Seventh Inning: Hank’s Dixiecrats on the Braves
With the CNN folks still waiting for our arrival to the golf club, with the rain still crashing from the sky, with the driver of the car sent by the cable channel still rattling on about all things Hank Aaron through mesmerized eyes, and with the strikingly high distance still not shrinking from the sidewalk to the floor of the front passenger’s side of the vehicle, I attempted to help the tired and aching man out of the wheelchair. One foot at a time, I thought.
That, and I prayed.
“Listen, can you grab Hank’s other arm and let’s see if we can do this without getting somebody hurt?” I told the driver, who nodded as he tried holding the umbrella he had over us with one hand while he used his other to do whatever he could do with the tired and aching man.
The driver couldn’t do much, but the prayers worked. Somehow, despite a few close calls here and there involving the head, the arms, and the fingers of the tired and aching man as we struggled to get him seated in one piece, it was done.
Well, that part was over. While my phone kept ringing and buzzing (“Are you here yet?”) as I climbed into the back seat, positioning myself directly behind the tired and aching man, the driver kept talking all things Hank Aaron, as Hank Aaron tried each time—courtesy of his contagious laugh, easy smile, and occasional “Why, thank you. Thank you very much”—to become Hank Aaron for that moment instead of the tired and aching man.
Oh, boy, I thought, as I called the CNN producer to say we were on our way. If we pull this off, I thought some more, it will rank somewhere on the all-time fantasy scale between the stuff of Mother Goose and those who run baseball saying they’re really trying to get more African Americans involved in every aspect of the game while keeping straight faces.
Jackie always saw through those straight faces.
So did Hank.
Just before Henry Louis Aaron turned 73 on February 5, 2007, he was in a reflective mood during one of our chats at Turner Field. His thoughts involved the good, the bad, and the ugly (and boy, was there ugly) after his post-playing days turned into his ongoing role as an executive with the Atlanta Braves. Time Warner was on the verge of selling the franchise to Liberty Media, and Hank thought about Ted Turner, the cable television maverick who bought the team in the spring of 1976. Turner hired the suddenly-retired Braves icon that fall.
Hank thought about Terry McGuirk, Turner’s right-hand man who was much more than that. McGuirk was such the glue for all of Turner’s endeavors (TBS, CNN, the Braves, the Atlanta Hawks, and the Atlanta Thrashers) that both Time Warner in 1996 and Liberty Media about a decade later kept McGuirk around when they purchased the Braves. It allowed McGuirk to continue as the final decision-maker for the franchise on just about everything. McGuirk was even more than that. He was Hank’s racquetball partner and trusted pal and he ranked among the most decent human beings you’ll ever find in corporate America. Hank thought those things as well as about Susan Bailey, his loyal executive assistant.
Then Hank thought about other positives involved with his then 31-year career in the Braves’ front office. “Really, the Braves have been very good to me in so much as and as far as what I want to do at this point in my life,” Hank said, still conflicted at the time over whether to keep working at his leisure as a Braves official or to retire in his deep senior years with his wife, Billye, by leaving Atlanta for their other home in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Hank leaned toward staying, adding, “You know, Terence, I’ve been with the ballclub all these many years really and I’ve never been taken off the payroll. I’ve never asked them for a raise. Same check I’ve been getting, and that’s fine. The only thing I can say is: they’ve treated me fairly decent in so much I can go and I have a key to everywhere in the clubhouse, everywhere in that ballpark. I can go to the office and I can do this and I can do whatever I want to do, and they treat me well, and when I say ‘they,’ I’m referring to Terry McGuirk who invites me to come to spring training, you know?”
Yes, I knew.
I also knew there was the bad stuff for Hank during his three decades in the Braves’ front office. Then there was the petty stuff along with the unnecessary stuff, especially given the stature of the man involved.
Henry Louis Aaron played his last major league game as baseball’s all-time greatest player on Sunday, October 3, 1976, at Milwaukee County Stadium. At 42 his final swing came in the sixth inning to produce an RBI single between the shortstop and the third baseman for the hometown Brewers against the Detroit Tigers, and then three things happened at once:
While I was dealing with my Dixiecrats at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Hank was battling his own (both inside and outside of the Braves organization), and it contributed to our bond. Here’s how Hank’s Dixiecrats operated: when they thought he functioned as a figurehead in the Braves front office (as a former Black superstar who smiled a lot and kept his mouth shut, especially on racial issues), they hugged him, and that wasn’t surprising. Henry Louis Aaron or not, such often is the mind-set for many in White America toward African American males who aren’t perceived in the minds of many in White America as threatening in the slightest way.
There were two of those “Everybody Loves Hank” stretches for Aaron with the Braves after his playing career. The first one happened from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. Hank was fresh from the Brewers—with the glow of No. 715 in his recent past and a trip to Cooperstown five years ahead. The public viewed that Hank Aaron as mostly the humble Alabama slugger who mostly kept his head down and who mostly said nothing while facing Ruth-loving racists. The second of those “Everybody Loves Hank” stretches went longer, and it spanned from the time he changed his mind about retiring as a Braves official in early 2007 through his death on January 22, 2021.
Mostly, there was that “Controversial Hank” stretch, and it occurred between those “Everybody Loves Hank” stretches. African Americans often are labeled “controversial” when they give opinions their Dixiecrats don’t like, which meant Hank and I regularly compared notes during his middle years as a Braves executive. I was the “controversial” Black columnist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Jackie Robinson was “controversial,” too. So, it isn’t coincidental Henry Louis Aaron faced external and internal turmoil in the Braves front office during his “Controversial Hank” stretch. He spent that time becoming Jackie often and boldly by speaking on baseball’s discriminatory actions toward African Americans and social injustice overall.
This was fate wrapped in destiny involving Jackie, Hank, and myself. The way Hank usually distributed his messages as the 21st century Jackie was through me as The Hank Aaron Whisperer, operating either in print with The AJC or over the national and local airways. During that “Controversial Hank” stretch, when he kept slamming home runs with his tongue regarding baseball’s sorry ways with African Americans, he also kept doing his job (just like the “controversial” Black guy he knew at The AJC). Hank was splendid as a major league team executive, by the way. He was too splendid for his Dixiecrats. They tried to portray Henry Louis Aaron, the Major League Baseball team executive, as just another Black guy who was overmatched and incompetent.
Hank’s Dixiecrats around the Braves’ front office didn’t attack with the racist letters and the vicious calls he experienced during his chase of Babe Ruth’s record during the early 1970s.
That was the redneck way. Hank’s Dixiecrats preferred the necktie way.
I could relate.
That was the redneck way. Hank’s Dixiecrats preferred the necktie way. As was the case for my Dixiecrats at The AJC, Hank’s Dixiecrats around the Braves organization used mind games. He also became a frequent media target over his habit of speaking freely to The Hank Aaron Whisperer on those inequities in baseball and beyond. There were national jabs at Hank here and there. Still, he was ripped the most by supposedly outraged hosts and their callers on news talk radio stations in Atlanta and by The AJC opinion writers (sports and otherwise) who weren’t The Hank Aaron Whisperer.
Hank also got a blast from the past as a Braves executive when he received hate mail and ugly messages from anonymous cowards. About those mind games hurled at Hank: the in-house ones were crushed whenever possible by Turner and McGuirk, his eternal supporters, always seeking to have his back that was the target for many during that “Controversial Hank” stretch of his post-playing years.
Hank and I discussed the Braves executives as we huddled after one of the yearly events the franchise held in his honor around what the Braves called “Hank Aaron Heritage Weekend,” which took place a few years before his death. “I try to keep my distance from most of all these guys,” Hank said of the other Braves executives, while shaking his head.
His words took me back to that chat we had in early 2007 at Turner Field, where he said he was appreciative of the slew of personal honors from the Braves, but he added he also was realistic, especially given his Dixiecrats in the organization. “I don’t know if I expect anything, whereas I’m treated the way I should be in certain respects, other than Terry McGuirk. I don’t bother with too many of the others,” Hank said. “The only reason I’m there is simply because the fact that [Liberty Media] wouldn’t have the team if it would not have been for them agreeing [in February 2007 with Baseball commissioner Bud Selig, Hank’s pal from his Milwaukee Braves days] to all things I was involved in. So, that’s the only reason I’m there. The commissioner was not going to give them the team. But anyhow, Terry McGuirk has always treated me with some respect really. I’ve had a lot of respect from him. In fact, I talk to him right now, and he probably is the only one that I really had any regard for, and that’s going back to when I served on the board [of directors for the Braves]. He treated me like I was somebody.”
Hank paused with emotion before saying: “But Terence, some of these people just…just…” Hank shook his head without finishing.
“I know. You know I know,” I said, as we chuckled in unison over our dealings with enough mind games from our collective Dixiecrats to keep psychiatrists busy through the next millennium.
During the 1990s, when Hank began roaring even louder to me for public distribution about baseball’s issues with African Americans, Turner ignored the screaming from Hank’s growing critics and he approached Hank about having an office at the owner’s massive CNN Center in downtown Atlanta. Hank would keep his nicely structured one at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. Turner just thought Henry Louis Aaron deserved another one, something grander.
Hank politely declined, but Turner strongly insisted. Then Hank agreed. He spent much of a day adding some of this and a lot of that to his new quarters, which nearly touched the sky on the 14th of the 15 floors at CNN Center. Massive windows dominated the place, and they gave Hank a gorgeous view of the so-called “City in a Forest,” featuring Atlanta’s combination of skyscrapers, hills, and pines. “Now listen to this, Terence: great big office. I mean, it was huge, man. I had three double windows and everything and I went there the next day, and the office door had my name and Bill Bartholomay’s name on it,” Aaron said, laughing, referring to the Braves’ chairman of the board who bought the Milwaukee version of the franchise in 1962 before he moved it to Atlanta after the 1965 season.
While Hank spent the majority of his time within a short drive to both CNN Center and Atlanta Fulton-County Stadium from his southwest Atlanta home, Bartholomay was only an occasional visitor to Georgia. He mostly traveled between New York and Palm Beach when he wasn’t home in Chicago, where he was an accomplished insurance guy. Bartholomay’s name on the door made no sense. Well, not unless you understood Hank had his Dixiecrats, but he also had McGuirk, who received a knock on his CNN Center door from his racquetball partner. Hank had a question. “Terry, did you and Ted tell me I was going to have my own office up here? That’s what I asked him, and [Terry] said, ‘Yeah, it’s right down here,’” Hank said, recalling how they walked down the hall to see “Hank Aaron” and then “Bill Bartholomay” in front of them on the door across the way.
With eyes flashing, McGuirk yanked down the Bartholomay sign and then he rushed into the office of the CNN official responsible for the situation. Hank watched nearby as McGuirk shouted, “This is Hank Aaron’s office, and it doesn’t belong to anybody else.” After that, McGuirk flung the Bartholomay sign to the floor and then he stomped on it while telling the CNN official, “When you want to do something, you come and ask me!”
Hank laughed with the memory, adding, “I’ll never forget that.”
I’ll never forget my visit with Hank inside of his CNN office during June 1996, when the U.S. postal service kept delivering hate mail not far from the door that finally had only his name near the top. “You just got another one,” Bailey said, yelling from the outer office, where she operated as Hank’s personal assistant throughout his post-playing career.
Hank shrugged, looking at me sitting across the way, and then he said without much of an expression, “I’m used to it.”
Unfortunately, Hank was.
During Hank’s pursuit of Babe Ruth’s career home run record, he spent two years during the 1970s battling opposing pitchers and threatening messages from that other group of cowards. Then, after a honeymoon period for Hank of maybe a year as a Braves executive not afraid to speak the truth about racism, he was blasted for more than two decades through those letters, calls, talk shows, and newspaper columnists, particularly over his criticisms of Major League Baseball regarding its dealing with minorities.
There also was Hank’s controversy of the moment when I visited him in his CNN office during that 1996 summer day. As part of a CNN documentary on Cuba’s love affair with baseball, Hank was shown in widely distributed photos with Turner and his wife, Jane Fonda. That trio became a quartet when Cuba dictator Fidel Castro joined the group, and Hank told me of the memory, “All I know is that I talked to Castro, and they received me very well.”
Hank told me something else. With the Summer Olympics prepared to start in Atlanta a few weeks later, he said he would invite the three dozen or so teenagers comprising the Cuban national baseball team to his home for a barbecue. He said his Spanish-speaking daughter, Ceci, would serve as translator for the group seeking to defend its gold medal. “They’ll be strangers when they come all the way over here, and I want to make them feel at home,” Aaron told me as Bailey shouted in the distance.
“Here’s another one,” she said.
Aaron shook his head, adding, “We’ll have chicken. I’ll get some pies. I’ll even take a few of them shopping because I know they’ll get a kick out of that.”
Oh, boy, I thought. I asked Hank if he would try to ease the yells from the yahoos in waiting over this by doing something similar for Team USA baseball players. Hank shrugged, saying, “I don’t know the American players. Plus, I’m not into politics when it comes to Cuba or anything else. I just know I got a chance to meet [the Cuban players], and they are great kids.”
What about the yahoos?
Hank laughed, saying, “I don’t care what people think.”
While the Dixiecrats at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution put my column detailing everything I just mentioned on Page 5 (at least it wasn’t above a tire or lawnmower ad), they reserved a spot at the top of the front page of their sports section for a piece from one of the White columnists on Braves pitcher John Smoltz losing that day to the St. Louis Cardinals.
My column was the talk of the nation. The Smoltz column? Not so much.
As for Hank’s Dixiecrats, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Furman Bisher spoke for all of them by writing of Hank in May 1991: “His main service to the Braves has been titular rather than active. In a sense, he has been a pensioned artifact, playing the role of a professional Hank Aaron, Home Run King.”
If you go by Bisher’s analysis, along with those of others among Hank’s Dixiecrats, Henry Louis Aaron was a lousy figurehead. Hank spent his 13 years through 1989 over the Braves’ player development office supervising the progress of future baseball All-Stars such as Dale Murphy, Bob Horner, Bruce Benedict, Glenn Hubbard, Rafael Ramirez, Gerald Perry, Jeff Blauser, Ron Gant, David Justice, and Steve Avery. Then there was the pitching duo of Tom Glavine and Smoltz. They evolved under Hank’s early watch into All-Stars who became Baseball Hall of Famers.
In addition, Hank was omniscient regarding the hiring of coaches and managers for the Braves organization. Exhibit A: in 1980 after Brian Snitker played four years in the minor leagues for the Braves as a forgettable backup catcher, Hank called Snitker into his tiny yet efficient office in West Palm Beach, Florida. Hank saw something in Snitker that Snitker didn’t see in himself, and that was his future as a Major League Baseball manager. But first Hank wondered if Snitker would stop playing the game to begin coaching for the franchise, starting with the Braves’ rookies in Bradenton, Florida. Snitker agreed. Before long Snitker spent the next two decades coaching or managing Braves minor league teams in Durham, Danville, Myrtle Beach, Anderson, Sumter, Greenville, Richmond, Gwinnett, and anywhere else from the middle of nowhere.
That was the CliffNotes part of the Aaron-Snitker story. “I can’t tell you how many times, how many people in the Braves organization wanted me to fire Brian Snitker over the years, saying, ‘He can’t do this,’ and ‘He ain’t that,’ but I wouldn’t listen to them, even though they kept saying, ‘Why? So why do you keep this guy around?’” Aaron told me, shaking his head before an event in his honor at Atlanta’s Truist Park in 2019, when that same Brian Gerald Snitker was in his fourth season as Braves manager. “I always told [the folks who wanted Aaron to fire Snitker], ‘Well, the reason I don’t fire him is because he’s good. He does a great job.’ He knows baseball and he knows how to deal with people the right way. He was loyal to the franchise to the point in which he would do anything you asked him to do, no matter how low somebody else would think it would be. There was just something about him that let me know he was the kind of person the Braves needed. So I didn’t pay them any attention really.”
Good for Hank, and great for the Braves.
Snitker was Hank’s last hire.
With that nudge from Henry Louis Aaron, the former backup catcher who many in the franchise wanted gone, stayed around Hank’s system for all of that minor league work. Then Snitker had the first of several highlights of his Braves career by serving as the major league team’s third-base coach from 2007 to 2013. Then he was named Braves interim manager in May 2016. Then he got the full-time gig the next season. Then he won baseball’s National League Manager of the Year honors in 2018. Then, after a second consecutive award from The Sporting News as National League Manager of the Year, he took the Braves to within two runs of reaching the World Series during the 2020 season. Then, with the Braves dedicating their 2021 season in Hank’s memory, Snitker took his team from stumbling through July to jumping with joy in November after wining the World Series.
Through it all, Snitker couldn’t stop praising Aaron. That included the emotional speech Snitker gave during a memorial at Truist Park near Hank’s statue, following Hank’s death on January 22, 2021. “The reason I’m here today is because of Hank Aaron,” Snitker said after he paused just shy of forever for the lump to leave his throat.
Hank’s homecoming soon followed. On a winter afternoon of warmth and brightness in Georgia, the historic Friendship Baptist Church in downtown Atlanta was sparse on Wednesday, January 27, 2021 due to COVID-19 restrictions. Henry Louis Aaron died five days earlier, and only a handful of family members were allowed to gather inside the sanctuary for his funeral. The few people in attendance beyond Hank’s relatives included eulogist Andrew Young, who was among Martin Luther King Jr.’s top lieutenants and long-time pal and neighbor of Aaron; Atlanta Braves CEO Terry McGuirk, who was Hank’s old racquetball partner and the person he trusted most around his franchise of nearly 70 years; and Houston Astros manager Dusty Baker, who was Hank’s unofficial son when they played for the Braves during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Among those kept from attending the funeral for pandemic safety reasons were me and other honorary pallbearers. “I can speak to some people to see if there is a way get you into the service,” Billye Aaron said, pausing from grieving her recently departed husband to say over the phone she would start by seeking a special exemption for me from Friendship Baptist Church Pastor Richard W. Wills Sr.
Even though I appreciated Billye’s offer, I declined. I hadn’t a problem watching the exhaustive coverage of Hank’s passing on all of the local Atlanta television stations.
I had similar thoughts the previous day, when the Braves held a memorial service for Hank at Truist Park, their home base. With a quick text to McGuirk, who always treated me well through the decades, I knew I could attend that equally pandemic-restricted gathering. Instead, I preferred to commemorate Hank’s life and times quietly, which described how the man himself operated more often than not. I said as much on the NBC Nightly News, when Lester Holt called me for an interview about Hank’s death. So, after I bundled up for the 40-something degree weather, I cycled the seven miles from my house to Truist Park before the Braves’ tribute began. Nobody was around when I rode to the side of the ballpark that allowed you to peek through a set of bars for a glimpse at the majestic Hank Aaron statue located in the Braves museum-like concourse area. All I could do was stare and smile. Even in death, the thought of Henry Louis Aaron triggered joy in my soul.
Before long, I heard sirens. I pedaled in the direction of the Bobby Cox statue, located near one of the main Truist Park gates, and I watched the police motorcycles stop. Billye climbed out of one of the cars. So did Young and other family members. I thought about moving closer to say something or at least to connect eyes with somebody and wave, but I didn’t. To me, this was their moment. So was the funeral the following afternoon, and then everything changed over the subsequent days, weeks, and months.
Just like that, the celebration of Henry Louis Aaron extended to the Braves, Atlanta history, Major League Baseball, sports in general, civil rights, and fairy tales.
What happened next was the stuff of Mother Goose.
The Braves dedicated their 2021 season to Hank and they showed as much early and often along the way to concluding with their ultimate tribute to baseball’s greatest player ever.
They won the World Series in his honor.
Here was the sequence:
I held my own memorial service for Hank at Truist Park and I invited only myself. Hours before the first pitch of the Braves’ home opener in early April against the Philadelphia Phillies, I went to his statue. As had been the case since the ballpark opened in 2017, there were the slew of Hank Aaron displays everywhere, and they gave details of his career. There were the 755 bats representing his home runs in Major League Baseball. There also was the continuous video that played high above that part of the concourse to describe Hank’s career through film clips, photos alternating between color and black and white, and the voice of a narrator. I had seen it all before and I knew it all in general, but as an audience of one during this solemn occasion, I did it all again. I even took a selfie without much thought of the Hank video playing in the background.
Later, when I got home, I looked at the selfie. I mean, I really looked at it and I noticed it showed Hank on the continuous video smiling his contagious smile over my left shoulder from high above on the big screen—and from High Above period.
It was beautiful.
As for most of the Braves’ season, it was brutal.
They lacked their No. 1 starting pitcher all year due to an Achilles injury (Mike Soroka). They lost their cleanup hitter (Marcell Ozuna) after late May following his arrest on domestic violence charges. They spent three months through early August without their starting catcher (Travis d’Arnaud) due to a damaged thumb. They watched their best player (Ronald Acuna) tear his ACL in mid-July to leave the lineup for the rest of 2021. In addition, the Braves stayed below .500 until the first week of August, but then they used Hank’s spirit and six trades around baseball’s July 31 trade deadline to spark a miracle.
Somehow, the Braves won the National League East division for a fourth consecutive year, and then a theme developed in the playoffs. The Braves beat the favored Brewers during the National League Division Series. Afterward, with folks still rubbing their eyes from the Brewers upset, the Braves shocked the favored Los Angeles Dodgers for the National League pennant. Finally, the Braves grabbed their first world championship since 1995 after they handled the favored Astros during the best-of-seven World Series in six games.
Before Game Three at Truist Park, Aaron’s presence was everywhere. Braves officials held a pregame ceremony featuring a two-minute and 30-second film on the video screen of his career, and that was followed by his widow, Billye, and several of his children walking onto the field to watch Hank Aaron Jr. throw out the ceremonial first pitch. At one point, an emotional Baker left the Astros dugout for the pitcher’s mound to greet each of Hank’s relatives.
With Hank, Hank, and more Hank dominating the ballpark, the Braves won that night, of course, and they grabbed two of the next three games, including the World Series clincher on the road. Here was the biggest thing: amidst the pixie dust falling on the Braves’ road to a world championship, McGuirk kept announcing before television cameras and elsewhere that Hank was High Above guiding the Braves along the way. Most strikingly, when McGuirk stood on the World Series victory stage at Minute Maid Park in Houston, he said through wet eyes that Henry Louis Aaron spent the season operating as their “angel.”
McGuirk was correct.
Sometimes, down the stretch of the 2021 season for the Braves, Hank stood at the plate or on the pitcher’s mound. Other times, he took the field, ran the bases, or made front office, managerial, and coaching decisions. Then, with Jackie Robinson nodding nearby, Hank retreated to the heavenly shadows, where he laughed his contagious laugh.
With much help from Hank’s spirit, the Braves did it.
Snitker did it.
Aside from Snitker himself, Hank got zero to no credit for Snitker’s rise, but what else was new? Hank got zero to no credit for those future All-Stars in the organization. What irritated Hank more was how his success as a Braves executive often was given zero to no credit period.
For the longest time, the Braves put this paragraph in the middle of Hank’s bio in their media guide before every season: “Following his playing career, Aaron joined the Braves’ front office on October 7, 1976, for a 13-year tenure as Vice President and Director of Player Development. In that position he oversaw the development of many players instrumental in the Braves’ 1982 National League West Division championship, including Dale Murphy, who won back-to-back National League MVP awards in 1982–83. Among active players, Tom Glavine was signed while Aaron was in charge of baseball operations.”
Yeah, okay. What about the rest of the story involving Hank Aaron, the brilliant baseball player turned brilliant baseball executive?
Murphy wasn’t the only homegrown Braves player of significance for that 1982 team with Hank connections. On Opening Day in San Diego, where the Braves started their National League record 13-game winning streak against the Padres, right fielder Claudell Washington and first baseman Chris Chambliss were the only players in the Braves’ starting lineup who weren’t signed, developed, or both by Aaron’s farm system.
There was more, and this irritated Aaron as much as anything when he reflected on his Braves’ front-office legacy, which was part of his baseball legacy: it was the way his role in the franchise’s sprint from the 1991 season to a major league-record 14 consecutive division titles, five National League pennants, and a 1995 World Series title was forgotten, downplayed, and considered irrelevant or nonexistent through the years.
Let’s go to the start of the Hank slight. In 1991 the Braves shocked everybody’s senses with their worst-to-first trip to the World Series. They lost to a Minnesota Twins team that was their mirror image in the American League after they both swung 180 degrees in the standings from the previous season. Even so, the Braves soared past the Twins and everybody else in baseball history by using that year as the catapult toward their epic streak of postseason appearances. When Baseball Hall of Fame general manager John Schuerholz wasn’t getting the bulk of the credit for that Braves’ run, the praise went to Baseball Hall of Fame manager Bobby Cox.
What’s missing here? Didn’t the Braves have a Baseball Hall of Fame player involved with that streak in one way or another?
Schuerholz began his major league career in 1966 with the front office of the dominant Baltimore Orioles of that era. He later was the architect behind a world championship, two American League pennants, and six division titles for the Kansas City Royals before he joined the Braves after the 1990 season. He acquired first baseman Sid Bream and third baseman Terry Pendleton that winter, and they both contributed to the Braves’ switch during a year from last place in the National League West to a National League pennant win against the Pittsburgh Pirates of Barry Bonds and Bobby Bonilla. Pendleton even captured 1991 National League Most Valuable Player honors, and Schuerholz added more pieces for the Braves—highlighted in 1993 by his signing of future Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Greg Maddux and his trading for clutch slugger Fred McGriff.
Cox already was in his second stint with the Braves’ organization when Schuerholz arrived. As for Cox’s first stint, he managed the team from 1978 through 1981 before Turner said he made one of the worst decisions of his professional life by firing Cox. Five years later Turner pulled Cox away from managing the Toronto Blue Jays to become the Braves’ general manager. While Cox served in that capacity, the franchise—which already had Henry Louis Aaron as director of player development for nine years before Cox arrived as GM—acquired Glavine, Smoltz, Avery, Justice, Gant, and Chipper Jones, another future Baseball Hall of Famer.
By the middle of the 1990 season, Cox had enough of the GM thing. With Schuerholz on the way a few months later from Kansas City, Cox named himself the Braves’ manager again for a run that lasted through the 2010 season. No question, Cox and Schuerholz deserved accolades for turning the Braves of the 1990s into one of the game’s most significant teams ever. Paul Snyder also was recognized on a regular basis as the franchise’s nationally revered scouting director for parts of three decades along the way to the Professional Baseball Scouts Hall of Fame.
But what about Henry Louis Aaron? At the start of that Braves’ streak, the key contributors were Justice, Gant, Mark Lemke, Blauser, Avery, Glavine, and Smoltz. Some were signed by Cox as general manager, but they all were developed under Hank’s supervision as the head of that department.
He got zero to no credit. He had his Dixiecrats. “I had one guy, when he first joined the ballclub [as a Braves executive], he came up to me and said, ‘Well, I’m a Marine. I’m used to getting these guys in shape,’ and ‘I did this,’ and ‘I did that,’ and I said to myself, ‘Hell, it’s about time for me to get out of here,” Hank said, shaking his head before a game at Turner Field during the summer of 2008.
Hank recalled how that Braves executive during the early 1990s kept insinuating through mind games that Hank’s system, which produced all of those All-Stars and Baseball Hall of Famers, was awful, along with the person who developed and ran that system. Some guy named Henry Louis Aaron. “He and I were always getting into it, and I just said one time, ‘Tell me anybody who knows how to fight [as a Marine] and get a damn curveball over the plate or know how to hit a curveball?’” Hank said, growing more irritated by the moment with the decades old memory. “I said, ‘We’ve got some good players in this system and we’ve got some good people working in this system.’ I had already hired a bunch of these coaches that came up, and one of them was [Snitker] who struggled like a son of a gun with a lot of hard work, but he finally got here [as third-base coach]. I said to this guy, ‘Man, we spend hours and hours out there,’ and I’m telling you, Terence. We used to stay out there from 8:00 in the morning until 8:00 at night training these guys. I’m talking about the likes of Justice, Lemke, Gant, all of these guys. I’m telling you. We used to stay out there hours, then sit down, and debate [with] these guys all the time to see what they learned.”
So much for the Dixiecrats questioning Hank’s work ethic. They also challenged his competency and his convictions. At one point, when Hank ran the farm system, he said other Braves officials wanted to bury future All-Star Gant deep in the minor leagues and replace the African American player with a rising White prospect. According to Hank, those other Braves officials suggested Gant was a bust at 24 after he struggled as a rookie outfielder for the Braves in 1989. “I said, ‘You ain’t sending this boy nowhere,’” Hank said, still fuming over the suggestion. “Now I had control of all of that at the time, and I said, ‘You ain’t sending this boy nowhere. He can outrun mistakes.’ What they wanted to do was keep the White player, and they didn’t want [Gant] to do anything. Doggone it, I’ll tell ya, whew.”
Whew, indeed, especially since Gant rebounded for the Braves to become Willie Mays and Barry Bonds for the 1990 and 1991 seasons. At the time, Mays and Bobby and Barry Bonds were the only major league players ever to steal at least 30 bases and rip at least 30 home runs during consecutive seasons. Gant also had productive years at the plate in 1992 (32 stolen bases, 17 homers, and 80 RBIs) and 1993 (26 stolen bases, 36 homers, and 117 RBIs), but he was released by the Braves after he broke his leg in February 1994 riding a dirt bike.
All Hank knew was that Gant had talent. Hank knew talent, for sure, which is why he was as angry as I’d ever heard him when he called me in September 2008. Our conversation involved Jones, Cox, and rewriting history. Our conversation also involved exaggerating or lying. Take your pick. “Something has just been bothering me really,” Hank said, sighing, which was enough to let me know in a flash Henry Louis Aaron had an AJC column he wanted me to write, and it would be huge. “I don’t mind other things, but somehow, some things need to be spelled out correctly. I was listening to something on television where Bobby [Cox] was talking about how, when Chipper came to the team, [Cox] took him aside to tell him what ‘we’ did to get him here, and I was stunned really.”
No, Hank was livid, and I was nervous. In addition to my solid relationship with Hank, I had one with Cox, the Braves manager who was so old school that he still wore spikes before, during, and after games. Even though media folks respected him for his cooperative ways, he had a reputation for ranking only slightly better than Bill Belichick as a quote machine. “Well, he pitched good for me,” Cox often responded with a shrug after one of his starters got shelled.
I saw a different Bobby Cox. If he trusted you, he’d tell you many things off the record and sometimes everything.
Cox told me a bunch of things. Contrary to popular belief, Cox hadn’t a problem going from ultimate players’ manager to crazy man with a red face and he used his tongue to burn the ears of players out of control more than folks knew, but I often knew. Then there was 1992 at the Braves’ spring training camp in West Palm Beach, Florida, where Cox confirmed to me what Schuerholz wouldn’t admit to anybody with a pen or a camera until 14 years later in a book: the Braves tried to work a trade for Bonds, the Pirates outfielder, nine months before he left as a free agent for the San Francisco Giants. I heard as much through whispers in the Braves clubhouse that spring.
Whispers weren’t good enough, especially since The AJC didn’t allow the use of unnamed sources. Standing behind the batting cage, I asked Cox if the Braves were trying to add Bonds to their lineup, he turned to say in a voice meant only for me, “John is trying to get it done.” As usual, Cox wanted no part of the sourcing. That left only Schuerholz. Even though he was tight lipped with the media about most things beyond his name, rank, and serial number, I asked him anyway. Nothing. End of scoop, though Cox had tried to help.
Hank might have known what was or wasn’t happening with a possible Bonds deal, and the more I thought about it, he probably did. I just didn’t think to ask him. Even though Hank hadn’t a problem telling me whatever he knew about the Braves organization (or virtually anything else), I leaned toward keeping those types of questions to a minimum during our conversations. I didn’t want Hank to believe I wanted something whenever he saw my number flash on his phone. If you stick your debit card into an ATM too many times, you’ll have insufficient funds. My Hank accounts were never overdrawn.
Now, with that sigh of disgust on the other end of the phone line, Henry Louis Aaron was calling to make a withdrawal from our joint account, and that was fine, but this one involved Jones, Cox, rewriting history, along with either exaggerating or lying. I cringed over the thought of sitting in the middle of a likely nationally elevated feud between a future Cooperstown manager, who always treated me well, and You Know Who on the other end of the phone.
I was The Hank Aaron Whisperer though and I suspected from several of our previous conversations that he and his wife, Billye, never were invited over to the Coxes during the offseason for supper after Sunday services. I didn’t know the details of the previous conflict or conflicts, but on this day before we got to Hank’s latest issue with Cox, Hank discussed how the Aaron-Cox tension started—or where he thought it started—because he really didn’t know for sure.
The way Hank figured it, the whole thing involved Chuck Tanner, his former Milwaukee Braves teammate of three seasons through 1957. Tanner was more noted for his managing than his hitting or fielding as an outfielder for those Braves, and then for the Chicago Cubs, Cleveland Indians, and Los Angeles Angels over eight major league seasons. In contrast Tanner spent 19 years as a manager, and the zenith of his career involved the “We are family” Pirates of Willie Stargell and Dave Parker. They won the 1979 World Series as one of the most charismatic teams in baseball history.
That said, after a 104-loss season in 1985, Pirates officials wanted a divorce from the sometimes ridiculously optimistic Tanner and his refusal to admit it was raining—even when he was drenched. Turner preferred such an approach for his team that spent 1985 on his superstation dropping 96 games. So, the Braves owner hired Tanner as manager. He later decided to bring Cox back to the franchise since he said he erred moments after he fired Cox following the 1981 season. Upon Cox’s return to the Braves, only the general manager’s job was available. Cox hadn’t done anything close to a GM’s role before, but he took it for the Braves probably with clenched teeth, Hank suggested. Tanner already was Braves manager. “I guess, I guess, one reason [I had a conflict with Cox is because] Bobby may have always held that against me,” Hank said. “When Chuck Tanner was hired and fired, [Cox] thought that I was the one who influenced Ted Turner to hire Chuck Tanner. And, hell, I was not the one who did. It was Paul Snyder who really [got Turner] into hiring Chuck Tanner. It wasn’t me. Chuck and I were very good friends, and I certainly said, ‘Yes. Give him a chance,’ but I was not the one. It was Paul Snyder, and yet, I think Bobby, sometimes, must have held that against me or something. I’m too old to be explaining anything to anybody. To hell with it. If that’s [what he wants to believe], that’s too bad.”
“I guess Bobby may have come to that conclusion,” I said, “just because you guys were teammates. That’s what he was going by, maybe?”
“Chuck and I were teammates, but we were very sporadically…Chuck and I never had that much in common really. He knew me as a ballplayer. He respected me for my ability and for what I did, and I appreciate that. But other than that, that was it. But I tell you: the way that I think that Bobby kind of held that, he kind of thought that I was the one that had Ted’s left ear and that I could have done something [to make Cox manager over Tanner].”
The September 2008 call from Hank came after he saw a taped interview of Cox talking about his baseball career during a rain delay of a Braves game. Two things caught Hank’s attention, and it began with Cox discussing how the franchise used Major League Baseball’s No. 1 pick overall of the 1990 Major League Baseball Draft to snatch Chipper Jones. (Cox’s story wasn’t exactly accurate, according to Hank, who was there.) Cox also told the interviewer he was fortunate after he became the Braves’ general manager in 1986 to have an esteemed baseball person in house. “Thank God I had some good guys like Paul Snyder sitting next to me all the time. He helped me out a lot,” Cox said, suggesting in Hank’s mind he valued Snyder’s analysis as a scout on the state of the Braves’ players in the organization as opposed to, say, Henry Louis Aaron, the vice president and director of player development.
Cox never mentioned Aaron during the TV show. “I’ll get into all of it, but he could have given me some kind of respect, and I guess one of the things that really bothered me is that, here [Cox] is, coming in as a new general manager of this ballclub, doesn’t know anything about being a general manager or being a farm director or anything else, and yet he decided to be friends with whoever he decided to be friends with,” Hank said. “What bothers me is that when he became general manager, there absolutely was no connection between the two of us. Here I am the farm director, and we have a bad ballclub, and it seems like he would talk to me about the kids we have in the minor leagues. It didn’t happen.”
Who knows whether Cox avoided Hank during his return to the Braves as a GM after his pitstop in Toronto, but this is for sure: they chatted often enough leading up to that Major League Baseball draft of 1990 to set up a lifetime feud over Larry Wayne “Chipper” Jones Jr. With me in the middle during the fall of 2008, this whole Aaron-Cox thing prepared to explode from private to public.
The old farm director [Aaron] called to say he wanted it known that he was more responsible for the Braves acquiring Jones, a switch-hitting third baseman who reached the Baseball Hall of Fame as the modern-day Mickey Mantle, than the old general manager [Cox] who Hank said was obsessed with Todd Van Poppel, a journeyman pitcher who played for six different teams and retired with a 40–52 record and a 5.58 ERA. “The kid never did anything,” Aaron said of Van Poppel, among the all-time flops of major league draft picks. “But every time you listen to Bobby Cox and the rest of them, it’s always like, ‘Oh, yeah. We always wanted to sign Chipper Jones.’ The only reason they didn’t take Van Poppel was because of what I told them about what his daddy told me.”
Van Poppel’s daddy told Hank that his son wouldn’t sign with the Braves, and Hank said of the memory, “I told Bobby, I told them all, and I told them, ‘Y’all better go and get Chipper Jones.’…Bobby has always been crazy about pitching, and Van Poppel was the No. 1 pitcher out there, but at the same time, Chipper Jones was out there, and I remember when we were so intent with trying to get this pitcher. Like I said, the kid never did anything, never did one damn thing. But Bobby wanted him so bad until we all…hell, I went down there [in Arlington, Texas, where Van Poppel was a high school star], and it seemed like 100 scouts. I looked at him, even though I had just retired as farm director, and here’s exactly what his father told me. He said, ‘Hank, Todd will never sign with the Atlanta Braves. He won’t ever sign with the Braves, and I can tell you that right now: he doesn’t want to sign with them and he won’t sign with them.’ That’s when I went back [to Cox and other Braves officials] and said it. I said, ‘Y’all better get Chipper Jones.’ But now they claim that’s who they wanted from the start, and that’s so much, well, crap, that it’s pitiful. So, I was just listening to this interview, where Bobby said Chipper came down to him somewhere, and Bobby said he took Chipper aside and he told him all the things he needed to do, and I said, ‘Oh, hell, Bobby wanted the pitcher.’”
“Now let me ask you this, Hank,” I said. “Do you want me to write something about this?”
“Well, yeah. I want to say something about it because I know you’ll have all the facts straight. I just think that I need to say something. It’s just been bothering me, and I just, well, I’ve just tried to…It’s just been bothering me really and it just needs to be said.”
“I can understand why, and I guess I need to make a list here of what I need to check on. And the main thing is: I need to find out exactly what Bobby Cox says he said regarding Chipper Jones and Van Poppel, all that. Before I write something, I’m going have to get with Bobby and see what he says.”
“Yeah, and I think, if you want to, I mean, if you want to because you do a great job and I don’t want to tell you how to go about it, but I would think you would ask Bobby, ‘Well, when you guys were deciding who to draft, well, Hank said the father told him his kid wasn’t going to sign with the Braves,’” Hank said, raising his voice, getting angrier by the millisecond. “The first player Bobby wanted was Van Poppel really in all fairness, and he did. And the reason he didn’t sign him was simply because it’s a known fact that if I had not told them [what the father said], they would have gone ahead and drafted this kid, and they would have lost a draft pick.”
“I’m going to flat-out ask him all of these questions, and is it okay to tell him I’ve been talking to you?”
“Yeah, yeah. Whatever, really.”
“You’ve said a lot of stuff here. I’ll tell you what: after I talk to Bobby, I’ll tell you what he says, and I’ll see how you want to handle everything after that. How’s that?”
“That’s fine, Terence. You can let me know. I’m just saying what needs to be said and what I want to say.”
It was time to for Cox’s side. Oh, boy.
The secret to getting Bobby Cox to speak beyond his normal mantra (“He pitched good for me”) on the Braves began with Cox’s outer office at Turner Field. He preferred that one for candid talk (involving those he believed wouldn’t violate his trust) over his fancier one down the hall from the home clubhouse. Actually, Cox’s outer office wasn’t even an office. It barely was a room. It was slightly smaller than your average walk-in closet and it was tucked away near the stairs that led up to the home dugout. It officially was the weather room, where the Braves’ head groundskeeper and his crew went to check the ever-present radar map on the TV screen for rain, sleet, snow, or whatever else appeared for the viewer in various shades of yellow, green, and red.
When Cox was at Turner Field, he spent most of his life in that room fully dressed in his Braves uniform, usually leaning back in a chair with his spikes on the ledge before him while smoking a cigar. He watched the radar map for hours—but only if a NASCAR race wasn’t happening. If you entered Cox’s outer office, if he trusted you, and if you talked Dale Earnhardt (senior or junior) between mentioning a Doppler-related something here and there, you were good with Cox.
If another coach was present, he’d be okay. If it was one on one, hallelujah.
For this Hank situation, this was hallelujah. I caught Cox, puffing away, studying a few green spots forming above him on the screen. Instead of mentioning the Earnhardts, I got straight to the point: Bobby, I talked to Hank, and he said…Basically, I told Cox essentially what Hank told me: that Bobby wanted Todd Van Poppel from the start during the 1990 Major League Baseball June draft as the No. 1 overall pick, that Hank informed Cox and other Braves officials about Van Poppel’s father saying his son wouldn’t sign with the Braves, that Hank said Cox was overstating his desire to pick Jones, that Hank thought Cox was full of resin bags regarding Jones, along with the way Cox reacted to Hank’s authority when Cox re-joined the Braves as general manager with Hank as farm director.
Cox took a couple of more puffs, whirled his spikes off the ledge in front of him, and then leaned forward in his seat toward me. “Was he serious?” Cox said, softly before he added a few words not found in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.
“Yes sir,” I said before telling Cox I needed a response. I told him Hank wanted me to use everything he said, which was potent. Then Cox took a few more puffs, and I expected him to do what he usually did after he told me exactly what he thought, which was to add, “Don’t write that,” or “That’s between us,” or “Keep this off the record,” but he didn’t say any of that.
Cox answered the questions. Every one of them.
“What do you recall thinking leading up to that 1990 Major League Draft with both Todd Van Poppel and Chipper Jones out there?”
“Well, we had a lot of people see [Van Poppel], and they liked him. Some other [Braves scouts] went to see Chipper, and they liked him a lot,” Cox said, before squinting between more puffs. “I can’t remember if I had Hank talk to Van Poppel’s father or not, but [Van Poppel] was unsignable. And we needed to know that beforehand. So that’s why it really was an easy decision to take Chipper. He wanted to sign. He wasn’t playing games with the college thing. It was simple. I mean, Chipper was the guy.”
“Hank said you didn’t talk with him much or at all when you took over as Braves general manager in 1986? Is that true? If so, why?”
“I like Henry,” Cox said. “I thought he did everything great. We tried to include him in everything.”
That was it. That was all Bobby wanted to say. After I wrote both sides of the Chipper Jones/Braves draft story for my column in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, I ended by saying of Hank and Bobby: “Here’s my suggestion: How about Jones joining Aaron and Cox in the same room this winter for a group hug?”