be a central source of pride for him, and even when he was cranking, he didn’t walk. On May 15, he went one for four in Philadelphia, raising his average to .208, but he had struck out five times and walked five times all season. Others would try to take the ball the other way, to shoot the ball into the right-center gap. That meant the hitter wasn’t overanxious to pull the ball, which meant he wasn’t trying to meet the ball too quickly and thus was missing good pitches.

The hitting coaches would all tell Henry the same thing: to stay back, wait on the ball, and then stride toward it. Henry hit differently. Since the ankle injury in high school, his hitting approach was to balance and drive off of his
front
foot, to use the combination of his quickness and power to drive the ball. Despite the results, few of his coaches knew exactly what to do with him, because they’d never seen anyone hit like that and be successful over the long term. Committing to the front foot should have left him vulnerable to late-moving pitches, made him susceptible to strike-outs, but he was just different.

Henry’s gifts at the plate were unpredictable except in their roots. He thought along with the pitcher and tried to beat him to the spot. It had been that way in Mobile, when Ed Scott first saw him. Henry had always banked on his ability to make contact with any pitch, in any location.

When he did catch—a three-hit game with a triple in a 2–1 loss in Philly—it was without warning, an innocent spark turned wildfire. The next day, in the Polo Grounds against the Giants, Henry rapped two more hits, a double and a two-run triple, to put on a show with Mays, who would also double and triple, just to keep the universe in balance. Then it was time to break out the adding machine: three straight multihit games against Pittsburgh and Brooklyn. By the end of the month, Aaron was suddenly hitting .352.

If Charlie Grimm knew Aaron had the potential to be a transcendent talent, it was Haney who worked unsentimentally to refine him. When Grimm resigned, Aaron was hitting .313. Indeed, in Haney’s first game, Henry went three for four, and Haney presented him with a reward: early batting practice when the team arrived in Pittsburgh. Henry responded that night with two more hits.

Meanwhile, the hype machine had found its man, and it was true: twenty-year-old Frank Robinson was indeed the real deal. At the all-star break, he was running away with the Rookie of the Year award, and for all of his blustery spring-training oratory, maybe Robinson’s old minor-league manager Ernie White had
underestimated
his former protégé. Robinson wasn’t just killing the ball; he was second in the league in hitting. He wasn’t just hitting the ball over the fence; he led the league in runs scored, even though he was not a base stealer. Like Aaron and Mays and Banks, he was a complete hitter, and that other rumor about Robinson was also true: You couldn’t intimidate the kid. It wasn’t yet August, but Robinson had already been hit twelve times. He stood there snarling, right on top of the plate. He ignored the customary batter-pitcher compact of giving up one half of the plate, and for it, Robinson would be hit twenty times in 1956 alone. It would be a hallmark of his long career. By the time he retired, in 1975, he would be hit a total of 198 times. By contrast, Henry was hit by pitches thirty-times over twenty-three seasons.

Robinson was not a beneficiary of the kingmakers in the East Coast media machine. He played in dowdy Cincinnati, which by all accounts was a city hostile toward blacks. Cincinnati was so fearful of offending the conservative middle-American attitude that in 1956, in the age of McCarthyism, the Reds changed their name to the Redlegs, lest anyone think the baseball team had sided with the Communists. It was only a matter of time before Robinson chafed in Cincinnati, but in the summer of 1956, Frank Robinson was the most exciting player in the National League.

Then, for Henry Aaron, came the unkindest cut: Robinson was named to start in right field in the All-Star Game. Robinson, in fact, would be the only black starter in the game, with Mays, Aaron, and Ernie Banks on the bench.