The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (23 page)

Henry voiced his reluctance to return to the South, the scene of so many humiliations. Ironically, it was living in Atlanta, the center of the modern civil rights movement, that shaped his views and deepened his conviction to become more than a baseball player.

Perhaps the three most historically significant players of their era: Henry’s consistency was often overshadowed by the charisma of Willie Mays (center), while Roberto Clemente (left) displaced Henry as the premier defensive right fielder in the National League. It was Clemente, however, who would be the most notoriously underpaid.

After Henry hit his 500th home run, on July 14, 1968, the baseball world realized it was Henry Aaron—and not Willie Mays—who represented the best chance to reach Babe Ruth’s all-time record of 714. For the next seven seasons, as he became the focal point of a national obsession, the smiles would be scarce.

Except that Milwaukee did not fold. Erskine led 4–1 in the sixth when Henry followed a Mathews single with another, and Bruton, too, reached on a one-out error. Then Adcock blasted a grand slam and gave the Braves a 5–4 lead. Four outs away from being swept in the doubleheader, Robinson again came up, sore groin and all, and tied the game with a two-out homer in the eighth, only to see Bruton win it 6–5, scoring on a sacrifice fly.

Afterward, it was Smokey Alston who blew his stack. They were the champs, and yet in each game it was the Dodgers who had folded in a critical moment. In three games, they’d committed six errors. Campanella was zero for eight with four whiffs. Adcock had homered in every game. Gutless is what they were, Alston said. And in the next day’s paper, in the genteel
New York Times
, no less, that was exactly the word attributed to Alston in describing his defending world champs:
gutless
.

In the Saturday finale, the Dodgers on the brink of being swept four straight, Robinson left after the first inning, his sore groin finishing him for the afternoon. Maglie put the Braves down, except for Henry Aaron and Adcock. Still, up 2–0, with two out in the seventh, “the Barber” gave up a dribbler to Bruton and a game-tying homer to Adcock. When Alston walked to the mound to relieve Maglie, the Barber didn’t want to give him the ball. The game stayed that way until the tenth, when Henry stepped to the plate. He already had three hits, and now Logan was on second with the winning run. That wasn’t all. Alston walked Mathews intentionally to get to Aaron. Don Bessent threw a one-strike fastball and Aaron crushed it four hundred feet against the base of the wall in left center, sending the 39,105 at County Stadium into a frenzy. The beer was on ice at Ray Jackson’s.

The Dodgers were now four and a half back. Robinson was brilliant, but Milwaukee had its sweep. Since Grimm had been bounced, the Braves had beaten Brooklyn six straight. Adcock now had sixteen homers, half of them coming against Brooklyn. With Charlie, Brooklyn had won eight of thirteen. The lead, though, was only two ahead of second-place Cincinnati, but those mashers weren’t supposed to have the pitching to stay in it, lending a certain degree of inevitability to a Dodgers-Braves showdown.

For all the commotion—letting the Dodgers up off of the mat earlier in the summer, the home fans booing relentlessly, being embarrassed like a bunch of Little Leaguers by a raving Quinn, and having to witness the public sacrifice of Charlie Grimm—the Braves were the best team in the league by the end of July, and had they hit like they were supposed to, they might have been even better than the Yankees.

As Grimm had predicted, Milwaukee had the best pitching in baseball. On July 26, the top four pitchers in ERA (earned run average) were the Braves starting rotation, Buhl and Spahn, followed by Burdette and Conley. The Braves had stretched out a five-game lead over Cincinnati and six games over the third-place Dodgers.

Henry was the catalyst. Mathews could still get behind one, but he couldn’t get his average higher than .250, and Adcock was devastating in stretches, but it was Henry who was there, delivering every day. Two days after the Brooklyn sweep, on July 15, Henry singled in a 4–1 win over Pittsburgh, and then the hits rushed downriver, with multiple-hit nights over the next seven games. By the end of the month, he was leading the league in hitting, just as he had set out to do while working on his swing in Carver Park. The hitting streak had reached sixteen games when the press started to take notice.

On August 8, at County Stadium, a doubleheader against the Cardinals, Henry singled in a 10–1 laugher to stretch the streak to twenty-five. In the second game, he stepped in against Herman Wehmeier. Henry was leading the league in hitting, and he remembered Wehmeier from his rookie season. Wehmeier was then with Philadelphia, but he was one of the few pitchers who had consistently tested Henry with knockdown pitches. In his first three at bats, Henry twice flied out to Bobby Del Greco, the center fielder, and once grounded to Ken Boyer. Meanwhile, Burdette and Wehmeier traded runs and outs. Tied 2–2, with one out in the eighth and O’Connell on second, Henry lashed a meaty fastball from Wehmeier, which Del Greco ran down.

In the tenth, Del Greco doubled, and with two out, Wehmeier rapped a single off Burdette’s glove. By the time Burdette could locate the ball, Del Greco had scored from second with the go-ahead run. The Cardinals won 3–2, and the streak was over, personally extinguished by Wehmeier and Del Greco, two names Henry Aaron would never forget.

T
HE
D
ODGERS
and Braves met for the final time for a two-game set September 11 and 12 at Ebbets Field. The Braves led the Dodgers by a single game and a stout Redlegs team by three. The Braves had held on to first place since taking that July doubleheader from Brooklyn, but as Henry’s streak sent him toward the batting title, the Braves lost half their lead. There was payback in Ebbets Field. After Henry destroyed the Dodgers in the opener (three for five, a double, a homer, and four RBIs) to run Haney’s win streak against Brooklyn to seven straight, Brooklyn won the next three. In the first, a 3–2 victory, Robinson accounted for all three runs with a two-run homer and an opposite-field game winner in the bottom of the ninth, which a streaking Aaron snagged for an instant before the ball dropped out of his glove, ending the game. In the second, a 2–1 Brooklyn win, Robinson led off the eighth inning of a 1–1 game by singling to left, taking second on Bobby Thomson’s error, and scoring what would be the winning run on an infield chop. In the finale, Newcombe needed only a run (a home run by Furillo) in a 3–0 win. The Dodgers would go 40–19, shaving five games off the lead.

Over the decades that followed, the Dodgers would be judged harshly for their inability to defeat the Yankees. But they also would be romanticized for that moment in time during the mid-1950s when Brooklyn and the Dodgers seemed to exemplify innocence and simplicity, virtues fast slipping away in modern society, virtues that disappeared with the Dodgers as they moved to the West Coast. Much of it was a myth, certainly, as were most notions of simpler times. The Dodgers leaving Brooklyn would serve for the next half century as a metaphor for virtues lost to progress. Brooklyn’s failure at the hands of the Yankees would burnish the dynastic traits of the Yankees while obscuring another immutable truth: The Dodgers, as the Braves discovered during 1956, were one of the more resolute and determined baseball teams in history. For the length of the baseball season, the Dodgers and Braves believed in the symbols they ostensibly represented.

The Dodgers were the old guard, representatives of a standard in sharp decay. The daily dramas on the baseball field were rivaled only by the confrontations in the boardroom and at Borough Hall, when Walter O’Malley danced with politicians around the construction of a new ballpark for the Dodgers. One plan in 1956 called for a retractable dome, another for a park in Staten Island. The Dodgers were already playing games in Jersey City, the explanation for this being that O’Malley was exhausting all options to stay in New York. The truth was that the old days were dead, and, far ahead of his time, O’Malley knew it, even as the heart of the city still seemed to be beating strong.

The Dodgers, these Brooklyn Dodgers at least, represented the last vestige of a disappearing time, a fact complicated by their unwillingness to go away on the field. Change was what the Braves and Dodgers September showdown truly represented. Change was why Perini, the old Steam Shovel, took his team to the open spaces of the Midwest—where parking was plentiful—rather than remain in the tight corners of Boston, fighting for space with another team, feeling unwanted virtually the whole time. For years, Logan would lament Perini’s decision to leave Boston. “We would have been the powerhouse,”
⁷⁸
he said. “Look at the guys we had coming up. But they made the decision to go.”

Maglie, one of the many signature faces of New York baseball, would say the same. Like Robinson, Maglie was not quite ready to give way to the Braves or O’Malley’s grand vision, which did not include him. During the furious Dodger run in August, Maglie posted a 1.99 ERA. In September, a 1.77 ERA and a no-hitter September 25 served as proof that the Dodgers were breathing down the Braves neck. Winning the pennant now was, they all knew, their last best chance to win, to say good-bye to the old days in style. Furillo, Erskine, Labine, Hodges, Newcombe, and especially Jackie … they were nowhere men, all of them, with no choice but for the uncertainties of the future to sweep them up, with each leaving the best of himself behind in Brooklyn.

O’Malley was playing games in Jersey City not because he wanted a retractable dome in Brooklyn, but because he knew Perini had it right: If the future was a place no one could yet imagine, it could only be realized by a man of vision who wanted to be remembered for something grand. Such a destiny could not be attained by staying in Boston, or, for that matter, in Brooklyn. Being remembered didn’t mean acquiescing to a politician’s compromise. It meant starting over.

The future was inevitable. Less certain was whether the Milwaukee Braves, set up to be the Next Big Thing, could take the pennant, the prize all season long Henry and Perini and Spahn all thought belonged to them. The old saying that water finds its own level was never truer than in baseball, because of the grueling length of the season. For much of the season, Mathews couldn’t get himself straight, and yet with two weeks to go in the season, the slugger had pounded thirty-two home runs. Adcock would finish with thirty-eight. Spahn was near twenty wins. There was the attrition of the season, as well. Chuck Tanner, the team rookie of 1955, would play only sixty games, bat .238, and spend time in the minors, looking more like a traveling salesman than a ballplayer.

Yet here they were, battered and alive, cradling a wafer-thin one-game lead for the pennant, with sixteen left to play.

P
ERINI AND THE
brain trust flew to Brooklyn for the series. Before the game, John Quinn called Haney for a meeting and announced the manager would be returning in 1957. He had taken a 24–22 team and gone 59–31. Maglie and Buhl warmed in the dugout, and by happenstance, Robinson and Burdette met under the bleachers. Instead of payback for their July rhubarb, what resulted was an unexpected peace accord. Burdette, the West Virginian with a reputation for not only throwing at black players but
enjoying
it, told Robinson there was no place in the game for racial taunting and—in perhaps the most backhanded compliment of the century—said he hadn’t called Robinson “watermelon” during their bitter confrontations following the all-star break out of racial animosity, but because he was commenting on Robinson’s weight, his “watermelon stomach.”

“Burdette told me that there is no place
⁷⁹
in baseball for racial references,” Robinson told the
Times
. “He said that he merely had been making a point that I am getting a bit thick in the middle. Lew’s statement about how he felt is one of the most gratifying things that has ever happened to me.”