The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (32 page)

I
F THE PENNANT
had been lost at happy hour in 1956, the 1957 flag was being left in the emergency room. Already Bob Wolf in the
Journal
crafted a preemptive epitaph, referring to the Braves as “fading.”

John Quinn made two moves. He acquired first baseman Vernal “Nippy” Jones to back up Frank Torre at first. Second, he purchased from Wichita the contract of light-hitting outfielder Bob Hazle, who then put on the greatest five-week show in the history of baseball.

And that is the other beauty about the American game of baseball: There isn’t just one way to become an immortal. The gods could go to Mobile and touch Henry Aaron, giving him so wondrous a gift that he could hit a baseball four hundred feet with his hands in the wrong position, or you could be twenty-seven-year-old Bob Hazle, a guy held in such low esteem that the Braves tried to give him away for free in the draft and nobody wanted him.

That included Quinn, who told his farm director, John Mullen, that Ray Shearer, hitting .330 at the time, was the guy he wanted. Mullen convinced Quinn that Hazle was the better choice, because with Frank Torre in the starting lineup, the Braves did not have a left-handed batter on the bench.

On August 1, Conley shut out the Dodgers, 1–0. It was the kind of day Conley craved. He had started the season 0–4 but had evened his record and was beginning to see the results reflect how good he felt about his arm. The Braves were 61–41 after the win, in second place by half a game to St. Louis and two and a half games ahead of the Dodgers. Three days later, Hazle rapped two hits in another win over Brooklyn.

Then came the showdown for first place at Sportsman’s Park against the Cardinals. In the opener, Henry doubled home a run in the first. Hazle led off the second with a long homer off Lindy McDaniel. Henry hit a two-run homer in the third, and it didn’t matter that Buhl was in the middle of another heinous masterpiece (complete game, nine hits, eight walks, but only two runs), because Hazle went four for five with two runs scored, two RBIs, and a home run in a 13–2 demolition. The next day, Hazle ripped three more hits and drove in three more in a 9–0 win. In two games, Hazle was seven for nine with five RBIs and a home run, and the Braves swept. In Cincinnati, Hazle led a sweep of the Reds by scores of 12–4, 13–3, and 8–1, going seven for ten with a home run and five RBIs.

Robert Sidney Hazle was born December 9, 1930, in Laurens, South Carolina. He grew to cut an imposing figure at six one, 190 pounds, but baseball had never come easily at the professional level. After two years in the army, Hazle played two games for Cincinnati before being traded to the Braves as a throw-in as part of the deal for George Crowe. He remained in the minor leagues, with their punishing schedule and meager pay. He had often thought about quitting. At the time Quinn called him to the Braves, Hazle was hitting .289, but even the Braves front office hadn’t thought his streak was anything more than that of a mediocre player enjoying a rare hot month; thirty days earlier, Hazle had been hitting .230.

The Braves had won ten straight, and Hazle’s average was .556. In forty-one games, Hazle hit .403, and now the press was making up nicknames for Hazle. Within a year, his career would be over, a rash of swings and misses, harmless outs and feeble explanations, either for his miraculous 1957 season or his inexplicable inability ever to hit the ball safely again. For the next thirty-five years, until his death in 1992, Bob Hazle would forever be known as “Hurricane” Hazle, named by teammates and writers after Hazel, the deadly 1954 hurricane that killed close to two hundred people from North Carolina to Toronto. He would be the greatest of comets, and when Milwaukeeans would speak of the Braves years in Wisconsin in elegiac tones, he was as important and beloved a figure as Henry, Spahn, and Mathews, his more accomplished Hall of Fame–bound teammates.

For the month of August, Hazle hit .493. By the end of the month, the Braves finally had separation. Twisted in the wreckage were the Dodgers (seven back), the Cardinals (seven and a half out), Philadelphia (Good night and good luck at fourteen and a half out), and the Reds (fifteen and a half back: See you next year and drive safely!). The Hurricane rampaged, and all that was left in his wake was the inevitable clincher.

The great irony was that as the Hurricane was unleashing his greatest damage and the Braves had engineered that championship run that distanced themselves from the pack, Henry Aaron, the Triple Crown threat and MVP leader, endured his worst month of the year, hitting .255 during August.

W
HEN THE HISTORY
of the great ones is written, the words are never merely a mundane compendium of numbers. Somewhere, there must be a singular feat that stands as a calling card. Just being good every day by itself does not merit a ticket to Olympus. It is the reason why there is a difference between stars and
superstars
.

Ted Williams took his team to only one World Series, and in it he hit poorly, but people
still
talk about the Williams starbursts: the home run in the World Series in 1941, going six for eight over the season-ending doubleheader to hit .406, instead of sitting out to qualify for .400 at .3995, the home run in the final at bat of his career.

Ruth? Too many to count, but leave it at the 1932 World Series. Mays wasn’t just electric. He was a one-man power grid. Every great Yankee pennant run contained some DiMaggio stretch where he was the difference maker. In Clemente’s lionish pride, you could practically
hear
the Puerto Rican national anthem with each and every one of his raging steps. Then, lonely on the other side of the trail, was Ernie Banks, who carried that heavy and unfortunate asterisk of being the greatest player never to take his team to the World Series, of never having the
moment
that separated winning from losing, and him from the rest.

That’s why they were different, these millionth-percentile players. Just having one on the team meant somewhere, at some point, even if it occurred just once, there would be champagne at the end of the summer journey. They would do something that made the words sparkle when they hit the page, leaping magically, like a child’s eyes on Christmas morning.

T
HE OLD
B
RAVES
modus operandi of squeezing the bat just a little tighter as the September leaves changed did not disappear without resistance—old habits die hard—and the result was a tension that could have been felt from County Stadium up and down Wisconsin Avenue. The “Slop Thrower,” Herm Wehmeier, journeyman to the rest of the world but a Walter Johnson against Milwaukee, pitched a twelve-inning complete game, striking out eight, and St. Louis beat the Braves 5–4. The losing streak hit three; it swelled to eight out of twelve when the Phillies beat Spahn 3–2 in ten innings September 15. The lead was shrinking, and that wasn’t the only part of the trouble. Two of Henry’s greatest pitching enemies were the ones threatening to steal 1957 the way one of them had taken 1956. While Spahn was losing, Wehmeier beat the Pirates in the first game of a doubleheader, and Sam Jones finished the sweep in the nightcap, cruising 11–3. The lead was two and a half games.

During the next seven days, Henry Aaron took hold of the National League pennant, wrestled it to the ground, and stomped the life out of it: two hits and an RBI against the Phillies, three hits and home run number forty-one in the eighth inning to finish the Giants, two runs scored and an RBI the next day as Burdette beat the Giants again.

And on it went: back-to-back two-hit games in routs of Chicago, the first a 9–3 win for Spahn’s twentieth, home run number forty-two in the 9–7 finale September 22, when Hazle won it with a homer in the top of the tenth. They had won six straight and the lead was now five, with six games left to play.

The Cardinals arrived at County Stadium, with the Braves needing a win for the pennant. As is so often the case in baseball, the parallels were delicious, poetic. The Braves had been here before at the end, looking at the World Series, only St. Louis blocking their view of the promised land, when the Slop Thrower snatched the title away and Fred Haney promised them a summer of hell.

The night was September 23, Burdette versus that old cur, Wilmer “Vinegar Bend” Mizell. They would play three hours and thirty-three minutes, the second-longest game of the year, topped only when Gino Cimoli had homered off Red Murff in the bottom of the fourteenth at Ebbets way back in May. Burdette had been on the mound that day, too, a twelve-inning, eleven-hit, six-walk no-decision. Koufax was the winner.

Forty thousand came to County to witness the completion of the mission. One, a twenty-three-year-old history major at the University of Wisconsin named Allan Selig, was faced with a difficult choice: go to a night class or go to the game, with the hope that the Braves could clinch it that night. In later years, Selig would recall that the choice was not such a difficult one after all. He bought a bleacher ticket. In the first, Burdette escaped the first two batters before giving up an opposite-field double to Stan Musial, who would be stranded at second. Schoendienst singled in the bottom of the inning, only to have Logan kill the momentum with a double play.

Henry pulled a single to lead off the second. Adcock, back from his broken leg, and Pafko followed as the crowd fidgeted, eager for a reason to explode. Covington drove Henry home with a sacrifice fly that sent Fred Hutchinson out of the dugout. After one inning, Mizell was finished.

Into the game came another Aaron nemesis, head-hunting Larry Jackson, the same Jackson whom Henry had accused of throwing at him back in his rookie year, the same Jackson whom Chuck Tanner would refer to only as “that right-handed son of a bitch.”

But Jackson was good this night, quelling the insurrection. He would pitch the next seven innings on a wire, dancing into trouble as Milwaukee waited to erupt. In nine of ten innings, the Braves would put a runner on, and yet there would be no celebration. In fact, the place was at times monastery-quiet.

With one out in the sixth, Wally Moon singled and Musial doubled again. This time, Alvin Dark bounced a two-run single to center and Burdette would not escape.

In the seventh, Schoendienst singled. Logan sacrificed him to second and Mathews doubled him home to tie the score. Fred Hutchinson’s next move made clear Henry’s influence. With none on and one out in a tie game, the Cardinal manager
intentionally
walked Aaron—the go-ahead run—with another right-hander, Adcock, on deck to face the lefty Jackson. Adcock bounced into a rally-killing double play.

The Cardinals increased the pressure. Moon singled in the eighth and Musial knocked him to third with his third hit of the game. Irv Noren grounded to short and Logan threw out Moon at the plate.

For the Braves, dying to exhale, the game was excruciating. Milwaukee loaded the bases, with one out in the tenth, off Billy Muffett. Haney called Burdette back for Frank Torre, who hit into a double play to end the inning.

Fifty years later, Chuck Tanner sat behind the dugout at the Pittsburgh Pirates minor-league facility in Bradenton, not far from the Pink Motel, where he and Gene Conley had been roommates, and where he and Henry had become friends those dusty years past. He had been traded to Chicago earlier in the summer and hadn’t been part of the final pennant race, but Milwaukee was never far from him. He had struggled badly before he was traded and understood that being a bench player, sitting around for days, cold without being in the action and being asked to produce without the benefit of rhythm, was the hardest of jobs. Tanner was fond of Fred Haney, and it was Haney who’d given him his first job managing in 1963. The Braves were long gone from Bradenton, but Tanner thought about Henry.

“I don’t know if there was a way to figure it,
¹¹⁴
but I felt it then and I feel it now. There wasn’t a player I’d ever seen get more hits with two outs than Henry Aaron. A two-out hit, one that scores a run, is just
devastating
to a pitcher. It’s like a tease. You think you’re gonna get out of it, but you’re not. Before you know it, you’re dead meat, mister.”

Muffett retired Henry in the ninth, but the two had met in extra innings before, on August 17, when the Cardinals were taking three of four from the Braves. With a chance to sweep the series and make a tight race even closer, Henry hit a game-winning, one-out double off Muffett in the tenth for a 5–4 win.

Now, here they were in the eleventh. Logan singled between outs by Schoendienst and Mathews. Henry stood at the plate, with two outs. With none on back in the seventh, Hutchinson had walked him intentionally. Now, Adcock wasn’t even in the game, having been lifted for a pinch runner, and the pitcher, Conley, was on deck. Yet Fred Hutchinson made the fateful decision to pitch to Henry.

Bud Selig would not forget the sequence. It was the first pitch, and Henry leaned forward, hands back, and sliced the ball into the right-center gap. He quickly rose to his feet, more hopeful than certain that the ball would drop, that Logan could score from first. The right fielder, Irv Noren, took a hard angle racing toward the fence.

Chuck Tanner had seen that kind of swing from Henry many times before. “You wanna know how quick his hands were? There was a game when Henry had two strikes on him. The umpire was an old, tough bastard, Al Barlick. The ball was on the outside corner and Barlick had raised his right hand to call strike three.
Henry was out!
The ball was by him. The signal was up. And he swung and hit the ball out of the ballpark. Never saw anyone do it as many times as he could. Hit it right out of the park.”

Logan ran furiously, head down, and only the crowd told him the ball had cleared the fence. Henry had won the pennant. During the weeklong stretch that turned a close race into a title, Henry had come to bat twenty-eight times, nailed fourteen hits, scored eight runs, and hit three home runs.

The next day, after a night of beer showers and champagne and thinking about the Yankees in the World Series, “Toothpick Sam” Jones took the mound for the Cardinals. It was a meaningless game, but no confrontation between Henry and Sam Jones could ever be entirely meaningless. Jones loaded the bases in the first inning, and Henry, looking for an appropriate exclamation point to the regular season, blasted home run number forty-four—a grand slam—into the left-field seats.