The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (16 page)

Edwin Lee Mathews, Jr., was born October 13, 1931, in Texarkana, Texas, but was raised in Santa Barbara. His father, Edwin senior, moved the family in 1935, in search of work during the Depression. He eventually landed a job as a wire chief, transmitting, among other news, baseball games for Western Union. As a boy, young Edwin was not close to his father. While the elder Mathews made a great effort to play catch with his son, Eddie’s earliest memories of his father were the odd hours Edwin senior worked, which prevented him from being home during the hours most fathers were, and the small bottles of alcohol Eddie would find hidden around the house.

Eddie was a two-sport athlete while growing up, excelling both in football and basketball. It was clear even in middle school that he had a special talent. In other, less forgiving cities, a player would have to be homegrown to truly reach the soul of the hometown. When the New York Giants relocated to San Francisco in 1958, Willie Mays was clearly the signature player of the franchise, but the city would not warm to the team until it produced Willie McCovey, its first star without ties to New York. Mathews was different. He was a hero almost from the beginning and would grow as a baseball player as the city became one of the new capitals of the sport. It was a glossy photograph of Mathews swinging away one night in 1954 at County Stadium that served as the initial cover for a new, sports-only magazine,
Sports Illustrated
.

He played baseball with a rugged intensity, wore his emotions nakedly, and was, on the surface, an uncomplicated competitor. What drew Milwaukee to Mathews was his grinding drive, often bordering on a rage, which, because of his passion, seemed glamorous. His youth and power made him something of a heartthrob to female fans. He connected to Milwaukee, Chuck Tanner thought, because of his almost pathological drive to succeed. That, plus Mathews’s rages, gave Milwaukee a player who reflected the city’s idealized vision of itself as a blue-collar, hardworking city.

He did not back down, ever. Mathews once engaged in a fistfight at third base with Frank Robinson after a hard slide, and brawled with six-foot-six-inch Don Drysdale for making a habit of throwing at Johnny Logan. Mathews, it was said, intimidated even fellow players with a look.

He was so gifted an offensive player, blessed with a smooth, slashing left-handed swing, that players and coaches alike underestimated his defense. In turn, Mathews played with a persistent self-consciousness regarding his abilities as a defensive player. Spahn was considered a sophisticate around the press, while Mathews was prone to fits of silence. He was wary of the writers in general and especially of the ones who did not cover the team on a daily basis. Mathews, even as a young player, was combative with the press. It was Mathews who fit the role of the prototypically tough third baseman, short on words, long on home runs, quick in temperament. He was not a vocal leader, the kind of player the press referred to in those days as a “holler guy.” Mathews could be dark and moody, prone to fits of anger and, some of his teammates thought, depression. He was to be feared when he drank, which was often. Mathews was the enforcer in the clubhouse and in the lineup. Almost immediately, Eddie Mathews earned a reputation as a player not to be crossed.

He would be anointed as a superstar not long after he was legally able to drink. Mathews possessed an uncanny level of star power, which attracted immediate attention. Within months of his arrival in the big leagues, he had been forecast to become among the greatest of players. In 1954, it was Mathews whom Charlie Grimm predicted had the best chance to break Babe Ruth’s single-season record of sixty home runs, even though County Stadium, with its symmetrical dimensions, did not favor left-handed hitters. The connection to Ruth had begun a year earlier, when before the all-star break, Mathews was ahead of Ruth’s 1927 pace, the year he hit sixty home runs. Mathews did not sustain his level of home-run hitting, but he had given everyone a taste.

The Milwaukee hierarchy was so taken with Mathews that one day during the spring, as Henry put on another batting exhibition, Red Thisted of the
Sentinel
asked Mickey Owen if he thought Henry would ever hit for power on a par with Mathews.

“No way,”
⁶⁰
Owen said.

Mathews, dark and distrusting, took time to warm up, but once he did, he could be the fiercest, most loyal of friends. It would be Mathews who would attempt to lessen the pressure on Henry by shielding him from the press when he played well and especially when he did not. “He knew Henry was going to have it rough,”
⁶¹
Chuck Tanner recalled. “Not that the writers meant anything by it, but Henry was so quiet, so soft-spoken at first that he wasn’t going to defend himself when some of the writers got out of line. Eddie used to tell them, ‘Get out of here. Leave that kid alone.’ And here he was, just a kid himself.”

Spahn, Mathews, Burdette, and Bob Buhl formed the core of the most influential clique on the Braves. Burdette and Spahn were roommates in spring training and on the road, as were Buhl and Mathews. They were the best players and the closest friends. Henry was not part of that group, partly because as a black player there were simply too many uncomfortable moments to navigate socially. The other part, however, was because Henry did not drink much, if at all. Growing up as a clubhouse kid in Milwaukee, Henry, Greg Spahn would recall, occasionally sipped a beer after a game, but most times, Greg Spahn would take a bottle of Coca-Cola over to Henry.

The rest of the Braves lived in orbit around the Spahn clique. The pitchers Gene Conley and Carl Sawatski roomed together. Conley was a six-foot-eight-inch right-hander, and after the Antonelli trade for Bobby Thomson, he was expected to be the fourth starter in the rotation behind Spahn, Burdette, and Bob Buhl. Conley, like Spahn, grew up in Oklahoma and was a natural athlete. He played football, baseball, and basketball. He accepted a scholarship to Washington State and found himself in the fortunate position of being in the middle of a bidding war between John Quinn and Red Auerbach, the coach of the Boston Celtics.

Gene Conley was the athlete as individual. He cut his own figure in an industry where a certain unchallenged conformity was expected. He was not apolitical, nor, despite coming of age during a time of political and social upheaval, did he share strong views on race. He often spoke of himself as somewhat naïve about the pressures of racial separation. Once as a ten-year-old living in Muskogee, Oklahoma, Conley took a black friend to the municipal pool. The two swam and enjoyed themselves without incident. When young Gene walked home, the director of the pool stopped him and told him never to bring his friend to the public pool again or both would face serious consequences.

In later years, when playing for the Boston Celtics, Gene Conley was drawn to the complexities and talents of Bill Russell, but at the time he was not attuned to the different, harsher road for black baseball players. Conley remembers the early black ballplayers on the Braves—George Crowe, Bill Bruton, Jim Pendleton, and Henry Aaron—dressing in the same corner of the clubhouse. The clubhouse man, Joe Taylor, gave the black players lockers in the same corner, away from the whites. Henry and his black teammates were unofficially segregated from the rest of the team, often showering together and dressing together when the white players had finished, unsure about crossing in the clubhouse the racial divide that had not yet been erased in society at large. Conley recalled the dynamic being appalling, but he also did not remember knowing quite how to confront an obvious wrong.

Henry’s inaugural season in the major leagues would be more a challenge of maddening perseverance than Broadway triumph. The pennant forecast for 1954 never materialized. He was quite good, proving that the spring hype surrounding him was no mirage, but the dream of duplicating the grand entrance to the big leagues of his two childhood idols—both Joe DiMaggio and Stan Musial won the World Series in their first full seasons—was a fantasy best left to the silver screen.

The Braves jerked around in the standings, wobbly at sea all season long, at times fearsome, only to then nose-dive into the mud. No team in baseball—not the perennials, the mighty Yankees and Dodgers, nor the two teams that actually won the pennant, the Giants and 111-win Cleveland—would beat other teams as manically as Milwaukee, only to follow such wins with fatal stretches of mediocrity. Three times over the course of the campaign, the Braves would catch fire, winning at least ten games. On a fourth occasion, they were nearly as good, winning nine in a row. But while those torrid streaks represented nearly half of the Braves eighty-nine wins, the rest of the season wasn’t nearly so glamorous. Spahn won his requisite twenty-one games, but Burdette was a languid 15–14. One of the Rookie Rockets, Buhl, lost his first seven starts and lost his spot in the rotation, while another, Conley, won fourteen and kept an uneven team interesting.

H
ENRY WOULD EXPERIENCE
much of the same, his rookie season resembling a volatile stock. There was opening day, April 13, at Crosley Field in Cincinnati, facing Joe Nuxhall, and Henry Louis Aaron, twenty years old, starting left fielder, batting fifth between Andy Pafko and Joe Adcock, bounced into an inning-ending double play in his first big-league at bat, debuting with the goose egg, zero for five. Two days later, at home against the Cardinals in the bottom of the first, he doubled in the right-center gap off Vic Raschi for his first big-league hit. Eight days later, in St. Louis, it was Raschi again, the ill-tempered ex-Yankee, who served up home run number one. It came in the sixth inning of a fourteen-inning, 7–5 win. And two days after that came the first breakout game, when Henry went five for six.

And then there would be games like the epic one on the afternoon of June 10, against Willie Mays and the first-place Giants. The Braves were home, playing the twelfth game of what would be a disastrous seventeen-game home stand, in which they had already lost nine games and were falling out of the pennant race before the solstice. Henry endured a day to remember. He went two for four that day, and while in the box score that was all that mattered, Henry just might have played the worst game of his life. Twice he came to bat with runners on. First, he bounced into a double play, only to follow up by hitting into a force play while each pitcher tossed zeroes at the other.

N
ONE OF THIS
would have mattered much under normal circumstances, but on this day, Gene Conley and Rubén Gómez weren’t pitching; they were fighting for the last scrap of beef on the table. Plus, Willie was in center, and the rookie Henry would always feel a special twinge when playing against Mays. Neither pitcher had given up a run, nor had either one of them any intention of giving in. Henry singled in his other two at bats, but once he got on base, that was when the trouble started. Standing on third, with one out, Bruton lofted a fly to center. Mays camped under the ball, squaring himself to throw. Henry tagged and broke for the plate, the
rookie challenging the great Mays in a 0–0
game
. Mays uncorked a good one, a hard one-hopper that skidded off the dirt cutout at home plate and into the mitt of the Giants catcher, Wes Westrum. The throw was true, and the home plate umpire, Jocko Conlan, waded into the choking cloud of dust, looked at Westrum and Aaron tangled on top of home plate, threw up the right hand, and signaled Henry out. It didn’t matter that Johnny Logan dressed Conlan down for blowing the call (Logan got tossed, and so did Burdette, who seconded Logan’s argument); Mays had won the battle, and Henry skulked to the dugout.

It was still scoreless in the ninth, and Henry singled again to start the winning rally. Danny O’Connell sacrificed him to second, and the managerial wheels started turning. Leo Durocher, the Giants manager, walked Catfish Metkovich to get to Conley, who even in the ninth inning was hitting for himself against Gómez. Conley looped a short fly to right. Don Mueller, the right fielder, snared the ball and, to his surprise, saw Henry off the bag between second and third. Mueller fired to second, and for the third time in one game, Henry ended an inning with a double play.

Only the finale made it worse. Conley started the tenth by striking out Mays and then gave up a pinch home run to Bill Taylor, losing the game, 1–0.

T
HROUGH IT ALL
, Charlie Grimm, the skipper, took on the persona of a double agent. On the good days, he would talk about Aaron as they all did in the spring, the can’t-miss, a member of the millionth percentile club, the guy with talent to spare.

But during the bad times, when Henry struggled through a slump in May and Grimm benched him, replacing him with a trimmer, slimmer Pendleton (it lasted one day; Pendleton went zero for three), it was “Jolly Cholly” (as the papers called him), who so very much enjoyed being one of the guys, who would join in with the razzing of Henry. Grimm told the writers that Henry had seemed tired from playing baseball year-round, and that he was probably a little stressed that the draft board had contacted him and it wasn’t quite clear if he would be wearing a different type of uniform in 1955. But Grimm still borrowed Adcock’s line and referred to Henry as “Snowshoes,” yukking it up with the boys at the rookie’s expense. It was Charlie Grimm who would remark to the writers that Henry looked as though he were sleepwalking, except when he was hitting. Occasionally, even Grimm, the manager, would call Henry “Stepin Fetchit,” a nickname the press—since it came with the imprimatur of the skipper—was all too willing to pick up and print.

AARON GOOD NOW,
⁶²
MAY TURN GREAT

Young Braves Fielder Has Won Respect of
Pitchers over League as Dangerous Hitter

N
EW
Y
ORK
, N.Y.—He throws sidearm from the outfield and runs the bases like Stepin Fetchit with a hopped up motor. But … Henry Aaron is one of the most promising hitters in the major leagues….