The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (28 page)

I
N LATER YEARS
, when the power of the player (and in the 1990s the general manager) would eclipse that of the manager, what Fred Haney had done with Henry Aaron on the first day of spring workouts would be the kind of move that got managers fired. Aaron had won the batting title hitting cleanup. Henry had been the cleanup hitter since midway through his rookie season, but Haney told him he would be the subject of a radical experiment: Henry would be batting second.

His reasoning was simple: The top of the order was not producing, and no one in baseball hit more than Henry. O’Connell couldn’t be trusted in the second spot in the order, yet Haney decided to bat him first. Bruton, normally the leadoff hitter, had been demoted by Haney during the previous year. That left Henry as the most versatile hitter on the team. Haney believed that having Henry hit second would give O’Connell better pitches to hit. The move would also give him more at bats, as he was guaranteed to hit in the first inning of every game. Mathews would remain in the third spot and Adcock would move up to cleanup.

The second spot was usually reserved for crafty batsmen, the ones who weren’t expected to hit the ball over the fence. Henry may not have been in Mathews’s category as a slugger, but he was a run producer. Hitting second would limit his opportunities: In the first inning, he could hit only a two-run homer at best, and later in the game, he would be hitting behind a leadoff hitter, the pitcher and eighth hitter.

But the real reason Henry did not want to hit second was because he knew that being in the two-hole, where you hit behind the runner, wasn’t where the money was.

“Hell, I’ll never drive in one hundred runs hitting second,” he said one day.

Henry set the Braves camp afire. March 11, against the Dodgers in Miami, Aaron yanked a fastball over the left-field fence off Sal Maglie. The next day, against the Cardinals, he hit another. Two days later in Bradenton, against Cincinnati, he hit his third home run of the spring. Against the Dodgers again the next day, Aaron took a fastball from Don Elston and blasted it over the four-hundred-foot sign in dead center, over the center-field fence, with seventy-five feet to spare. The
Times
called it the “king-sized wallop of the day.” March 16, against the Phillies in Clearwater, Aaron pounded another home run.

It was, thought Gene Conley, as if Henry had decided to focus on another element of his game—power hitting—just for fun.

And that was just the thing about being in the one-millionth-percentile club: It wasn’t hyperbole, for the great ones
could
do just that. In baseball, you could separate the good ones from the great with your eyes closed—literally, to the veteran baseball ear, it was often that easy. Contact with the ball just
sounded
different—clearer, cleaner, sharper. When a hitter like Musial or Williams stepped into the cage, there was simply the sound of perfection. The bat didn’t graze the pitch, but caught it flush, not just once every four or five swings, but a dozen times in a row if they found their groove. Teammates would tell stories about Henry
choosing
which field—left, center, right—he would drive the ball into. Against the fastball, Henry could fire his hands and wrists and hips through the strike zone without hesitation, level and deadly, unleashing the perfect power swing against the sport’s ultimate power pitch.

On breaking balls, the best ones did not shift their bodies too quickly, anticipating a fastball, only to be struggling woefully out of hitting position. They were different. Henry was one of them. He could defy physics and not be caught unbalanced. They could rattle off that mental checklist before the ball reached the plate. They could do what sounded so easy
—see his release point … look fastball, adjust to the curve … don’t pull your head off of the ball … stay tight … shoulder in … wait on the ball … be quick!—
and make it look like cake. Everybody else in baseball told themselves the same thing before the pitch, and yet they were the ones walking back to the dugout.

And when all else failed, when the pitcher made a great pitch in a great location—and with a different pitch than expected—a fooled, beaten hitter like Henry could simply summon the gods, weight heavy on the wrong foot, looking for the wrong pitch, and
still
tag it. With Henry, the wrists were already becoming legendary, but unlike the great power hitters, Henry had still not taken to pulling the ball. His power still remained in the right-center-field alley, which meant he could still swing a fraction of a second late and generate tremendous power.

It was true that at times he could look funny, for, unlike Musial or Williams, he did not possess classic mechanics. His teammates and coaches wondered how he could generate such power when finishing on his front foot, instead of his back leg or at his waist, yet they immediately found themselves in awe of just how technically sound he truly was at the actual moment of impact. One day, he tried to explain it to
The Sporting News
. “Whether I’m hitting good or not
⁹⁹
depends on my timing,” he said. “I never have any trouble seeing the ball. I can’t even say I see it better when I’m hitting good than when I’m not. When my timing is off, I have trouble, and when it ain’t, I don’t.” To veteran hitting experts, it was something of a remarkable admission. Normally, slumping hitters would decide they were picking up the ball leaving the pitcher’s hand just a fraction too late.

Upon contact, everything was in perfect place, as if Henry were a model: His head was down, his eyes focused on the ball. His hands were back, clearing through the strike zone at the same time his hips whipped through, steady and then lethal. On contact, the ball jumped, spring-loaded.

When Henry stepped into the cage for batting practice, players marveled at his bat control, how he could lash line drives to any part of the ballpark. “I remember it probably better than anybody,”
¹⁰⁰
recalled Frank Torre. “I am left-handed, and many times I had to throw batting practice to Henry. He damned near killed me. He was the scariest guy.” During the six weeks of spring, Henry seemed intent on tearing through the league, retribution for stalling in 1956, payback for Herm Wehmeier. He slid into second base against Washington, sprained his ankle, and missed a week, but by the end of March, he was still leading the Braves in runs driven in. When he returned, and the Braves began making their way back north, the rampage continued. He hit a home run in Tampa against Cincinnati, and again April 5 against the Dodgers in San Antonio. When he was finished, and the Braves completed the exhibition season against Cleveland at County Stadium, the Braves were playing with the kind of furious purpose that Haney had long craved.

HANEY, BRAVES SURE 1957 WILL
BE THEIR PENNANT YEAR

The headlines followed along similarly, all dwarfed by one that appeared in
The Saturday Evening Post
, quoting Mr. Warren Spahn, who declared three days before the season started that the Braves would not only win the pennant but would play the Yankees in the World Series, and beat them.

At no point during the 1957 season did Henry’s average drop below .308. He homered in every park, against every team, home and away. If he hit when the Braves were ahead, he gave them insurance. He hit when the game was close. He did not steal bases in large numbers, but he stretched singles into doubles, doubles into triples. While Haney had credited him for being a consistent player in 1956, from the beginning of the season in 1957, Henry exuded a special star power that at once elevated him into the elite class of the league.

Take the second game of the season, the home opener in front of 41,506 at County Stadium April 18 against Cincinnati: Burdette and the left-hander Hal Jeffcoat pitched briskly, as if they had a plane to catch, trading fastballs and sliders and double-play balls for five innings. In the bottom of the sixth, Aaron caught a Jeffcoat fastball and golfed it into the Perini pines, the high row of trees that stood between the outfield fences and the miles of parking lot, for the only score of the game. Burdette closed his own deal, forcing the mighty Ted Kluszewski to ground into a double play in the eighth, sealing the 1–0 win. The Braves mashed the Redlegs three straight, and won their first five games.

On April 24, at home against St. Louis, the Braves faced their old nemesis Herm Wehmeier, the man who in 1956 first snatched away Henry’s twenty-five-game hitting streak (after dropping him with cheek-high fastballs during his rookie season), then beat Spahn and ripped the pennant away that fateful final Saturday. Wehmeier lasted just four innings, giving up home runs to Adcock, Aaron, and Mathews before departing. Yet Wehmeier escaped with a no-decision. Crandall bombed the winning home run in the bottom of the ninth.

The Braves played three straight extra-inning games to start May, once at the Polo Grounds over the Giants and twice in Pittsburgh, and won them all. Tied at 1–1 in the tenth against the Giants, Henry drove in the game winner that gave Spahn a ten-inning, complete-game win. The next night, Henry went five for six against Pittsburgh. Burdette was up 5–2 in the bottom of the ninth, only to give up a pinch-hit, three-run homer to John Powers (.195 average, six homers for his career). The Braves scored three unearned runs in the tenth, the second coming when the Pittsburgh right fielder, Roberto Clemente, allowed Henry’s single to skip past him to win, 8–5. The next night, Henry doubled in the fourth to score Gene Conley, smoked a two-out, three-run homer off Bob Friend in a six-run sixth, and scored the winning run after tripling to lead off the eleventh. Henry was muscling his way onto the big stage, armed with a sudden and complete command of his game. His teammates thought of him as a gifted hitter, if not a bit aloof, but during the first weeks of 1957, he took on the look of a superstar. The surge of confidence went back to the first days of spring training, when Henry arrived in Bradenton convinced not only of his own ability but that 1957 would be the year when his talent and self-confidence would intersect. Moreover, he had begun to force the writers and his teammates to view him as a leader.

D
URING HIS FIRST
three seasons, Henry had escaped the criticism leveled at the rest of the Braves. He was portrayed mostly as a comet, a player too talented to miss as a prospect but too green to be part of the Braves cultural problem. He was just reaching his potential as a player and was asked only to let his play provide his leadership. The press had not yet collectively come to a conclusive opinion of Henry. He was twenty-three, entering his fourth season, and while the Braves did not appear to have the experience of the Dodgers, they were a veteran team, whose leaders were all in their thirties. Spahn was thirty-six, Logan and Burdette were thirty, and Bobby Thomson was thirty-three.

Henry was not quoted often, and when the paper previewed the Braves, it talked about the psyches of Spahn, Mathews, and Burdette as keys to the Milwaukee season. In later years, Henry would see these characterizations as subtle forms of the racism he had dealt with his entire life. He would take the writers’ underestimation of his influence as proof of their cultural reluctance to position a black player ahead of established white stars—even in the late 1950s, when Robinson had already retired and proved that a black player could lead a club without the visible on-field fissures baseball people had long feared.

More than simple racism, the uncertainty of the press with regard to Aaron seemed to prove another vexing phenomenon: the inability of the writers close to Henry to read him properly. Had one, whether it was Bob Wolf of the
Journal
or Lou Chapman of the
Sentinel
, been able to connect with him, he would have seen Henry’s confidence upon his arrival in Bradenton as obvious. Henry told the
Defender
he saw the National League Triple Crown as a goal, and that Willie Mays was one player who could keep him from leading the league in average, home runs, and RBIs. If he could stay ahead of Stan Musial for the batting title, he figured, he would have a chance. The story may have been one of many light spring-training features, that time of pastel optimism. Henry’s comments could have even been considered reckless for a young player, and quickly dismissed. Expecting to have a good year was one thing; talking about surpassing Mays and Musial was quite another, even for a defending batting champion. But in Henry’s case, it was indicative of his emergence as a star player, emblematic of his circuitous method of revealing just how sure he was of his ability. Just a year earlier, it was Henry who had barnstormed with Mays, outperformed other star players, only to be enveloped, swallowed whole, by Willie’s aura.

In just a year, he no longer considered his abilities with deference toward other players, even Mays or Musial, who had won his first batting title when Henry was nine years old and had won six batting titles before Henry turned eighteen. They were great players. Musial had been his idol, true enough … but now they were his
peers
.