The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (17 page)

… the 20-year-old Negro is deceptively fast, and at least an ordinary hand at getting his outfield chores done, even if he has his own way of going about them.

On the Braves, the prevailing view of Charlie Grimm was one of benevolence. Johnny Logan loved Grimm, as did Conley and Mathews. Mathews believed Grimm to be one of the better baseball men he’d encountered, but he knew Charlie was too close to his players. Henry, however, did not care much for Grimm. Aaron believed it was Grimm who was responsible for much of the hazing he took from his teammates and the press during the season.

If nothing else, Henry believed that Grimm should not have encouraged the creation of a minstrel character. It was Grimm’s responsibility, Henry believed, to shield him from some of the harsher layers as fans adjusted to seeing blacks on the same field as whites. Robinson had such protectors, Branch Rickey and Charlie Dressen, as did Mays with Durocher. Henry had a guy calling him “Snowshoes” to the press.

The Sporting News
would devote an item on April 15, 1954, a full seven years after Robinson reached the majors, to the moment in the Braves-Cardinals game when, in the eighth inning, Milwaukee became the first team to field an all-black outfield during a regular-season game.

But he kept hitting, not to the .300 mark, which was the gold standard for good hitters, but not under .270, either. In late May, Grimm moved Henry to the cleanup position and Henry struggled with the responsibility of hitting fourth, at one point posting a dreadful mark of just five hits in forty-one at bats. He was fourth in the all-star balloting, but making the all-star team as a rookie was, in those days, a long shot (though it wasn’t lost on Henry that DiMaggio was the first to ever accomplish the feat). At one point during the season, Henry admitted that there were a couple of pitchers who were intent on giving him the business. One was Larry Jackson, the hard-throwing lefty with the Cardinals, and the second was a journeyman with the Philadelphia Phillies named Herm Wehmeier. “I don’t know what I did to those fellows,” Henry said. “But they both worked me over pretty good.”

At the all-star break, the Braves were fifteen and a half out. By August 1, the Braves had shaved six games off the lead. Being a mile away from first place wasn’t part of the plan, but the Braves were especially galling, considering they were in fourth place, with the best pitching staff in the league. But they won twenty of twenty-two games in August to make it interesting. By the fifteenth, the lead was three and a half.

In the second game of a doubleheader at Crosley Field, where Henry had made his big-league debut, fate reappeared. The Braves won the first game 11–8, their sixth in a row. The lead was still six and a half games, with twenty-three to play, but they were alive and still had three games left with the league-leading Giants.

In the nightcap, the Reds had leaped all over them. First it was Jim Wilson, then Joey Jay, the bonus baby, and, finally, Spahn in relief. Down 7–1 in the top of the seventh, Pendleton singled for Spahn and the dam burst. The Braves batted around. Henry singled and scored a run and a poor sucker named Corky Valentine walked off the mound at the end of the inning, down 8–7.

The next inning, Henry faced a big left-hander named Harry Perkowski and boomed a cannon shot into the deepest part of the old park. Adcock raced around with an insurance run and Henry dashed to third, sliding hard. His body carried past the bag. His left ankle did not. The bone snapped cleanly. The stretcher came next. Bobby Thomson, the man whose broken ankle in spring training had put Henry in the big leagues in the first place, ironically ran for him at third.

Once Henry went down, the end came quickly. On September 10, down four games to the Giants and two ahead of the Dodgers, with seventeen to play and riding another ten-game win streak, the Braves arrived in Brooklyn for a two-game showdown and lost both. Adcock, who made a habit of wearing out the Dodgers (Clem Labine had already beaned him earlier in the season), followed Henry to the hospital, after Newcombe fired a fastball headed for Adcock’s cheek in the opener. Big Joe threw up his right hand in defense and the ball cracked the bone. Then they lost another in Philly, and all three at the Polo Grounds to the Giants. They finished in third place, eight games behind the Giants and four behind the Dodgers. Henry underwent surgery, had pins set into his ankle, and thought about 1955.

After the World Series, Henry found the price of losing wasn’t just the pennant. He’d lost the final month of the season and, with that, a chance at the Rookie of the Year award. He finished fourth, behind his teammate Conley, a young shortstop with the Chicago Cubs named Ernie Banks, and the winner, Wally Moon of the Cardinals.

I
N LATER YEARS
, Henry would reveal modest disappointment at not having won the award, and even a bit more at having finished fourth. By the time the season was over, however, Henry Aaron had learned something far more valuable than a trophy. He had seen them all up close—Willie Mays, the rookie Ernie Banks, the great Stan Musial, and, as a player, even the great Jackie Robinson—and none had intimidated him. He would later say he had learned how deeply his pride ran, and how that pride, comparing his abilities with those of his contemporaries, was the ingredient that truly fueled his motivation.

In the off-season, after the pins were taken out of his ankle and he could walk without crutches, Henry did not think about the 1955 season or about fitting in with his new team. He thought of the big picture, about his legacy. He had been in the big leagues for all of five months, and he had resolved to pursue one goal: He wanted three thousand hits. It was a goal that seemed far outside what he had accomplished in just one injury-shortened season, the place of immortals. At the end of the 1954 season, only seven players in the history of the sport had crossed the three thousand mark, but after only one season in the big leagues, Henry had reached a seminal conclusion: There was nothing on a baseball diamond that he could not do.

PART TWO
MAGIC

CHAPTER FIVE
WEHMEIER

O
N THE FRIGID
, festive evening of January 22, 1956, in the middle of Milwaukee’s most prestigious banquet room, the Grand Ballroom of the Wisconsin Club, Charlie Grimm took out his banjo and strummed “Has Anybody Seen My Gal?” When Charlie followed up with “When You Wore a Tulip”—a capella,
in German
, no less—the place went wild.

That was the night the Milwaukee chapter of the Baseball Writers Association of America descended upon the Wisconsin Club and honored Charlie as the inaugural recipient of the Sam Levy Memorial Plaque, for meritorious service to baseball. Not a whiff of negativity interrupted the bonhomie. Jolly Cholly was in his element, awash in the moment, whooping it up with the scribes, sharing the dais with two of his best kids, Chuck Tanner, the outfielder whom the writers had chosen as the 1955 team’s top rookie, and Henry Aaron, who in his second year had been chosen—over the forty-one-homer Mathews—as the team’s Most Valuable Player.

Pretty heady stuff, all of it was—a harbinger. The season itself had been anticlimactic: the Braves had spent all of 1955 looking up at the Dodgers—who not only dusted the rest of the National League but finally beat the Yankees in the World Series after five losses—but individually, Henry had turned in a star performance: .314 average, 27 home runs, 106 runs driven in. In keeping with their unflattering portraits of Henry the person, the writers would have been remiss had they not reminded the world that Henry that night was about as animated as a three-toed sloth: “Aaron, who rarely shows emotion
⁶³
of any kind, admitted he was ‘thrilled’ by the honor,”
The Sporting News
reported. The truth was that Henry was quite proud of his 1955 season. He was upset that the year before, in 1954, Wally Moon had hit .300, while he had not, and it likely had cost him the Rookie of the Year award. In later years, he would remark that he was “disappointed at not winning. Not because Moon didn’t deserve it … he did. I just thought I could have done better. I figured if he could hit .300, I could, too.” He had better than doubled his home run total and by crossing the 100-RBI mark had initiated an enduring history as a devastating run producer.

The banquet was held ten days before his twenty-second birthday, and Henry was already enjoying a healthy sampling of the big-league caviar: single-breasted tuxedo with notched lapels, white carnation and winged collar, rubbing elbows with Frank Zeidler, the Socialist mayor of Milwaukee, National League president Warren Giles, and the commissioner himself, Ford Frick. The Grand Ballroom packed in over six hundred that night. But the club, as a general rule since opening its doors in 1891 with a goal of “promoting and providing a venue for German-American understanding and fellowship,” did not yet routinely admit blacks. For Henry, the rules were waived for one evening.

The night belonged to Grimm. No less an authority than
The Sporting News
reported that even sharing the stage with an obvious comer like Aaron and the kid Tanner, shining brightly as a future star of the Braves, it still was Grimm who “stole the show,” strumming “Shanty Town” on his left-handed banjo. While Grimm gushed about his excitement over the coming year, Henry reached the podium with characteristic deference. “We’ll be striving,” he said, “to bring all you fine Milwaukee people a pennant in 1956.” Tanner, green as the outfield grass, did not veer off of the reservation: “I’m sure we have the men who can do it.”

In only three years, Grimm had placed twice and showed, finishing third in 1954. In public, the Braves tipped their cap to the Dodgers, who rushed out of the blocks so quickly that nobody was going to catch them. There was no shame in losing the pennant to a team that had started the season 18–2 and went wire-to-wire. It was a boat race, Charlie said, just one of those fluky years when everything went right for a club; it just happened not to be his. The Dodgers were hungry—starving, in fact—for that first World Series and nobody, not even the Yankees this time, was going to stand in the way. Brooklyn had been schlepping for that first title since 1884, and with that group—Robinson and Reese, Duke Snider, the hard-hat Furillo, all soon to be Roger Kahn’s famed “Boys of Summer”—well, you had to figure they were going to make a last stand.

That was one way to look at it. Another way was to say that something was terribly wrong with a franchise that had Spahn, Burdette, Mathews, Adcock, and a rising Aaron and yet could only look at the Dodgers backside for six months. Tipping the cap was for the public. Internally Perini and his brain trust believed that, the Dodgers aside, maybe the problem existed from within. The Braves lost the 1955 pennant by thirteen and a half games and the closest they got to the Dodgers for the whole year was a distant ten and a half. It was indeed a boat race, and the Braves, supposedly a powerhouse, were left drifting harmlessly in the East River wake.

Showdowns between the two clubs further convinced Perini. Twenty-two times Milwaukee took the field with Brooklyn in 1955, and fifteen times the Brooks came out on top. And it didn’t matter if the games were held in narrow, boxy Ebbets Field or in the wide-open spaces of County Stadium, because while the Braves dropped eight of eleven games in Flatbush, they did only one better at home, losing seven of eleven at County Stadium. If Milwaukee couldn’t beat Brooklyn straight up, there would be no pennant. As the winter progressed, Perini began asking himself the question with a bit more frequency. Maybe the problem wasn’t Don Newcombe and Jackie and Pee Wee, as the conventional wisdom suggested. Maybe the problem was Charlie Grimm.

A
T THE END
of 1955, Grimm realized that the question of his survival was a fire he had to contain. While the Dodgers were about to taste the champagne, the word was that Grimm was out in Milwaukee, heading back to his beloved Cubs for a front-office position. No matter how much sand he applied, it was a rumor he could not extinguish. “I shouldn’t dignify either question
⁶⁴
with an answer,” he told the Associated Press. “I can’t deny anything which has no basis to it. I have not been contacted by the Cubs. I have another year on my contract here, and as far as I know, I will be back. And I am definitely not throwing in the towel here.” The Cubs rumor wasn’t exactly hearsay; Grimm was at his baseball best on the North Side, both as a player and a manager, and he didn’t hide just how much he loved that franchise.
^*

Perini was no coffee shop owner, oblivious to the day-to-day operation while Quinn made him money. He read the papers, kept his radar tuned, listened to what was being said around town. In 1956, Perini toured England to explore an expansion of a different type: He wanted baseball owners to consider buying financial stakes in English cricket and soccer teams, a foreign exchange of sorts, a cross-marketing endeavor that would be consummated in full nearly a half century later, when George Steinbrenner entered his New York Yankees into a partnership with the English soccer dynasty Manchester United.

Perini was aware of the knocks about his club: Milwaukee wasn’t tough enough in the clutch. They liked chasing the girls as much as chasing the pennant, and maybe a whole lot more. Even Adcock, their man-mountain first baseman, might have been a little more Jane than Tarzan. Adcock was a beast. He could rip a phone book in half with his bare hands. But Joe would never charge the mound. Pitchers could throw at him. Newcombe had put him in the hospital not once, but twice. Mathews used to try to fire him up—“Kick his ass, Joe.
⁶⁵
We’re right behind you”—but it did no good.

They had good players, and the boys weren’t afraid to mix it up, either. Henry used to say that Johnny Logan was the best at starting a fight, and Mathews the best at finishing it. But leadership, the kind that won pennants and not split decisions during a rhubarb, was another matter.

Perini knew his team’s weakness because everybody else did, too. Put all the clichés in a hat and pick one—“Baseball is a funny game”; “Sometimes a team just has your number”; “Those guys in the other uniforms are getting paid, too”—but none of the old saws could beat the trump-card edict of all winning ball clubs: “Beat the teams you’re supposed to beat.”

The two bottom-feeders of the National League—eighty-four-loss St. Louis and ninety-four-loss Pittsburgh—beat Milwaukee a combined twenty-two times in 1955. Getting beaten by the patsies of the league, more than anything that was happening at Ebbets Field, was what cost the Braves the pennant. Within the organization, the Braves knew too many games were being lost to the previous night’s hangover. Perini knew it, Quinn knew it, and the Braves coaches knew it. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the Brooklyn Dodgers knew it, too. And it was, of all people, the furious Robinson, who would always tell his mates, and sometimes the press, too, that when the Braves were good enough to get to the table, Milwaukee just didn’t have the fire to close the deal.

To make it official,
The Sporting News
put the Braves business in the street for all to see, summarizing with a simple, deadly sentence: “What the Braves need, more than anything else,” read a paragraph on September 28, 1955, “is that intangible thing called spark.”

Grimm
was
in the final year of his contract, but instead of providing security, not having a guaranteed future in Milwaukee beyond 1956 only made him look like a lame duck should the Braves struggle early. Add to that a little extra kindling: the persistent rumor that Perini and Quinn didn’t just want to ax Cholly; they wanted to replace him with the ferocious, canny Leo Durocher, who had just been bounced by the Giants. Everybody knew “the Lip” could wear out his welcome in places faster than he could drop an
F
bomb on the home plate umpire, but the man could manage. Charlie never got to the Series as a player, and as a manager, he saw his Cubs lose to the Yankees in 1932 and to the Tigers in 1935 and 1945. Durocher, meanwhile, won it all as a player with Ruth and won it all again with Dizzy Dean, and he would go down as the guy who inspired the nickname “the Gashouse Gang” for the 1934 Cardinals. He was hated, especially by the umps and the commissioner’s office, and maybe by some of his players, but in those days, Leo’s teams didn’t get worse when the leaves started to change. They didn’t miss when they sniffed a pennant, like they did in 1941 with the Dodgers—also in 1947, though Durocher had been suspended for a year for associating with gamblers—and in the miraculous 1951 season and the title year of 1954 with the Giants. No Durocher team would get shut out by the Pirates three times in a season when there was money to be had.
^*

Durocher didn’t just know how to manage; he lived the game, turned it inside out, studied the seams, felt baseball the way a pianist fingered his keys. “Baseball is a lot like church,”
⁶⁶
Durocher used to say. “Many attend, but few understand.”

Putting Durocher in charge of the Braves held special portent for a young Henry Aaron. It was Durocher who was Jackie Robinson’s manager when Robinson reached the majors in 1947. It was Durocher who took Willie Mays under his wing when Mays was called up in 1951 and the Giants won the pennant. The day after Aaron was honored in Milwaukee, Mays was in Minneapolis, attending a banquet in honor of Bill Rigney, the Giants new manager for 1956. That “the Franchise” flew to Minneapolis in January to welcome his new manager was significant, especially because Mays
still
walked on water for hitting .477 for the Minneapolis Millers before being called up to the big club for good in 1951. But instead of concentrating on Rigney, Willie talked nearly as much about how much he would miss Durocher.

“He was more than just a manager to me.
⁶⁷
I can’t explain it, but I know what Leo did for me,” Mays said, adding, “but certainly I’ll give Rigney 100 percent.”

Mays would be professional for Rigney, but he was no Durocher. Durocher knew how to talk to Willie, how to motivate him, coax the best performances out of him. Durocher was caustic, but knew how to chastise Willie without breaking his confidence. While Willie would have run through a brick wall for Durocher, Henry had Charlie Grimm calling him “Stepin Fetchit.” It was Grimm who repeated the old stories about how Henry didn’t know who Ford Frick was, even though the commissioner was seated next to him while Cholly sang like it was Saturday night at the
hofbrau
. And while it was Durocher who clashed with Robinson in the way that intense, driven men do, each stoking their similar, smoldering fires, Robinson would always respect Durocher for extracting from him the competitive elements that would make him great. But Durocher, who came from the bare-knuckle town of West Springfield, Massachusetts, didn’t care about skin color, not if you had the goods to be a ballplayer.

“I don’t care if the guy is yellow
⁶⁸
or black or has stripes like a fuckin’ zebra,” Durocher said in early 1947 when white Dodgers resisted the idea of being Robinson’s teammate. “I’m the manager and I say he plays.”

Durocher, Perini also knew, provided instant credibility, the big New York name that would trumpet to the baseball universe that Milwaukee wasn’t the bushes. By drawing two million fans twice, Perini was already the financial envy of the baron class, especially the owners who chafed at being second in those two-team cities—the Philadelphia A’s and St. Louis Browns had skipped town to Kansas City and Baltimore, respectively, within a year after Perini left Boston—and he knew he was close to fielding a dominant team, as well.

All of which added up to one nagging, significant thing:
expectations
, the kind that defined hungry baseball cities like New York and Boston, the kind that were just descending on Milwaukee and threatening to upset the idyllic equilibrium, free eggs and free cheese and free gas for a smile and an honest effort. Big-league baseball may have existed in Milwaukee for less than five years, but the attitude shift from just “happy to have a team” to “We deserve a pennant” was happening faster than Henry’s wrists whipped through the strike zone.