The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (39 page)

And that was the reason why the National League season of 1959 was so special. It combined the individual and the collective. It featured a supernova eclipsing the established star. And it spotlighted a three-team pennant chase deep into September—the Dodgers, the Giants, and the Braves vying for the prize—a chase that would have lasting consequences for each franchise, and the players involved.

The supernova was Henry Aaron, and for the first month of the season he began to chart his course toward a place more rarefied, more exclusive. He began the season with fury—extra base hits in each of the first seven games of the season, including three in an opening-day destruction of Bob Friend and Pittsburgh at Forbes Field, then three more for the home opener, including singling and scoring the winning run in beating Philly in front of 42,081 at County Stadium. At the end of April, Henry was hitting .508.

Henry did not necessarily need a reason to tear into the league at a more vigorous pace, but two spring-training incidents clearly would have motivated him. The sting of the World Series loss would never go away, and during the spring, Haney did not intend to let any of the players forget, especially the ones who didn’t produce. One day in Bradenton, Mathews, who had died at the plate during the Series, wanted to stay in the batting cage for a few extra swings. “You didn’t want to swing it last October,”
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Haney bellowed for all to hear. Throughout the length of spring training, Haney’s jabs contained just a bit more acid.

Of course, Haney did not seem to blame himself for nodding off at the wheel in game seven, but he gave the players the works. “We could use some more speed,” Haney told Shirley Povich of the
Washington Post
. “Pitching and hitting sound pretty good, but you can’t overlook other ways to win ball games. In a close game, the big play can beat you. Willie Mays can beat you four ways. He can beat you with a hit or a throw or a steal or a big catch in the outfield. We don’t have one like that on our club.”

For three years, Henry had listened to Fred Haney take his whacks at various players on the team, and now he had taken a shot at him, too.
We don’t have one like that on our club
. It was true that Henry did not have big stolen-base totals. It was bad enough that Haney had sat in the dugout while the World Series turned to ashes, and now the players had to wake up to the morning paper, with him cutting them off at the knees. And now there was this, Haney waxing nostalgic for Mays.

So Henry swung with purpose, setting the Phillies, the Pirates, the Cardinals, and the Reds aflame. When the Giants came to Milwaukee for three games to start May, Henry had to swallow Sam Jones walking away with a victory in the opener and Willie going four for five in the second game, a Saturday win for San Francisco.

In the finale, Burdette against Johnny Antonelli, the two stars put on a show in a sideways Milwaukee rain. With one on in the first, Mays took a sidearm fastball from Burdette and sent it four hundred feet to dead center, the ball landing softly in the Perini pines in right-center field. In the bottom of the inning, with two out, Henry pounded a home run of his own to make it 2–1. The next time up, Mays lashed a drive into the left-center gap and raced for second, only to be erased by a laser from Pafko. Leading off the fourth, Henry faced Antonelli and wafted another home run, this one close to where Mays’s ball had landed. An inning later, the Braves finished Antonelli with five runs and took the game, 9–4. When Mays and Aaron were finished sparring, Willie had gone two for four, with a home run and two runs driven in. Henry was three for four, with two home runs, three driven in, and two runs scored.

The Dodgers came to County Stadium the next night and Drysdale posted a classic line—eleven innings, ten hits, nine strikeouts—which meant nothing, because he was long gone by the time the matter was decided, at the end of the sixteenth inning, which happened to be three minutes before the National League curfew of 1:00 a.m.

BRAVES SHADE DODGERS,
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3–2

Aaron’s long double breaks up
thriller just before curfew

By Frank
Finch/
Times Staff Representative

M
ILWAUKEE—
With first place at stake, the Dodgers and Braves battled for 4 hrs, 47 minutes … before Hank Aaron doubled Eddie Mathews home … to give Milwaukee a 3–2 victory….

… Aaron, the greatest hitter in the game today, drove in the tying tally with an accidental bloop single … and then demonstrated his greatness with the clutch clout that ended hostilities at 12:47 a.m.

Even if Fred Haney didn’t believe he had a game breaker the caliber of Mays, Henry played with a certain type of ferocity. Most players played with purpose, but few could make their bodies do what the mind wanted. On May 10, Henry singled in the ninth inning off Joe Nuxhall to cap a doubleheader sweep of Cincinnati.

The Braves took over first place three days later. In the meantime, Henry maintained a scorching pace. In a particularly painful loss in Philadelphia on April 23, he doubled for his first hit of the game in the seventh inning and then homered in the ninth to give the Braves a 3–1 lead, only to see Pizarro give up two homers in the bottom of the ninth and lose 4–3. He would hit in every game for nearly the next month, a twenty-two-game hit streak. In the final game of the streak, a crisp afternoon at Seals Stadium, with the Giants and Braves slugging it out for first place, Sam Jones held on, trailing 2–1 in the fifth. Mays had already homered, and even though he was down in the game, Jones was pleased by his shackling of Henry, who bounced out weakly in his first at bat and struck out in his second.

Jones quickly retired the first two batters of the inning and, with the pitcher, Spahn, standing at the plate, was about to cruise into the dugout. But Spahn singled. So did Bruton. Then Mathews flipped a single to the opposite field in left to make it 3–1. Jones was breathing fire when Henry stepped to the plate. Henry took a Jones delivery and blasted it into the gap in center, over Mays’s head. Bruton scored from second and Bill Rigney made his quick trot across the infield with the hook. Jones left the mound, turning as he headed to the showers to stare down Henry, who was staring right back at second base.

SAM JONES GUNS FOR HANK AARON
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M
ILWAUKEE (AP)—
Sam Jones of the San Francisco Giants was quoted … as saying, “The next time Henry Aaron sees me on the mound, he is going flat. He’s going to get a face full of dirt.” …

“Don’t let ’em print what you said,” Willie Mays pleaded with … Jones….

“Aw, go ahead and print it. I said it.”

And with a little self-satisfied twinkle in his eye, Henry responded, “Sam must have been a little upset at getting beat,” but he knew Jones was a little upset at getting beaten by him. Sam Jones would die of cancer in 1971, at forty-five years of age, and there would not be a moment of reconciliation. Sam Jones took his fight with Henry to the grave.

On June 16, at the cavernous L.A. Coliseum, the trio of Johnny Podres, Clem Labine, and Art Fowler held Henry to a hit in five at bats, dropping his pregame average from .402 to .398. He would not threaten .400 again, but he assaulted pitchers, especially in late innings. Once, it was easily Mays in the National League, Elston Howard and Berra in the American as holders of the clutch-hitting title, but now Henry had elbowed in on the discussion.

But the Braves could not escape their own drift. They had lost first place at the all-star break and would trade places in the standings with the Dodgers throughout the remainder of the summer. In the second week of September, the Giants still held the lead, but the Dodgers and Braves played two bitter games at the Coliseum. In the first, Bob Buhl beat Drysdale, 4–1. The next night was a game the Braves would not forget. Henry struck hard again, going four for six, singling and scoring in the tenth to break a 6–6 game. Up 7–6, with one out in the bottom of the tenth, Maury Wills singled off McMahon, then raced to third on another single by Chuck Essegian. Junior Gilliam wafted a sacrifice fly to tie the score at 7–7 and rejoiced when McMahon walked in the winning run. The Dodgers and Braves were now tied for second, both 79–65.

O
N
S
EPTEMBER
15, the Giants led by two games. The next five games would likely decide the pennant, home games with Milwaukee and the Dodgers. San Francisco had held on to first place since July 10. Bad things always seem worse when they happen to you, and that was why the San Francisco Giants generally lacked sympathy for the Braves. The Giants proceeded to split the series with the Braves, lose all three to the Dodgers—which put Los Angeles in first place for the first time in consecutive days in May—and then lose two more to the Cubs and the Cardinals. The Giants lost eight of their final ten games, and by the final weekend, they were finished.

The Braves, meanwhile, entered the final two games of the season trailing by a game, thanks to Jack Meyer (now pitching for Philadelphia) beating Burdette 6–3 at County Stadium. Losing was one thing, but there were still two games left. But on that night when Mathews hit his forty-fifth home run, staring the Braves in the face should they find a way to take the pennant was not the perennial New York Yankees, but the Chicago White Sox, who had won the pennant for the first time in forty years, not having done so since the infamous year 1919. These Sox, the “Go-Go Sox,” as they were called, couldn’t break a pane of glass with their bats, but they ran all the way to the pennant, beating out Cleveland. The dreaded Yankees were thirteen back.

It wasn’t the losing that night that galled Perini and Burdette and the rest, but the sparse and uninspired crowd of 24,912 that showed up at County Stadium. Had winning become so old so quickly? Was the circus in town? Then came the chilling extrapolations of thought: If the fans weren’t showing up for a team that played for the pennant, the whole franchise would fall through the floorboards if they’d ever had a losing season.

On September 26, at Wrigley Field, the Cubs jumped all over Podres. It was 9–0 in the third, heading to a 12–2 Cub pounding of the Dodgers. Meanwhile, up Route I-94 in Milwaukee, Spahn and Robin Roberts wrestled to a 2–2 standstill against Philadelphia until the bottom of the eighth, when Mathews and Aaron started the inning with singles. Needing a run to tie for the pennant on the final day, putting their destiny in their own hands, Fred Haney decided to do some managing. Adcock put down a sacrifice, advancing Mathews, who scored on Bobby Avila’s force play. Spahn struck out the first two batters of the ninth and finished the job for his twenty-first win of the season in a tidy one hour and fifty-nine minutes. Both teams would win the next day, setting up a best-of-three play-off, the Dodgers versus the Braves again, to begin Monday, September 28, at County Stadium, the winner to take on the awaiting White Sox in the World Series.

Henry figured his team would go to the World Series a third straight time. This Dodger team simply didn’t scare anyone with its lineup. Snider was old, and so was Hodges. Pee Wee was at the end; Robinson was long gone. They played in the sun and not the tough corners of Brooklyn. They certainly could pitch, but the Braves had Burdette and Spahn, who had both won twenty-one games. Besides, both teams would have to hit to win the series, Henry believed, because the big pitchers on each side had already pitched just to make the play-off possible. The opener would be two middle-rotation guys, Danny McDevitt for L.A. and Carl Willey for Milwaukee.

But when he walked out to the field to take a quick look at the conditions, Henry could not believe his eyes. There was hardly a soul at the ballpark—County Stadium empty … for a play-off game, no less. It was bad enough that the Saturday-afternoon game, with a pennant on the line, had been witnessed by exactly 23,768 paying spectators. The weather had been gloomy that weekend, a slashing rain pelting the field, but that couldn’t stand as the reason for why the hungriest city for baseball in the league suddenly had better things to do.

“A disgracefully small crowd
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of 18,297 watched in apathy,” wrote Arthur Daley of the
New York Times
. “No one seemed to care much and the players responded with the routine job the uninspired surrounding seemed to demand.” Henry’s worst fears were realized.

The Braves knocked out McDevitt with one out in the second. They led 2–1, but like Bob Turley’s relief appearances in the World Series, the Braves couldn’t touch the new man, Larry Sherry. Sherry pitched the rest of the way, not giving up a run. In the sixth, the game tied 2–2, Willey gave up a long home run to Dodger catcher Johnny Roseboro that wound up being the game winner.

He blasted a pitch over Henry Aaron’s head and into the right field bleachers….

Once upon a time Milwaukee was rated as the most rabid town west of Flatbush…. Nothing deterred them. They braved rain, snow, discomfort and second-place finishes….

… The support Milwaukeeans gave their Braves must have been moral. It certainly wasn’t physical. The bleachers were virtually empty….

… Maybe the Braves shouldn’t have given their followers the bonus of two pennants and one world championship. They have nothing left for an encore.

—Arthur Daley
,
The New York Times
,
Sept. 29, 1959

Once in Los Angeles, the finale was emblematic. Aaron and Mathews, invisible in the opener, jumped on Drysdale in the first for two runs. The Braves led 2–0, and 3–1, and, in the bottom of the ninth, 5–2. Burdette was tough and ornery, ready to force a winner-take-all gambit in Milwaukee. Then Wally Moon led off the ninth with a single, and it was the old Dodgers, the ones who had roamed Brooklyn, made the name famous, trolled the archives for one last reminiscing. Snider, thirty-three and gray, singled. Two on, nobody out, and the tying run at the plate, and Fred Haney about as motionless as a cigar store Indian.