The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (35 page)

For eleven miles, out of the airstrip grounds and along the streets of the city’s south side to the Eighteenth Street viaduct, the sound of cowbells collided with that of banging pots and pans and yells and screams. The next day, city officials estimated the gathering at 200,000. Zeidler called the greeting “the biggest spontaneous celebration in the city’s history.”

BRAVES WELCOMED AT AIRPORT
¹²⁶
BY
THOUSANDS OF WELL-WISHERS

The turnout, it should be remembered, was not for an elaborate parade, with bare-kneed majorettes and marching bands. It was for a bunch of tired baseball players who are still on the short end of the odds in an unfinished competition for the baseball championship of the world.

Over the years, after the Braves had long since left town, Henry would be known in Milwaukee for three major things: the home run off Billy Muffett, the way he carried himself, and his unwavering position that Milwaukee owned a greater piece of his heart than any place he’d ever visited.

At 11:25 a.m., the Yankees seventeen-car sleeper pulled into Milwaukee to a great and unwelcome surprise. A delegation of Milwaukee civic and political leaders greeted the Yankee officials with booklets titled
Milwaukee USA
and welcomed the Yankees and the World Series to the city. The players walked with no small degree of annoyance past the congregation and silently boarded a Greyhound bus, which would take them to County Stadium. Stengel had slipped onto the bus and refused to come out, despite the pleadings of Judge Robert Cannon and the civic group, who wanted Stengel to say a few words. The Yankees were here for a World Series, not a banquet. Cannon, the Milwaukee circuit court judge who would precede Marvin Miller as head of a fledgling players union, remained on the bus as it peeled off, and the welcoming gesture fell about as flat as Mantle’s crew cut. According to the
Journal
, “the Yankees hurried off. The fans and welcoming committee moved forward, smiling. A cheer was heard. The Yankees ignored the reception. Heads down, faces grim they walked rapidly to the three chartered Greyhound buses east of the station.”

“This,” a Yankees official was quoted as saying as he boarded the team bus, “is strictly bush league.”

F
OR THE THREE
games to be played at County Stadium, six thousand standing-room tickets were made available. Art (“Happy”) Felsch slept in a tent for ten days to guarantee he would be first in line. The ballpark, draped in bunting even along the outfield fences in front of the Perini pines, was sold out, with 45,804 there for the first World Series game ever played in Wisconsin. On a fifty-three-degree afternoon, Saturday, October 5, the Yankees responded to the pageantry by beating the tar out of Bob Buhl in the third game. For the first time in the Series, the Yankees showed off their vaunted power. Mantle, leveled by a bad back and ineffective for the first two games, ripped two hits, including a home run, and drove in a pair. Kubek, coming home, hit two homers, including one in the first inning as a nervous hum flitted through the stands. The Yankee first four in the order went seven for seventeen with three homers, eight runs scored, and eight more driven in. For a brief moment, it appeared that the Braves would have an easy time, as Bob Turley, the New York starter, gave up three hits and four walks and couldn’t get out of the second inning. The only problem was that Buhl couldn’t get out of the first. Don Larsen was staked to a 5–0 lead after two innings, on the way to a 12–3 final. Down 7–1 in the fifth, Henry laced a Larsen fastball for his first home run of the Series.

In the fourth game, when the blustery lake winds laced a chilly fifty-degree day, the Braves came face-to-face with the Yankee mythology. Spahn was brilliant, avenging the opener when he couldn’t escape the sixth. He gave up a run to start the game, then settled, retiring eleven straight Yankees at one point. His counterpart, the knuckleballer Tom Sturdivant, held a 1–0 lead until Logan led off the fourth with a walk and Mathews followed up with a double. Stengel walked to the mound. Not particularly interested in facing Aaron with two on, nobody out, and first base open, Sturdivant suggested walking Henry. Loading the bases wasn’t great baseball strategy, but perhaps putting Aaron on would solve two problems. The first was that Sturdivant wouldn’t have to face Henry; the second was that the on-deck hitter, Covington, might hit into a double play and minimize the damage.

Stengel listened, felt the wind whip past his ears, and rejected the suggestion.

“No, pitch to him,” Stengel told Sturdivant. “With this wind, Babe Ruth couldn’t get one out of here.”

Stengel retreated to the Yankee dugout. Sturdivant tried to drop a knuckler in on Henry, one that danced belt-high. Henry destroyed it for a three-run homer. The next batter, Covington, hit a one-hop grounder to second—a sure double-play ball, in other words—and Frank Torre homered later in the inning to make it 4–1.

When Sturdivant reached the top step of the dugout at the end of the inning, he said to Stengel, “I thought you said Babe Ruth couldn’t get one out of here.”

Shortly before his death in 1995, Mickey Mantle appeared in the documentary
Hank Aaron: Chasing the Dream
, and recalled Stengel’s reply.

“Well,” the Perfesser told his pitcher,
¹²⁷
“that wasn’t Babe Ruth you were facing.”

By the ninth, Spahn had been masterful, holding a 4–1 lead and needing only three outs to tie the Series. Bauer lofted a soft fly to Henry in center. Mantle chopped to Logan at short. But McDougald and Berra singled to right. One strike away, Elston Howard hit a game-tying three-run homer. The Yankees took the lead in the tenth when Spahn retired the first two men of the inning, only to see Kubek single and Bauer triple him home.

And this is why these were the Yankees, why the mythology spread like honey to New Yorkers, like cholera to the rest.

Deflated, the Braves came to bat in the tenth. Tommy Byrne hit Nippy Jones on the foot with a pitch, the home-plate umpire awarding Jones first because of a faint mark of shoe polish on the ball. Mantilla ran for Jones, and took second when Schoendienst sacrificed off Bob Grim. With Mantilla on second, Stengel did about a year’s worth of managing. He called Mantle off the field, and moved Kubek to center. Mantle jogged off the field, replaced by the old pro Enos Slaughter, whose arm was better in left. After Casey’s shuffling, Logan sent a double into the gap in left to tie the game. The next batter was Mathews, who ended it with a two-run homer. The series was tied again.

T
HE SERIES WAS
going back to New York after Burdette defeated Ford in a taut 1–0 masterpiece. The Yankees, masters of creating luck through intimidation, had put runners on in each of the first four innings but could not score, while consecutive singles by Mathews, Henry, and Adcock accounted for the only run of the game. The Braves would return to New York one win from taking the Series.

Bob Buhl started game six, a title on the line. He had won seventeen games during the season. For more than two seasons, he had been the Braves best pitcher in those blood wars with the Dodgers, and yet he collapsed in the World Series, folding at home in game three. Given a second chance, Buhl gave up four hits and four walks, which amounted to two important runs. Down 2–1, Henry tied the game at the top of the seventh with a home run to deep center, past the 402-foot sign and into the Braves bull pen, where reliever Taylor Phillips caught it. The Yankees retook the lead off Ernie Johnson in the bottom of the inning. In the ninth, Mathews walked to lead off the inning, but Henry struck out and Covington bounded into a double play to end the game. And so it came down to a seventh game, Burdette versus Larsen.

In two hours and thirty-four minutes, Milwaukee had its answer to Lou Perini’s boast that the city would be the baseball capital of the country.

It was over early—four runs in the third, and the pinstripes never recovered. The final score was 5–0. For the final out, Skowron bounced a short hop to Mathews, who raced to third and stepped on the bag, and the Braves were champions. Burdette was the hero, winning three games. In the crowd, frenzied Milwaukee fans unfurled signs that read
BUSHVILLE WINS
.

Henry hit .393, with three home runs in the World Series, eleven hits in the seven games, including a twelve-hop, RBI single up the middle during the winning third-inning rally. Three weeks later, in a close vote, he was named National League Most Valuable Player, beating out Ernie Banks, Stan Musial, and Willie Mays. It had been ten years since Herbert had taken him to see Jackie Robinson, ten years since he’d told Estella he would be a major-league baseball player. He was twenty-three years old, and though his journey was just beginning, in many ways it was already complete.

A
MONTH LATER
, on December 15, 1957, Barbara went into labor at St. Anthony’s Hospital in Milwaukee. She delivered premature twin boys, Gary and Lary, and the immediate hours after their birth were perilous. Neither child weighed four pounds. Lary would spend three weeks
¹²⁸
in the intensive care unit at St. Anthony’s, kept alive only by the protection of an incubator. Gary, who weighed three pounds, three ounces at birth, arrived ten minutes before Lary, but he would not survive a week, dying two days after he was born.

Suddenly, the afterglow of a world championship as well as the personal awards and baseball achievements were tempered by events beyond the reach of Henry’s baseball abilities. He began the year celebrating the birth of one son, spent an incandescent summer furiously chasing dual pursuits, both seeking vindication for 1956 and establishing himself as one of the truly great young players in his sport, neither quarry eluding him. And now, eight days before Christmas, he faced the coming year emotionally halved by his professional success and profound personal loss. He had seen death before, years earlier in Mobile, when his brother Alfred did not survive childhood, but the death of a son presented a different dynamic altogether. When he was a child, it was Stella and Herbert who provided the family support and stability in dealing with family tragedy. Now, though only twenty-three, Henry was the head of his own household, and the responsibility to maintain and support his family fell to him. This did not mean explaining death to little Gaile, who was three, or to Henry junior, nicknamed “Hankie,” who was nearly ten months old, but it did mean that he would have to confront the various and unpredictable emotional repercussions that always accompany death. Over the years, throughout six decades of public life, in thousands of interviews, numerous books, and even in his own autobiography, Henry would never discuss Gary’s death beyond acknowledging that the little boy did not survive long past birth, choosing instead to leave the wound buried deep under accumulated layers of scar tissue. During the months that followed, as 1957 moved into 1958, Henry moved forward stoically and privately, focusing publicly on the upcoming challenge of defending his World Series title and striving to be the first player in National League history to win consecutive Most Valuable Player trophies. And his was the appropriate course of action, for 1957 was not a time culturally when the press probed into the personal lives of professional athletes, or when the athletes themselves felt compelled for public-relations and image reasons to permit revealing and candid interviews about personal topics not directly related to their craft.
The Sporting News
and the
Los Angeles Times
ran only wire-story briefs about Gary’s death, and the local Milwaukee newspapers did not challenge the Aarons’ privacy.

But, as is so often the case, it was during this period of grief that important and lasting threads in Henry’s life would be formed, where the public life of Henry Aaron, the man who would seek not only acceptance as a potentially great baseball player but respect as a person of substance, would begin to take shape. Both professionally and personally, things would change after 1957—between Henry and Barbara, in the way Henry was viewed as a baseball player and the way the people of Milwaukee would view their baseball team, and, most importantly, in the way Henry would see the larger world around him, and his place within its uncertain, bittersweet confines.

*
Greg Spahn also noted that short memories also exist in baseball. “My father and Casey became good friends later on.” (Spahn finished his career with the Mets, where, in 1965, Stengel was his manager.)

CHAPTER NINE
ALMOST

B
Y FOUR O’CLOCK
on the afternoon of October 5, 1958, Warren Spahn knew exactly how a dynasty was supposed to feel. For seven innings he had sparred with Whitey Ford, just as the two had a year earlier in the opener of the 1957 World Series, again pitching in Yankee Stadium. Yet where Spahn had pitched bravely but labored and lost a year earlier, here he basked in the wonderfulness of being in total command, in complete control of every pitch, both in velocity and location, regardless of hitter or situation.

For any pitcher, especially one as fiercely competitive and driven as Spahn, walking off the mound that way represented a supreme moment. The fourth game of the 1958 World Series was over and Spahn soared, lifted by the importance of the victory and his part in it. In a World Series rematch with the Yankees, the Braves were not simply unafraid of the vaunted New Yorkers but were in the process of embarrassing them as no team had since before the end of the war, when in 1942 St. Louis smothered DiMaggio and Berra and the dynasty in five easy games to win it all.

The final score was 3–0, and the details of the game were to be savored and replayed. Spahn went the distance, besting Ford, who was gone after seven. He had given up but two hits and struck out seven. Only one batter, Mickey Mantle, even advanced past first base the entire game. Mantle hit a booming triple over Covington’s head in the fourth but was left stranded, unable to score. While the game had been close, with the valiant Ford equaling Spahn frame after frame early on, the delicious part was that it was the Yankees, those ice-cold, steel-nerved veterans of the fall who always relied on their opponent to commit that crucial psychological lapse, who were faltering. Norm Siebern lost a ball in the sun in the sixth inning. Tony Kubek muffed a ground ball, which led to the first Milwaukee run. After years of making the opposition wilt, it was the Yankees who were now falling victim to the pressure.

The Braves were now winning in games three to one, with one more to go to defend their championship and become the first National League team to repeat as champions since the days before players had numbers on their jerseys, back when the New York Giants beat the Yankees in 1921 and 1922. That was before Yankee Stadium had been built, before the Yankees had won their first title, before the Yankee name really meant much of anything. The Braves monument was being erected, and Spahn stood at its center, for consecutive titles, both over the Yankees, no less, would cement their place in history, simultaneously erasing the bitter disappointments of 1956.

Lew Burdette, that Yankee killer, was scheduled to be on the mound for two of the final three games, if the Series even went that far. For the team, a win away from a championship, the victory represented something far larger than a win in a seven-game play-off series; it was as if the Braves had finally reached their collective apex, their formidable individual and team abilities coalescing at once in a shimmering display.

S
PAHN AND COMPANY
had done nothing that dusky afternoon at Yankee Stadium that they hadn’t done for virtually the entire 1958 season. For the first time, it was Milwaukee, and not Brooklyn or the Giants or the Yankees, that entered the baseball season not needing to explain away what had gone wrong—not only why they hadn’t won, but how they’d continued to lose. They entered 1958 as champions, and could soak in that perfectly decadent feeling of reaching the peak of their powers. That was the greatest spoil that came with winning. Nobody stood around second-guessing.

After defeating the Yankees three times, Burdette returned to his hometown of Nitro, West Virginia, the conquering hero, the MVP of the World Series, the recipient of beers on the house, literally, for the rest of his life. Instead of being haunted by the needling presence of Herman Wehmeier, Warren Spahn basked in a championship over the winter, the king of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, even though it was his wife who was actually the Oklahoma native. Instead of wanting to punch every wiseass fan in the chops after a bittersweet season, Eddie Mathews stood awash in the winner’s sunshine during the 1957 off-season. These days, there was no reason to want to rip a guy’s lungs out for asking the wrong question, at the wrong time, as he had after the bitter defeat of 1956. With Mathews, the bitterness of losing revealed itself most forcefully whenever he tried his best
not
to be bitter.

“When you come close to winning
¹²⁹
a championship and don’t win it, everybody wants to know why you didn’t win, or how it feels to come so close and lose. Nobody wants to hear about the 92 games you won or the great things you did; they only want to know about the one terrible game you lost,” Mathews wrote in his 1994 autobiography,
Eddie Mathews and the National Pastime
. “It gets old, though, talking over and over about the same moment of disappointment in your life. You want to say, ‘Hey, a month before that I beat the Cardinals with a three-run homer.’ But nobody cares about that.”

Those concerns were part of the old days, the old Braves. Even one of the most important pieces of the scary old days—the annual showdowns at Ebbets Field—would never return, for the Dodgers didn’t live in New York anymore. Having tormented and tortured the Braves for years, the Dodgers were gone from Brooklyn. Nobody was happier that the Dodgers had left than Spahn, who literally couldn’t win a game in Brooklyn. The Giants were gone, too, to San Francisco, and now train rides were replaced by DC-7 jets and five-game series on the West Coast. The National League would not host a regular-season game in New York for five years.

When the 1958 season commenced, the Braves danced around the quicksand that sinks most title teams, but only barely. In his own way, each player found himself let down by the painfully temporary nature of winning. Whether it was Spahn or Adcock or Aaron, each discovered that winning was not so unlike a good massage: It felt otherworldly, but too briefly. The feeling never lasted long enough.

As spring camp opened, the stars did not report there fat and they did not squabble among themselves over money or credit for their part in finally winning the title. Many of the players arrived in Bradenton as if they still had something to prove. For a time, they even continued to listen to Fred Haney.

That wasn’t to say that money was irrelevant. In baseball, money was still the best way to measure value, especially when it flowed at a trickle from the penurious wallet of John Quinn. And when it came time for the reward of finally being the best, the money spring was drier than Fred Haney’s scalp. During the first week of January, the week before the deadline when teams were required to mail out offers to the players, the Associated Press and the
New York Times
ran dueling stories about the two pennant winners, the
Times
placing the Yankee payroll unofficially at $500,000, led by Mantle at $65,000 per year and Berra at $58,000. “So far as is known, only the Braves and possibly the Dodgers can be regarded as being anywhere near the Bombers’ salary bracket,” the
Times
wrote on January 5, 1958. “The world champion Milwaukeeans have a few high-salaried performers such as Warren Spahn, Red Schoendienst and Eddie Mathews. Hank Aaron is moving up rapidly, but they haven’t quite the array of high financiers the Yankees have to satisfy.” The AP did not place a payroll figure on what the Braves would spend on player salaries in 1958, but it was assumed that after a world championship, the players would expect more.

In fact, everybody wanted more.

If winning the championship was a team effort and the greatest moment in Milwaukee baseball history, the city was more appreciative of the victory than management. Nineteen of the players, including Aaron, Burdette and Mathews, did not sign their original contracts. Billy Bruton, who missed the Series after the violent collision with Mantilla during the pennant run, made $14,500 in 1957 and exactly that the following year. When camp broke in Bradenton the first week of March, Burdette stayed home. Haney said the holdout had nothing to do with the money (Burdette was really earning $25,000 instead of $28,000, but in an age when player salaries were as well guarded a secret as any at the Pentagon, the press could hardly be faulted for guessing). Instead, it was because Burdette didn’t like Haney’s strict camp style, which required the pitchers to run for miles. In later years, the smothering degree of control ownership exerted over the players made them sympathetic figures; it paved the way for massive change. How management treated its champions in 1958 served as an undisputed example. Spahn, the twenty-game winner and defending Cy Young recipient, received a raise of three thousand dollars, bringing his salary to sixty thousand dollars. Mathews, who had hit the big home run in game four that saved Spahn and left the city delirious, received a five-thousand-dollar raise, for a salary of $55,000, and Burdette eventually received more money, if not fewer calisthenics. After the second spring-training exhibition, Quinn gave Burdette a $10,000 raise, for a total of $35,000.

Burdette got his money, but only one other player came close to receiving his salary demand, and that was Henry. He indeed had asked for forty thousand dollars, the second straight year he’d asked that Quinn virtually double his salary. In 1957, he’d asked for a $17,500 raise and received just a $5,000 increase, bringing his salary to $22,500. In 1958, he’d asked for another $17,500 and received $12,500, for a total of $35,000.

The Braves began the defense of their title on April 15, a breezy day at County Stadium, Spahn versus Pittsburgh’s Bob Friend. Vernon Thomson, the Wisconsin governor, threw out the first pitch, but not before Perini beamed his gap-toothed smile as the Braves fifteen-by-thirty-seven-foot pennant was raised before the game. Mathews hit a home run in the first, a towering drive into the center-field bull pen, and then another in the third. Spahn labored but persevered—except in facing a hungry Pirate outfielder named Roberto Clemente, who in four appearances against Spahn rapped three hits, including a double. Friend was better than Spahn on this day—Henry could attest, going hitless against him and one for six on the day—but the pennant magic still held a flicker. Trailing 3–2 in the bottom of the ninth, the Braves tied the score before Conley lost it with two out in the fourteenth. At three hours and forty minutes, the game was the longest opener in the National League in twenty-three years and was the first time Spahn or the Braves had lost a home opener since moving to Milwaukee.

There was first the money and then the business of defending the pennant, and the tough, militaristic Haney knew only one way: keeping his foot on the necks of his players. One result was inevitable clashes—both with the club’s free spirits, who always needed a short leash, and the sturdy veterans, who believed their performance the previous year had earned them the right not to have Haney turning another training camp into boot camp.

Another result was a certain loss of the innocence that surrounded the entire Milwaukee affair, and each player lamented the sober reality that chasing a goal is far more romantic than achieving it, and while the 1958 season would be a highly successful and efficient one, it felt to Henry, and especially to Mathews, a little less sparkly, a little less fun.

Take the case of Bob Hazle and the cool afternoon of May 7, 1958, a Wednesday afternoon, in St. Louis, when Herman Wehmeier took the mound against the Braves. This time, Burdette was on the mound and Wehmeier, for once against the Braves, looked exactly like the ham-and-egg pitcher he was to the rest of the league.

Schoendienst led off the game, Logan to follow. Both singled. Mathews flied to right. Henry doubled in both runs, and Frank Torre doubled him in. Then Covington stepped up and took a Wehmeier offering and sent it clear into Kansas. Wehmeier faced six batters, five of whom got hits, three of whom nailed extra base hits, all five of whom scored. Fred Hutchinson, the Cardinals manager, called for Larry Jackson out of the bull pen. Hazle stepped up, and Jackson chucked a fastball, hard and straight and deadly, slightly behind Hazle, who instinctively backed into the ball. Hazle was knocked unconscious.

Exactly seventeen days later, Quinn had two things to say to Hazle. The first was to ask him how he was doing. The second was to tell him he’d been sold to Detroit.

This was the way management always made sure to remind players that yesterday’s news was today’s liability, and the reminders could be as icy as the wind off Lake Michigan. As much as Spahn or Burdette or Henry Aaron, Hurricane Hazle had won the 1957 pennant. Sure, he had stopped hitting (he had actually stopped against the Yankees during the Series), but no matter how many years a player played in the big leagues, few could ever get used to the callousness of management. Mathews recalled the moment in
Eddie Mathews and the National Pastime:

The other ballplayers were completely stunned
¹³⁰
and upset about it. We thought it sucked. Here was a guy who came out of nowhere and led us, not single-handedly, but led us to our first World Series. He was in a slump the first month of 1958, but he’d had some ankle trouble in the spring. We figured the ballclub owed him more than that. He was 27 years old and a super-nice kid. After he came up in 1957, he was just a part of us. Whenever we’d go out, he’d come with us, just a nice guy, what I would call a good old Southern boy, fun laughs, the whole bit. Of course, I never understood a lot of the stuff that went on in baseball, but we were pretty disappointed when Hazle was dumped. We all said, “What the hell did he do wrong, have an affair with the general manager’s wife?”

Gene Conley was next. Never a Haney favorite, Conley found himself banished to the bull pen. Then his arm started to hurt, and he spiraled; he would never be as promising as he once was. Conley would not look back on 1958 fondly, for it represented one of those curious phenomena in sport when the team did well, while the individual player struggled. For years, the two stalwarts of the pitching staff, Spahn and Burdette, would tease Conley about his mechanics. Neither had to deal with Conley’s height, but both men knew potentially dangerous mechanics when they saw them, and Conley’s motion tended to place a great deal of strain on his elbow and shoulder.