The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (37 page)

But when Haney was told that Bruton would not be back until mid-May at the earliest, and even then it was unclear what kind of player he would be, Haney’s solution was simple, and it wasn’t to look to the trade market for help: Put Henry Aaron in center, permanently.

At the major-league level, there would not be a manager who Henry Aaron ever believed helped him become a better player. He would credit only two men in the minor leagues with improving him as a player and as a hitter. The first was Ben Geraghty in Jacksonville and the second was Mickey Owen, his manager with the Caguas team in Puerto Rico. Geraghty was quite likely the first white man who took an interest in his success, an invaluable dynamic for a young player, especially given the task of integrating the notorious South Atlantic League that faced Henry, Felix Mantilla, and Horace Garner. Watching him play with Caguas, Owen saw that Henry possessed an uncommon ability as a hitter, and he took it upon himself to help refine that ability.

In the major leagues, Charlie Grimm was more a drinking buddy than a skipper, and Henry hardly drank. Henry didn’t wish any man to lose his job, but he wasn’t exactly distraught when Grimm got the guillotine in June 1956. Gregory Spahn recalled that as an adolescent roaming the Braves clubhouse, he never saw Henry drink anything heavier than a soda. “If he ever had one beer,
¹³³
I don’t ever remember him having two,” Spahn said. But at least Grimm left him alone. Once Henry became a fixture in the lineup, Charlie let him play, batting fourth, playing right field.

But Fred Haney just couldn’t leave Henry alone. He had put him in center in 1957, after Bruton was hurt. Henry could understand that at least. The team had been in a pennant race and was faced with an emergency situation. In the heat of July, Henry had been his only option.

But now, in the dead of winter, with a full six weeks of spring training before the season began, this was no emergency. The team had known for months that Bruton would not be available, and yet playing Henry out of position was the choice Haney decided was appropriate.

Henry was insulted by Fred Haney. In addition to being convinced that Haney was uninspiring as a leader, Henry believed that his manager was stunting his development as a player both at the plate and, quite obviously, in the field. It was Haney, after all, who had come up with the grand idea of batting Henry second. Haney had even stuck Henry at second base a few times.

Henry saw something else, and when he thought about it, the smoke would billow from his ears: Why was he always the lucky one who got screwed? He may have been quiet, but no player ever possessed a greater sense of his own ability than Henry Aaron. And it wasn’t just that Henry had an overly inflated opinion of himself. Willie Mays was the biggest attraction in the game and had won an MVP and a world title. Mantle had four titles, an MVP, and a triple crown to boot. But Henry was now an MVP, a world champion, a batting champion. He’d had one two-hundred-hit season, and on August 15, 1957, in the seventh inning of an 8–1 rout over the Reds at Crosley Field, Henry had bombed a two-run homer off Don Gross. The home run was the one hundredth of Henry’s career. Before his twenty-first birthday, Henry was averaging 180 hits a season.

Back in those days, before guaranteed contracts and performance incentives and a union that made the players more than hired hands, it was more common for managers to tinker with players and their positions, but in general, the great ones didn’t get messed with—at least not as easily as Haney seemed to be doing with Henry. Mays played center field and batted third. You could write his name in the lineup in
pen
. Duke Snider? Center field. Mantle? Ditto. Ted Williams? Left field. DiMaggio? Exactly. (Though, it was also true that Haney told Eddie Mathews, who would one day be elected to the Hall of Fame and be considered perhaps the greatest third baseman of all time, that he was thinking of playing him in left if Covington didn’t get it together.)

Haney was mucking with another subsection of the ballplayer code: Don’t send me out there to look foolish. Playing defense was hard. It required repetition, and time, and study. Henry didn’t want to stand in center field in the Polo Grounds, with its 485-feet straightaway to center, only to be embarrassed by balls coming at him from angles from which he’d never grown accustomed. By putting him in different positions each year, there was no way he would be recognized for his defensive ability.

In his previous four seasons, Henry might have voiced his displeasure with Haney’s moves, but only to intimates, a Mantilla or a Bruton, for example. In the spring of 1958, Haney would not tell Henry what position he would play, waiting to find out if a couple of kids, the former Duke star Al Spangler or Harry Hanebrink, would work out. Henry believed it should have been the other way around. Haney should have told Aaron what position he’d play, then filled in the gaps around him.

“That position in center
¹³⁴
is like no other in the outfield,” Henry told the
New York Times
before a spring game with the Dodgers. “You’re in on all the plays, either backing up the guys on your right and left or running in to back up throws to second, keeping your eyes out for the pickoff throw to second that might go wild and having to run all over the outfield, covering more than I’m used to.”

And there was something else: “I’ll be cut short in some things like the All-Star game if I play center. With guys like Willie Mays playing there what chance have I of making the team?”

Maybe it was a question of accumulation, of too much of everything: the tragedy of losing one child and praying for the survival of the second, combined with the whirlwind of publicity and demand for public time that came with being in the spotlight. During the offseason, Henry had appeared on
The Steve Allen Show
. He traveled to New York to be honored for “high principle and achievement” from the Sports Lodge of B’nai B’rith. Fred Miller gave him a job in the Miller publicity department, traveling the country to say nice things about beer, Milwaukee, and baseball. He went from Boston to Manchester, New Hampshire, to New York, Denver, and Salt Lake City. Before the tour, Henry joined Logan, Conley, Mathews, Torre, Covington, and a few other teammates in Chicago to play a benefit basketball game against the Harlem Globetrotters. In that game, the Trotters featured a new showman named Meadowlark Lemon.

When the 1958 season began, Henry couldn’t hit. There were a couple of flashes—a two-homer game April 24 in Cincinnati that capped a three-for-three day—but after going one for five in the first game of a doubleheader May 30 in Pittsburgh, Henry was hitting .232. Between the two-homer game against the Reds and a two-run shot off Ron Kline in Pittsburgh, Henry homered just once—a two-out shot off Robin Roberts in a 5–2 loss—for his only home run in a span of 121 at bats.

Henry slogged through the first half of the season. For the first time in his career, he would spend the entire first half of the baseball season unable to enjoy consecutive days with his batting average over .300.

T
HE
B
RAVES TOOK
over first place two weeks before the all-star break and held on to it for a month. During that time, Henry began to experience that phenomenon special to baseball: of water somehow reaching its natural level. He had not hit for power for the first month and a half of the season, could not find the rhythm that made him the most dangerous man of the summer, and, like every ballplayer, did not offer much insight as to why he was not hitting. Nor did he explain how and why he came out of it so forcefully—thirteen hits in twenty-one at bats in one five-day stretch against the Dodgers and Reds, and all of them rockets. In a week, his average shot up thirty points.

Then the thunder came. July 21–22, against the Cardinals at County Stadium: Henry came to bat ten times, raked seven hits—three for six the first day, followed up with a four-for-four afternoon—but the Braves gained little daylight in the standings. The day before, at Forbes Field, Bob Friend recorded but one out, and the Giants bombed the Pirates, 7–3. San Francisco had caught and passed the Braves in the standings, taking a half-game lead. Nine days later, the two met for a critical four-game series at County Stadium, a game in Milwaukee’s favor separating the two.

Raw numbers never tell the complete story. Maybe the sense of ambivalence that seemed to wash over Milwaukee was nothing more than a natural leveling of things, what the economists call a “market correction.” The civic enthusiasm that welcomed the Braves when they arrived from Boston was so overwhelming, the passion so complete, that it was impossible to sustain. Perhaps, even, the growing attitude among the players, fans, and ownership that baseball had lost some of its magic was not quite accurate in the first place. The Braves were still leading the league in attendance. They had been in first place or near the top for the previous three years. What passed for concern in Milwaukee would have been welcome in cities that couldn’t pay their fans to come watch a ball game. And yet there was concern: concern that the magic of Milwaukee baseball was fading away, that perhaps the arrival of baseball after decades of being strictly minor-league had amounted to nothing more than temporary euphoria. Maybe Perini hadn’t discovered oil in the form of baseball prosperity and Milwaukee was not, after all, a lasting model of sport and community. Maybe the town was nothing but a boomtown in disguise.

What made them all nervous—Lou Perini especially—was the sudden
feel
of the place, especially in comparison to the time before the championship. If you weren’t careful, the numbers could be very deceiving, even the sellouts, for there was a big difference between a crowd of forty thousand, with twenty thousand more fans unable to get into the ballpark, and a sellout of forty thousand, with some fans at the park because they were unable to get rid of their tickets. The concern was real, and too many people—from Henry to Eddie Mathews to Perini—sensed an ominous, intangible difference for all of them to be wrong.

Still, on a warm Friday night, August 1, with Willie Mays in town, having designs on taking the pennant from the home team, more than 39,000 packed County Stadium for the first-place showdown between the Braves and Giants, Burdette versus McCormick. The game was thrilling, tense, the Giants playing desperately and inefficiently, a wheezing team clawing to save itself. Burdette was hit hard, eleven hits in eight and two-thirds innings, but he managed to escape each problem, striking out eight, forcing double plays, giving up harmless two-out hits. The game was 1–1 until both teams tallied in the late innings. In the top of the ninth, Burdette labored to hold a 4–2 lead. With one on and two out, Willie Kirkland ripped a double to put the tying runs at the corners and the go-ahead run—Mr. Mays himself—at the plate. Burdette wouldn’t get the chance to face him. Haney called on Don McMahon.

McMahon threw a fastball, and then another. And then he threw another. And then he threw four more fastballs. Mays wouldn’t budge, fouling off one, taking another close for a ball, pushing the count full. Del Crandall was behind the dish, playing sign language with McMahon. Now, this was war. Willie took McMahon’s best, one heater after another. And that was the way to pitch to Mays, because you didn’t throw him breaking balls.

But then Crandall called for a curve and McMahon agreed reluctantly. He wound and tossed a little spinner at Mays, who lunged and chipped it foul.

Now Crandall was calling for
another
curve … and that was like trying to pet an alligator. You could double up fastballs on Mays, but not curveballs, not if you were fond of living. But that’s what Crandall called, and that’s what McMahon threw, a little teardrop of a pitch that kissed the sky and spun easily into Crandall’s glove, just perfect enough for home-plate umpire Dusty Boggess to raise his right hand and call strike three and the game over, leaving Mays frozen as the Braves celebrated.

That night, in his suite at the Knickerbocker, Fred Haney poured himself a drink and chatted with one of his California chums,
Los Angeles Times
columnist Braven Dyer. “I have an idea,” the skipper said, “that that was the big one tonight.”

The next afternoon, Henry enjoyed the kind of day power hitters craved—four for four, with a home run, two doubles, and three driven in. The sun-drenched crowd of 34,770 watched the rout, prompting John Drebinger of the
Times
to remark, “Anyone of the opinion that baseball is waning in this sector had better recheck his figures. When a town produces a capacity crowd on a Saturday afternoon it can scarcely be said to be disinterested.”

The end of the Giants as pennant contenders came the next day, when Spahn completed the doubleheader sweep, 6–0. San Francisco had come in having lost three in a row and now had been bounced four straight by the division leaders. The Braves lead was now six. By the time the losing stopped, the Giants skid had reached ten out of eleven. They would not contend again, finishing twelve games out. Chiefly responsible for the San Francisco demise were the Braves—who beat them sixteen out of twenty-two times during the season—especially Henry, whose fire glowed with the sight of Mays in the other dugout. Henry hit .333 against the Giants, with nineteen runs driven in, his most against any team.

That left the Pirates, and the rising Roberto Clemente, who were now a half game out of second place, five games back.

If the Giants pennant hopes had been undone by their head-to-head meetings with the Braves, the Pirates knew the Braves couldn’t keep them from winning the pennant, for Pittsburgh gave Milwaukee trouble, on the mound and at the plate. That the Dodgers, Giants, and Pirates would come to County Stadium in succession was a gift from the schedulers to the fans, who enjoyed watching the most driven players play with added passion.

For years, Henry would downplay his rivalry with Mays. There was no advantage in it for him, he would say. Henry wanted to be a great player, regardless of the competition. Mays was cool and confident, the older brother to the young lions who were dominating the game. He was the first transcendent black superstar. Jackie was the first black player, admired, respected, but Willie was beloved, a player whose talents were undeniable and whose disposition, unlike Jackie’s, didn’t threaten whites. Mays would never betray any rivalry with Henry, or any player, for that matter. Willie even used his confidence to influence the debate. Whenever he was asked who was the greatest player he ever saw, Willie would reply, “I thought I was.” Still, despite each man’s protestations, there was never a great deal of warmth between the two. Henry wanted to be the best. Willie played as if he was always in the lead—and he was.