The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (27 page)

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In 2008, the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York, took the unprecedented step of replacing Robinson’s original plaque with an updated version, one that notes his batting average and awards, but also his place as the first African-American to play in the Major Leagues in the twentieth century.

CHAPTER SEVEN
SCRIPTURE

I
T WOULD TAKE
one of those years when it all came together—when he could not only hear the notes in his head but play each and every one of them beautifully—before the legend could officially commence. It needed to be the kind of season where all you had to do was say the year and the heart of every fan would spontaneously flutter, carrying that person easily back into the warm currents of memory, and when, even decades later, the faces of his peers would firm with professional respect. Sometimes, the faces would betray envy, other times admiration, but in all of them would be the recognition that he was one of the very special ones, that millionth percentile, someone who may have stood on the same field with them but, because of his enormous talent, was playing a game completely different from all the rest.

H
ENRY RANG IN
the year 1957 with the same ritual he would begin every year of his first decade in the big leagues—by sending his contract back to the Braves unsigned. He’d earned $17,500 in 1956 and had no illusions about his value to the team. First for Charlie Grimm and then for Fred Haney, Henry had chopped the wood. Adcock had his best year in home runs, drove in more than a hundred runs, and most importantly, it seemed as if all of those home runs were against the Dodgers late in games. But as the season reached its devastating conclusion, with every at bat critical, Adcock’s batting average dropped nearly twenty points in September, highlighted by a disastrous zero for seventeen in four games against bottom-feeders Philadelphia, New York, and Pittsburgh. Mathews was second in the league in home runs, but he was stuck in low gear for the whole season, hitting .229 at the all-star break before grinding his way to a .272 average.

Henry hit thirty-seven points higher than Adcock, fifty-six points higher than Mathews, and was more consistent than both. Adcock was certainly the signature clutch player on the team in 1956, but Henry had shown, as he did in the Philadelphia doubleheader, that he was not frightened of the moment. Mickey Mantle won the American League Triple Crown in 1956, but Henry was the only player in the majors with two hundred hits, a twenty-five-game hit streak, and 340 total bases.

Thus, he sent the contract back to Milwaukee blank. Two hundred hits had to count for something, and on January 26th, a two-paragraph Associated Press brief hit the wire, filling a corner of the next day’s
Chicago Tribune
. Henry was home in Mobile and spoke by telephone to John Quinn, who by the end of the conversation understood Henry’s idea of his own market value. He didn’t just ask Quinn for a pay raise; he wanted his salary
doubled
.

BRAVES’ AARON ASKS PAY
BOOST
⁹³
OF 100 PER CENT

M
ILWAUKEE
, J
AN
. 26 (AP)—A report tonight said that Henry Aaron of the Milwaukee Braves, the National League batting champion for 1956, is asking for a 100 per cent salary boost—or $35,000.

“I think I deserve it, after the year I had last season,” Aaron said in a telephone interview from his home in Mobile, Ala.

The Braves had the reigning batting champion, but little sentimentality existed in dealing with John Quinn during contract time. The salary figures offered to players were hard, for lesser players usually final, and for the more gifted, a higher number was merely far below what a player was actually worth. In those days, there were no agents and no lawyers negotiating deals, no salary arbitration, and no ability to attract interest from another team. And what if you didn’t like the numbers that were being offered? Well, there was always bartending. The big leagues—or O.B., which stood for Organized Baseball, as the clubs liked to be called collectively—even negotiated a lockout deal with the independent leagues in Mexico and the Pacific Coast League, blocking a player who did not sign his contract from playing ball anywhere else.

The Players Association was still two decades away from power. Players walked into the front office, virtually always undereducated and, lacking the leverage to play for another team, always overmatched. Quinn understood management’s inherent advantages and did not hesitate to flaunt his power. The front office turned making players sweat for a few extra pennies into a sadistic little sport.

“I was making ten grand one year
⁹⁴
and Mathews was holding out. Logan was, too. Quinn was a good baseball man but tough with the negotiations,” Gene Conley recalled. “One day, he calls me over to his office right as my kids are having a birthday party,” Conley said. “He’s got a couple of cups on the table and a bottle of whiskey. He says to me, ‘I’m not giving you what you want.’ I tell him I’m not signing, that if this is the offer, then I have no choice but to go back and play basketball. He pours a couple more cups, and says, ‘You’re going to get it, but you’re not worth it.’ And then he starts asking me about the family again. He knew the highest number I was asking for was low, but he wanted to make me fight for that. The next day, I saw him and he was all smiles, and asked me about my family and the birthday party, like nothing ever happened. Still, he knew baseball.”

Three days after his twenty-third birthday, on February 8, Henry signed his contract for 1957. The papers said he would be making between $25,000 and $30,000, and that Henry’s tough stance with Quinn had gotten him close to the seventeen-thousand-dollar raise he sought. Throughout the season, the papers would refer to Henry as earning $28,000. The actual figure was $22,500. Henry had won the batting title, and a measly raise of five thousand dollars was his reward.

“I think back then we all realized
⁹⁵
just how powerless we were,” Henry said. “I didn’t have any great strategy. Nobody taught me anything about how to negotiate a salary. A lot of times, you had to take what they gave you. But I figured I would ask. They never gave any of us what we were worth.”

T
HE
R
OBINSON
sentiment that the Braves were underachieving echoed in a Milwaukee press corps that began to reflect the subtle changes in coverage that would be a harbinger for the contentious years ahead. Traditionally, the writers allowed the explanations for winning and losing to remain within the field of play, but the evidence that the Braves were simply not focused enough, not driven enough, simply not tough enough to be champions was an angle too obvious to ignore.

The Braves were leaving the pennant in the bar, and Milwaukee fans began sending anonymous letters to the local papers in Milwaukee and Chicago, listing the favorite haunts of the players.

The attitudes of the players were one part of the discontentment, and the national writers followed. “The National League pennant has been a mirage
⁹⁶
for the Milwaukee Braves the last three seasons following their second-place finish in 1953, the year they left Boston,” Edward Prell wrote in the
Chicago Tribune
. “Haney realized he had a discipline problem when he succeeded Charlie Grimm as manager last June.” What was jarring to the players was the speed with which the Milwaukee writers—and, to a lesser extent, the fans—had be come so jaded.

Chuck Tanner recalled the difference in the coverage of the
Journal
and the
Sentinel
. “Bob Wolf always kept it to the game,
⁹⁷
whether we won or lost,” Tanner said. “But that Lou Chapman at the
Sentinel
, he wanted the
story
. He wanted to know who was getting along with whom. He wanted a spark. I remember when they traded me to Chicago, Lou used the old trick to get me to say something bad when I walked out the door. He came over to me and said, ‘Chuck, got a pretty raw deal, didn’t you?’ The fact was, I was grateful to the Braves because they gave me the chance. But you could see the change starting then. Talking about the game on the field wasn’t enough. Now look at it.”

The transformation had begun the previous year, when the Braves had been embarrassed by the Dodgers during a June home stand, but in 1957, the press had begun intensified scrutiny of the franchise. Since Perini’s arrival in Milwaukee, his leadership had not been in question. With attendance soaring and competitive teams close to a pennant, the Braves were the model for franchise relocation, but now the scrutiny was as much about whether Quinn and Perini had chosen the right players as it was about when the players were going to perform.

O’Connell and Logan were to form the top double-play combination and more: Together they would give the Braves the toughness and fire the team had always lacked. “Danny was to be the holler guy who would make the club seem less placid on the field,” wrote the
Tribune
. “The Braves have no quarrel with Danny’s vocal enthusiasm, but the chunky Irishman has fallen short of their expectations as a player.”

Bobby Thomson suffered similar wrath. He had been acquired from the Giants for Johnny Antonelli and hit but .235 as an everyday left fielder. The Thomson injury had expedited Henry’s path to the big leagues, but now another key and expensive deal was starting to look like a failure.

In turn, the manager tightened the screws. This was a championship team, he said. The team didn’t make any moves in the offseason, Haney said, because the Braves were already good enough to win. What they needed was more discipline. Wanting to win wasn’t enough. Relying on fundamentals to buttress talent was what Haney believed separated a championship team like the Dodgers from his own team.

There could be no greater difference between Haney and Charlie Grimm than in spring training. A half century later, Gene Conley recalled Grimm with a reminiscent lilt in his voice. “Jolly Cholly,”
⁹⁸
he said. “Charlie ran us out there and let us play.” Grimm drank with his players, and gave them plenty of free time in the spring, relying on their professionalism instead of using a hammer. Players brought their golf clubs to Bradenton. Charlie brought the banjo. Chuck Tanner recalled a spring training when Grimm cut workouts short because he had a special surprise for his team. “We were working out and Charlie Grimm called us over because he had invited one of the most famous banjo players in the country over. Here it was, spring training, and we were sitting there listening to this guy play the banjo.”

Haney was different.

Haney instituted two practices per day, plus meetings, and the golf clubs disappeared. Spring training was not to limber up the muscles and get ready for the season, but more a clinic, with repetition of the most mundane baseball drills. Haney used spring training to redraw the rules. Under Grimm, Bruton had been free to steal bases. Grimm had told him to follow his instincts and ignite the ball club, as a leadoff hitter should. Haney announced that no player would steal without his command, or any who did could expect a heavy fine.

Grimm had given Charlie Root, the pitching coach, the authority to make pitching changes. Haney stripped Root of that responsibility. Haney, however, followed the growing trend of the 1950s by managing from the dugout, allowing his third-base coach to wave or hold runners on the base paths. Grimm had managed in the Durocher style, from third base. By 1957, a manager positioned on the coaching lines neared extinction. Only Bobby Bragan, the Pittsburgh manager, managed away from the dugout.

If Grimm had enjoyed being one of the boys, Haney forged a clear line of authority: The Braves were his team. While Charlie Grimm had not criticized his players in public or exposed them to management, Haney, it seemed, used every spring-training interview to expose a player he believed had not performed for him in 1956.

When Arthur Daley of the
New York Times
came to see him in Bradenton, Haney offered the
Times
columnist strike one: “We came close to winning the pennant without anyone having an outstanding year. I’m discounting Henry Aaron, who won the batting title, because he’s a kid just starting to develop as a great hitter.” Then came strike two: “Joe Adcock, Bill Bruton and Johnny Logan all had average years. And you can’t tell me Eddie Mathews isn’t better than a .272 hitter.” And finally, in talking to the Associated Press about Thomson, came strike three: “I can’t play a .235 hitter in left field.”

When the
Chicago Defender
showed up, Haney took a few more hacks at his club, this time taking aim at Danny O’Connell: “He hurt us a lot.” There was one player, though, who made the craggy, five-foot-five-inch Haney’s lips curl into a smile.

“No one on our team had a really big year. Not even Hank Aaron, though he led the league in hitting,” Haney told the
Defender
. “Aaron’s the best hitter in our league. Yes, better than Willie Mays. He’s easily capable of bettering his 1956 figures.”