The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (33 page)

When the pennant-winning home-run ball cleared the fence, Henry’s teammates carried him off the field.
Time
, which two months earlier had referred to him as “The Talented Shuffler,” now used words out of Scripture, Exodus 8:17, to paint the deed: “For Aaron stretched out his hand
¹¹⁵
with his rod, and smote the dust of the earth.”

When Henry was a boy, tossing stones in the air, driving them into the right-center-field gap of his imagination, he wanted to be Bobby Thomson, carried off the field by his teammates. The front page of the
Journal
the day after the Braves-Cardinals game served as a bittersweet reminder of the conflicts and contradictions that would define the rest of his life.

On the left side of the newspaper was a photo that even the notoriously conservative
Sporting News
would say reflected the true idea of America: Henry’s dark body hoisted in the air above a sea of jubilant, mostly white teammates.

Above the fold, adjacent to the photograph of Henry, was a news story, dateline Little Rock, Arkansas, detailing a white mob beating several black students attempting to enter Central High School.

CHAPTER EIGHT
BUSHVILLE

T
HE STORY HELD
that the Pittsburgh Pirates lost the 1927 World Series to the Yankees before a single pitch was thrown. Overmatched by the greatest team ever assembled, the 110-win New York Yankees of Ruth, Gehrig, and Lazzeri, the Pirate players watched the mighty Yankees take batting practice and crumbled, piece by piece, player by player, immediately deciding that they could not win.

The lore of the 1949 pennant race captured a similar tone. The Red Sox players believed they were equal to the Yankees that year, but their manager, the ex–Yankee skipper Joe McCarthy, feared the great DiMaggio and the innate toughness of the Yankees to such a degree that his players sensed his lack of confidence in them. Needing to win just one of the final two games of the season at Yankee Stadium for the pennant, the Red Sox folded just when they needed their championship wits the most. Boston lost both, and the Yankees won another pennant and World Series.

Even against those tough-as-hell Brooklyn teams, the ones that could run away with the National League or beat you at the end—take your pick—the Yankees always found a way to get in their heads—a play here, a stolen win there. Take 1953, when Brooklyn was armed to the teeth—105 wins, 955 runs scored, Robinson, Reese, Snider, the MVP in Campanella, the best club in the world—and the Yankees still handled them in six games.

That was how the Yankees cut teams down, first mentally and then by bleeding them, game by game, inning by inning. Each generation of New Yorkers told a story of some pennant race that reinforced Yankee October dominance, and in each, there was always a worthy team good enough or even better than their Yankees, only in the end to be forced to kneel before the lordly pinstripes, and the shadow of the big town itself. All of which reinforced the Yankees—and the city’s—sense of superiority. There was a lesson in the mythology: All things being equal, New York itself would be the critical difference.

Charlie Root, the Milwaukee pitching coach, knew firsthand a consequence of losing to the Yankees was a hagiographic blend of truth and myth, and how, once written, the legend could be impossible to overcome. For Root was on the mound during the fifth inning of the third game of the 1932 World Series, October 1, 1932, at Wrigley Field. Babe Ruth had already homered in the first, been pelted with tomatoes and fruit from the Wrigley fans, and verbally abused from the Chicago dugout. In the fifth, he took a strike, two balls, and another strike from Root before jawing with the pitcher. At that precise moment, he pointed his bat toward the center-field fence, toward the great beyond…. Ruth
called his shot
. And then the Babe parked Root’s next pitch, a sloppy curveball, over the center-field ivy and into the land of fable. Whether Ruth had actually called his shot, or was simply adjusting himself to hit, or was pointing out a local species of pigeon did not matter, nor did Root’s salty protestations for the rest of his life that he would have “knocked Ruth on his ass” had the audacious Bambino tried to show him up like that, in the World Series, in his home park no less.

All that mattered was that the story would have been different had Root not served the Babe such a juicy morsel in the first place. And it was like that for every unfortunate soul who suffered through the monotony of spring, fought through summer, and clutched the pennant, only to be caught in the sticky web of the Yankee mythology. Had they put up a better fight, even won just a couple of games, the 1927 Pirates might have been able to escape the idea that they cringed under the immense shadow of the Yankees, the story that would haunt each one of them till the end of their days.
Maybe … might have … if only—
loser’s words, every last one of them. Like Charlie Root and the Cubs, they didn’t. Pittsburgh was swept into the Yankee mist in four easy games, and the legend became fact.

The Yankees were intimidating because they didn’t lose. After winning the first of their seventeen titles in 1923, the Yankees lost the World Series just three times in thirty years. The Cardinals beat them in 1926, when in the seventh game, trailing 3–2, Ruth ended the Series in a spectacularly boneheaded fashion, getting thrown out by a mile while trying to steal second with big Bob Meusel at the plate and Lou Gehrig on deck. New York lost to the Cardinals again in 1942, when Henry was eight years old, being taken in by baseball and the hero of that ’42 Series, a rookie from Donora, Pennsylvania, named Stanley Musial. And the Dodgers, after failing five times, beat the Yanks in 1955, only to lose to them the following year.

The city grew to expect the exclusivity of the fall. Since 1949, no team outside of New York had even won a single Series
game
. Both teams outside of the boroughs in the World Series had lost badly. The 1950 Whiz Kid Phillies were swept out of the Series by the Yankees, which would be the last Series between two all-white teams in baseball history. The 1954 Indians of Feller, Wynn, and Garcia steam-rolled to 111 wins, only to be swept four straight under the brilliant spell of Mays and the New York Giants.

In the days leading up to the 1957 World Series, the New York writers naturally suggested a similar psychological phenomenon would overtake the Braves as they landed in New York. Only two regulars, Warren Spahn and Red Schoendienst, had ever played in a Series. When Johnny Logan and Del Rice entered cavernous Yankee Stadium for the first time, the word that reached the newspapers was that two seasoned pros, tough, grinding competitors, both spent that first walk-through slack-jawed, looking up at the familiar moldings and trellises of the majestic ballpark, overcome by small-town wonder, no different from a family of four visiting the Empire State Building for the first time. When Fred Haney disembarked from the Braves charter bus, a reporter approached and asked if the Braves expected to be another good-intentioned victim of the famed dynasty.

“Fred, do you think your team will choke up
¹¹⁶
against the Yankees?”

“What the hell is the matter with you?” Haney barked. “What kind of question is that?”

That the midwestern Braves, whose naïve and grateful fans delivered milk and eggs to their heroes, contrasted so sharply with the cold and impersonal victory machine that was the Yankees made for an irresistible—and to the Braves, wholly irritating—story line. Still, Logan was convinced that his team held an edge over the Yankees because of the rugged terrain of the National League. The Braves had won a five-team race, had finally beaten the Dodgers, and relished the opportunity to stand with the Yankees.

The Yankees took over sole possession of first place June 30, two full weeks before the all-star break, and polished off Chicago by eight games. The third-place team, Boston, finished sixteen games out, and the writers and fans (and to no small extent the Yankee organization) spent the final days of the regular season positioning the Braves as fodder, just another fill-in-the-blank October opponent.

The facts were, as always, just a bit different.

Johnny Logan
was
wide-eyed that first day at the Stadium, but not because he had adopted the role of awestruck newcomer. He had spent the final week of the season leading up to the Series working
himself
into a competitive lather to beat the Yankees. The only way for the Braves to avoid being folded into another Yankee yarn, he decided, was not to make it close, not just to give a better showing than the Dodgers, but for the Braves to win, plain and simple. Logan had grown up in Endicott, New York, but quickly had identified with Milwaukee. He settled on the south side of Milwaukee, a working-class neighborhood, and like a few of the Braves—Felix Mantilla was another—Johnny Logan would never leave Milwaukee. “Before the thing even began,
¹¹⁷
we were hearing it from Casey Stengel and the smart guys from New York, who started calling the town ‘Bushville.’ Believe me, we sincerely wanted to stick it to them. We wanted to show them that there were some ballplayers in Bushville.”

Logan heard the old saws regarding the Yankee mystique and how even great teams buckled under its power. How else, he would often recall having been asked, could he explain how a bunch of tough bastards like the Dodgers, who grew tougher in the roughest clinches of a fight in the National League, lose to the Yankees so many times, in 1947, 1949, 1952, 1953, and 1956, winning only once, in 1955? Logan believed the questions were designed only to produce doubt, and that those critical dips of self-confidence, invisible to the eye, were precisely what gave the Yankees that intangible edge.

Spahn, who would start the first game against Whitey Ford at the Stadium, was blunter. Spahn had been vindicated, for when the season began, he had told Furman Bisher in
The Saturday Evening Post
that the Braves would win the pennant and face the Yankees in the World Series. He said in that April article that the Braves would beat the Yankees in seven games, and days before facing Ford, he told the writers that the Yankees did not, during the long season, have to face the same level of competition as the Braves. “They had to beat the White Sox,”
¹¹⁸
Greg Spahn said. “They had to beat the Dodgers, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and St. Louis. They faced tougher teams.”

There was something else, a score to be settled from many yesterdays. Spahn hadn’t forgotten that the Yankee manager, Casey Stengel, had sent him to the minors years earlier for not decking Pee Wee Reese when Stengel managed Spahn in Boston. More importantly, Spahn’s father, Edward Spahn, hadn’t forgotten, either.

“Before the start of the 1957 World Series
¹¹⁹
between the Braves and the Yankees, Stengel was walking through the lobby of the Commodore Hotel in New York. I’m not sure why he was there, probably for some promotional thing,” Greg Spahn recalled. “My grandpa saw him and threw him up against the wall. He said, ‘Now what do you think of my son? You think he has enough guts to play in the major leagues?’ They were about the same size, not very big people. My dad and a few other guys had to pull my grandfather off of him.”
^*

Logan had another concern. When his eyes scanned the three-tiered stadium, he wasn’t buckling at the thought of the Yankees, but doing a certain amount of math in his head: Yankee Stadium held nearly seventy thousand people, County Stadium more than forty thousand. World Series earnings were based in part on stadium capacity. That meant the winner’s share of the Series was going to be a considerable amount of money. In that regard, Logan couldn’t have been happier to be playing the Yankees.

Playing the Yankees meant money, and winning the World Series meant even more. Gene Conley recalled a similar sentiment. “We weren’t scared of the Yankees,”
¹²⁰
he said. “We knew we were finally going to get some postseason money. For some of the guys, that check was a pretty good chunk of what they were making in the regular season.”

Fifty years later, Logan, still pugnacious, tar-throated at eighty years of age, said it even better: “When we went in 1957,
¹²¹
we wanted to win, yes sir. We wanted to show Casey Stengel we weren’t Bushville.

“And you know what? I’ll tell you something else. We wanted the money, too.”

H
ENRY DID NOT
say much during the buildup to the World Series. Both the
Journal
and the
Sentinel
ran daily front-page stories, with the Braves
(IKE CONSIDERS ATTENDING GAME HERE OCT. 5)
competing for space above the fold with local news
(TAVERN PATRON SLAIN BY NERVOUS ROBBER)
and national
(LITTLE ROCK SCHOOL IS QUIET AS NEGROES ENTER AGAIN)
. The local angle from the Yankees centered on the success of the sensational rookie from Milwaukee, Tony Kubek. Henry was the fulcrum of the Braves offense, the front-runner for Most Valuable Player honors, but he stood far from the front of the club publicly.

From a motorcade that spanned two and a half miles, from Wisconsin Avenue to Lake Michigan, Spahn and Burdette kissed babies during a pre-Series rally that caught 150,000 Milwaukeeans in a state of pride. Henry and Wes Covington shared a convertible, with Barbara sitting regally in the back. Fred Haney received a gold statue nearly equal to his five-foot-five-inch frame. On two occasions, Henry found his name prominently mentioned in ink: The first was a front-page story in the
Journal
detailing a three-way scrum for the pennant-clinching home-run ball, the participants being Henry, who hit it off Billy Muffett, Hubert Davis of 1307 McKinley Avenue, who caught it, and Donald Davidson, the Braves public-relations man, who wanted to showcase the famous heirloom for the public and offered Davis World Series tickets in exchange for the ball.

THE PENNANT VICTORY BALL
¹²²
FLIES INTO SERIES SQUABBLE

Henry stated his claim to the home-run ball modestly: “Sure, I’d like to have it”; while Davis assumed the position of insulted practitioner of English common law, which held that possession was nine-tenths of the law: “I wasn’t gonna settle for no bleacher seats,” he said. “If he offers me grandstand, I’d consider it.” Davidson was on the defensive: “I didn’t offer him any tickets. I just asked him if he wanted to see the World Series. I didn’t mention bleacher tickets.”

The second instance was the revelation that the ankle injury Henry had suffered in Philadelphia had not only cost him five games but likely the Triple Crown, as well. At the time of the injury on July 17, Henry was hitting .351, and he wound up losing thirty points off his average. In later years, when age would transform Henry from phenom to elder statesman, he would stress to younger players the importance of playing through pain, coining a slogan that one of his future protégés, Ralph Garr, never forgot. “You can’t help your club from the tub,”
¹²³
Garr recalled. “Henry used to say it all the time.”