The nursing home disguised as a rehabilitation center.
The tired and aching man.
The dressing of the tired and aching man.
The nurse trying to hide her sad face.
The wheelchair with me pushing.
I’d never seen anything close to this Henry Louis Aaron during our nearly 40-year relationship. It shocked my senses, but in the strangest of ways, the whole thing slowly became bearable.
As I pushed the tired and aching man farther down the hallway with activity up ahead, he appeared slightly less lethargic than before. I also began remembering things. We had those decades of discussions in person sprinkled between a slew of phone calls. There were always the phone calls—those wonderful phone calls when Hank became Hank—which was a blessing each time he spoke on the other end. He had that baritone voice with his distinctive cadence dominated by Hank words and phrases.
“Have you received all of the honors you believe you could have received?” I asked Hank during a phone conversation in November 2008.
“I think I understand what you’re saying. You know, I, the one thing that I think I have always been blessed with is: I have always been blessed by my own peers. Now that may not have held true in the case of many years in New York. There were many times even now I look back on my record, and I say to myself, ‘Henry, you had this great career, this great career for 23 years, and yet, you only won the Most Valuable Player award once.’ And I came very close winning it two or three times, but somebody else would win it, and those are the kinds of things I look back and say, ‘If I had been a White player or if I had played in New York City, I would have probably won it two or three times.’ Those are things I wish, and the other thing I wish was my own doing, and this is that I thought that out of all the things that I have accomplished in baseball, the one thing that escaped me that I probably could have done better with was winning the Triple Crown. I think I could have, well, you never know. I do know I can’t do it now,” he said, causing both of us to laugh. “But those are the type of things you think about, but, Terence, there aren’t too many other things that I think about [along the lines of regrets in the game]. You know me better than just about anybody and you know I played the game for 23 years, and I gave it every little thing, everything I had, and that was all I could do, whether I was playing with the Braves, the Brewers. Wherever I was playing, I gave my very best.”
On this July afternoon, when Major League Baseball’s all-time greatest player waved me into a side room at Turner Field in Atlanta, I could see it all over his face. He couldn’t take it anymore. The closer that other guy moved to the home run record, the angrier Henry Louis Aaron became.
Oh, I’m sorry, this wasn’t about Barry Bonds. It was about Mark McGwire.
Actually, Hank wasn’t as much upset with McGwire during that summer and fall of 1998 as he was with the media coverage of the St. Louis Cardinals slugger. McGwire was on the verge of slamming a 62nd homer for the season (while on his way to 70) to surpass the old mark of 61 set by Roger Maris in 1961.
“They keep changing what they say, and I’m confused. Which is it? That’s what I want to know. Which is it?” Hank said, growing more irritated by the moment. So I decided to sit there, using my ears instead of my mouth as I nodded as Major League Baseball’s all-time greatest player continued to vent. “All I’m hearing on television and from the newspaper is: if Mark McGwire hits more home runs than Roger Maris, he’ll be the home run king. How does that make him the home run king when I have 755 home runs?”
How, indeed? Hank was the Home Run King. Actually, Hank is the Home Run King, and I know about August 7, 2007, when Barry Bonds slid past Hank’s career total before Bonds ended with an all-time major league high of 762.
Bonds had help, though, and I know. Bonds said he mistakenly used steroids provided by his trainer, but that still classifies as help—lots of help—so much help that it was the antithesis of Hank’s career.
Henry Louis Aaron only terrorized opponents with adrenaline, which means Dr. Harry Edwards had it about right near the end of 2007. That’s when I asked the accomplished sports sociologist from northern California how history should sort out Aaron, Bonds, performance-enhancing drugs, and the home run crown, and Edwards gave an answer for the ages: “Barry may have the record, but Hank always will be the standard bearer.”
If nothing else, Hank has the statues.
Greatness often is measured in statues, and nobody outside of maybe dictators from the old Soviet Union have inspired the building of more statues in their likeness than Henry Louis Aaron.
There are two Hank statues in Atlanta. The first is around the spot of Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, where he ripped No. 715 to topple Babe Ruth’s career home run record. The other sits near Truist Park, the Braves’ home after the 2016 season. There is a Hank statue at the Milwaukee Brewers’ home ballpark called American Family Field, and another one in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where he began his professional career as a shortstop. By the end of 2022, he also is slated to have a statue in Mobile, Alabama, his hometown. City officials plan to place five statues along their riverfront inside what they’ll call Hall of Fame Courtyard, which is scheduled to feature eight-foot images in bronze of Willie McCovey, Satchel Paige, Billy Williams, Ozzie Smith, and Aaron. They’re all Mobile natives and they’re all inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Hank’s statue is the first under construction. In the meantime, the Double A Mobile BayBears play in Hank Aaron Stadium. His boyhood home was moved during the summer of 2008 from its original spot to next to the ballpark. And Hank Aaron Stadium does have a bust of Hank.
Twenty-three seasons. That’s how long Henry Louis Aaron played in the major leagues, featuring 21 years with the Braves of Milwaukee and Atlanta before he finished his Baseball Hall of Fame career in 1976 after two seasons in Wisconsin with the Brewers. Even beyond 755, Hank’s lifetime numbers are ridiculous. According to the folks at Elias Sports Bureau, they haven’t created a method to determine for sure if Hank Aaron holds the record for most offensive records in Major League Baseball history, but it feels that way. Despite 45 years between his last at-bat and his final breath, he still owned more RBIs (2,297), total bases (6,856), and extra bases (1,477) than anybody. He had 25 trips to All-Star Games, four National League titles for both home runs and RBIs, two NL batting championships, three Gold Gloves in right field to show he also sparkled beyond the plate, an NL MVP award, and a world championship ring.
If you take away Hank’s career home run total, he still would have more than 3,000 hits, because he collected 3,771 of them.
That’s for starters. All of Hank’s shots over fences were nice—along with his only inside-the-park homer that happened on May 10, 1967, against the Phillies in Philadelphia—but what thrilled Hank nearly as much as those homers was never striking out 100 times or more in a season.
Hank also was faster than you think. He attempted 311 steals and he was successful 77 percent of the time, which was the same as Willie Mays, who was supposedly more gifted than Hank on the basepaths. Hank versus Willie is often a thing: Willie had nine more Gold Gloves than Hank, but Hank was a right fielder during the era of Roberto Clemente, the Pittsburgh Pirates glove master who essentially invented defense in right field. As for Willie, a bunch of Gold Gloves happen when you’re playing the already glamorous center field with drama and flair and when you spend the start of your career in New York, where Hank was only a visitor.
With apologies to Willie (Hank had better numbers for homers, hits, RBIs, batting average, runs scored, total bases, strikeouts, etc.) and to Babe Ruth (Hank had 41 more home runs and faced stiffer competition since baseball was segregated back then) and to Barry Bonds (performing-enhancing drugs) and to the figment of Joe DiMaggio’s imagination (he insisted on that introduction as the greatest living baseball player), Henry Louis Aaron was the best ever, dead or alive, and there were so many reasons that happened.
Several of those reasons got overlooked like this one: this man with God-given skills as a baseball player was also a workaholic. Hank rarely left the Braves’ lineup during the preseason, regular season, or postseason because he made sure he was physically and mentally strong from the start of spring training through whenever his team stopped playing that September or October. “I worked very hard, Terence, very hard when I went to spring training every year,” Hank told me, beaming with the memories during the mid-1990s in the home clubhouse at Atlanta Fulton-County Stadium, where he relaxed as a team executive at an empty locker. He thought about his February and March days, when the Milwaukee Braves called Bradenton, Florida, their spring home before they moved to West Palm Beach in 1963. The Braves stayed there when they relocated to Atlanta after the 1965 season and they didn’t leave for another spring-training site in Florida until they went to Orlando, 22 years after Hank retired as the African American version of The Natural.
“Staying in shape, doing even more, that was one of the things I always took pride in. When I got to spring training. I worked extra hard,” Hank said, nodding. “Of course, they don’t do it anymore, the way we used to do it with somebody standing up in front of you and throwing the ball from side to side. Things like that and running laps, and on my own, I ran an awful lot. I got my legs in very good shape and I was ready for the season. I never was overweight, never was overweight. I guess for the first 15 or 16 years, my weight didn’t vary more than a pound and a half or two pounds, never was overweight. I weighed 178 pounds for a long time, a loooong time.”
Hank eased into one of his glorious laughs that gave you no choice but to join him and then he said, “I was very, very little really. Very small. In fact, when I first got to the big leagues, if you would notice something, I could show you. I was looking at some pants when I first got to the big leagues and I didn’t have pants to fit me. It wasn’t like it is today. These players get it cut where they’ve got some tailor-made pants on. Back then, you had to take what they gave you, wrap them around, and I had them all bagged up and everything. Terence, I was just glad to have a pair of pants in the major leagues.”
Designer threads or not, history is more intrigued by what Hank did inside of whatever pants he wore during and after his major league debut with the Milwaukee Braves on April 13, 1954. History often starts with his hands, specifically his wrists, labeled as “quick.” History suggests that given the ability of somebody who Hank himself described as “very, very little really” while ripping homers at a higher rate than the thicker likes of Harmon Killebrew, Frank Howard, the two Willies (McCovey and Stargell), and other such sluggers of his day, Henry Louis Aaron triggered his offensive sprint toward Cooperstown with those “quick” hands and wrists leading the way.
History isn’t wrong along those lines. History is just incomplete.
To hear Hank tell it, his work ethic enhanced his natural attributes, and his work ethic contributed the most to his durability. Only Pete Rose (3,562) and Carl Yastrzemski (3,308) played more games during their major league careers than Hank’s 3,298, but he wasn’t invincible. His rookie season with the Milwaukee Braves ended September 5, 1954, after he broke his ankle sliding into third base, and then there was his fairly unknown surgery for bone spurs on his ankle during the spring of 1965. Other than that, Hank said, “I never had a hamstring problem. Never did or anything like that, so I was very fortunate, but I worked at it.”
Hank had other aches and pains throughout his 23 seasons beyond that broken ankle and those bone spurs. He just chose to keep playing despite them with much help from his mental toughness. Take those bone spurs, which came down the stretch of the 1964 season. With 12 games left, the Phillies were blowing a six-and-a-half-game lead in the National League before divisions existed. The St. Louis Cardinals (the eventual winners) and the Cincinnati Reds were charging from behind, but the Braves weren’t in contention.
Even so, Hank contributed to the Phillies’ choke that late September, when he ignored his physical woes to stay in the lineup along the way to a four-game sweep for the Braves in Philadelphia. “I had a cracked ankle. Well, it was a spur in my ankle, and right after that, I needed the operation, but I played the three games because I felt it was my obligation. They had to put [a competitive] lineup out there,” Aaron told me. “I just went out there to do the best I could. I played through a lot of scrapes and tears through the years. I sat out maybe one or two games, but I was in for the duration. The one thing that bothered me a lot: I had my ankles. I sprained my ankles an awful lot. But other than that, I played through a lot of things really. There were times I went to the ballpark and I didn’t feel like playing, but I knew I had to and I just went out there and played. I don’t know. I see guys now sit out when they have headaches, things like that. No, I never did. I played every single game. I played a lot of baseball games.”
I took a quick look around the Braves’ clubhouse during our conversation, hours before a game to make sure nobody was around. I wanted to ask Hank something about old-school players compared to modern-day ones, and since the coast was clear, I did. “So, why are these guys injured way more now than they were in your day?” I asked. “I think of Ken Griffey Jr., spending many of his post-Seattle Mariners years sitting more than playing for the Reds, and that’s ending what was once his serious chase of your home run record. Are these guys, including Griffey, just softer than you and your peers, or is it something they’re doing or not doing with conditioning?”
“Well, I think, you know, in baseball you have to strengthen certain parts of your body,” Hank said. “You don’t have to strengthen everything. Just like football players don’t have to have strong hands necessarily when compared to baseball or some other sport. They need to have strong legs. If you’re a baseball player and if you’re working with weights and all of that other stuff and if you don’t work with them right, it will cause you major damage more than anything else. So, you have to be very careful. I think as strong as some of these guys are, I think some of them get injured from being that strong. If you look at your pitchers, the good ones who have been successful down through the years, they all are built like your Greg Madduxes and your Tom Glavines and your John Smoltzes. They’re not bulky and all of that stuff, and your real, good ballplayers, they’re built the same way. In baseball you have to have strong hands, strong arms, good eyes. That’s it. You don’t need to go into the weight room and lift in order for you to go out there and pick up somebody who weighs 300 pounds,” he said, laughing. “I think a lot of these ballplayers are working on the wrong things really.”
Baseball’s all-time greatest player worked on the right things, and then he did them every time he took the field. Or so it seemed.
Whether you’re watching Henry Louis Aaron in black and white as he slammed a curveball over the fence in center field at Milwaukee County Stadium on September 23, 1957 to walk off with the National League pennant for the Braves, or as he circled the bases 17 years later on April 8 at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium in living color after he became better than Babe Ruth in home runs, or as he performed any of his other mind-boggling feats in between, the following thoughts about Henry Louis Aaron jumped from the screen into your consciousness: he never missed a cutoff man. He never got thrown out on base. He never managed less than a line drive at the plate. He never missed a sign. He never struck out (well, maybe he did, but only on a called third strike when an umpire blew it.) He never failed with runners in scoring position. I mean, did Hank ever make an error, and are you sure he didn’t reach base just about every time he swung a bat? Regarding the baseball career of Henry Louis Aaron, it resembled those of his legendary peers in this regard: mythology was mixed with reality, and it was often difficult to separate the two. The difference? For Hank, mythology and reality mostly were one.
Then came the 21st century baseball chauvinists who studied everything beyond incredible on Hank’s resume and screamed: “Yeah, he did all of that, but those were different times.” But were they? During the summer of 2016, I asked Hank about this current time in baseball, and we went back to the future.
“I was just wondering,” I asked Hank. “What do you think—if you were in your prime right now in Major League Baseball—how well do you think you would be able to do under these circumstances? For instance, if you were in your prime right now, playing for the Atlanta Braves and playing at Turner Field, say, as opposed to Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, do you think you would be able to do as well as you did throughout your career, better, or about the same?”
“I think, Terence, I think I would be able to figure it out, whatever it was for me to do. I’ve thought about that for a long time. I said, ‘What would I do if I was playing today?’ Then I started thinking about the different situations that we had to handle when I played. Lower the mound. Raise it high and make the mound flatter. I had to contend with the slider that was coming down from guys like Gibson. So, I sort of figured that out, and when I first got to the big leagues, my first year coming from Class A ball and then immediately getting into the big leagues, I didn’t have that great of a year, but I did end up hitting 13 home runs and I think it was 69 runs batted in. Then I broke my ankle, but I had figured it out from coming from A ball to the big leagues. So to answer your question, I think that, I don’t see, I wouldn’t see any problem other than probably the way the game is structured today [regarding pitching strategy of teams]. You’ve got to be ready in all situations because today the pitcher doesn’t go no more than five innings, and then they bring somebody in for two, and then they bring somebody in for one or two more. So you gotta be ready for all of those particular situations, and I think if I see other guys figuring it out, I think my talent could do the same thing.”
“You mention the pitching thing, and that to me seems to be one of the biggest differences. Like back when you were coming up in the ’50s and the ’60s, you didn’t have all of these late-inning relief pitchers and what have you now, and I don’t know if that’s an advantage for the hitter or disadvantage. But, like you say, I know you would kind of figure it out. But do you think you would somehow have an advantage having to face all of these pitchers, as opposed to back in the ’50s and ’60s?”
“Well, I don’t think that particular thing would bother me as far as facing different pitchers. But the thing that would bother me most would be pitchers [coming and going] through interleague trading—pitchers coming from the National to the American League and going back and forth. You would have to learn how those pitchers’ fastballs would move and other things. So, yes, it would be a learning experience, but by the same token, I would be able to figure it out. The other thing, too, is the traveling. It would seem to me—correct me if I’m wrong—it would be easier to travel now than it was back in the ’50s, I guess, with planes as opposed to trains. [Flying] would help you more.
“Oh, no question about it. I mean, we didn’t have, in fact, I was just talking about this the other day. I said, ‘When I first got to the big leagues, there was no such thing as a bus coming to pick you up at the airport or train station or whatever it was. They would pull that cart on the side, the boxcar you were sleeping in, and you would get up any time you would want to get up, and you would see ballplayers at 9:00, 10:00, 11:00, 12:00, pushing those big, old trunks down the highway, trying to get them a ride.’…Yeah, and you had to eat whatever they wanted you to eat. You didn’t have meal money. There wasn’t such thing as meal money, and your travel would be on trains. So, yes, yes, [traveling today,] that would be of some help to you.
“Anyway, you look at all the things in the big leagues now, and I think the only thing that probably would be of a disadvantage for me would be trying to figure out different pitchers [from the other league]. I don’t think that stuff wise, you can say anybody now has better stuff than guys like Gibson and Koufax and Drysdale and those guys. No question, they had as good of stuff or better stuff, and then the thing that was so bad about it—there was no protection for a hitter. They would throw inside and knock you down, and the umpire would just say, ‘Ball one, ball two,’ and you would just have to get up,” he said causing us both to laugh. “Nowadays, you come close to a guy, and the first thing you know you’ve got two teams out there fighting with each other.”
“That’s true definitely. A couple of other things I was thinking of regarding the differences. Back in your day, you just had newspaper guys you had to deal with. Now, you’ve got anything that anybody does good or bad, it’s on ESPN, FOX. It’s on the Internet. It’s on these blogs. How would you have been able to handle all of that sort of 24-hour media?”
“You know, Terence, that would give me more problems than somebody’s fastball because I’ve never been one to look for publicity or to try to look for anything in particular. I just felt like for all of the news media, the way that they do it today would be a serious problem with me. Even now, when I go to the Braves’ camp, I try not to go down there with the idea of trying to create any kind of problems other than just going down there, watching the game, and going home.”
“Oh, no doubt.”
“So, I don’t know how I would handle it. That would be a serious problem for me really.”
“And I tell you, Hank, just from me being in media, I was telling this to somebody the other day: I’ve been covering major sports for four decades, but to be honest with you, if I were a player right now, I don’t know how much I would talk to the media.”
“Yeah, it’s kind of tough.”
“Yeah, and here’s another thing I was thinking about. If you were in your prime today, there are way fewer Black players than there were when you were playing.”
“No question about it. No matter whether you played the Pittsburgh Pirates or the St. Louis Cardinals, most or all the clubs had at least one or two [Black players]. But nowadays, none of them for the most part have a Black player at all on their club. They don’t care about Black players, and the whole thing is sickening.”
“Sad situation. So, if you’re in the lineup of the Braves today, and if it just involves playing baseball and nothing else, how well do you do?”
“Oh, I think I would do well. I don’t know of anybody who would be in somebody’s lineup that I would think could do better than what I could do. Nobody. I’d bat, well, it would depend on where they would want me. When I first came up and I was hitting third, that was because the [Milwaukee Braves] manager wanted to make sure I got to bat in the first inning. And, of course, later on when [Eddie] Mathews got hurt and didn’t play well, then they dropped me down to fourth. So, it wouldn’t make any difference. I just feel I would fit in regardless of whatever. I think I could still end up hitting my average of 35 to 40 home runs. I could play every day. I could steal a base when I got ready. I could do all right.”
“Of course, the big question is: do you think you still would hit 755 home runs? More, less, or would it be about the same?”
“I don’t know if that would happen, because I don’t know if I would need to play that long,” he said, laughing. “I would make a lot of money in just four or five years, and that’s the thing. Would I have the incentive? Would I have the desire? Would I want to play a long time? I don’t know. For years I didn’t make any money and I was having good years. So, I don’t know if I could [hit 755 home runs playing today]. That would be hard for me to say simply because they pay these guys so darn much money. They make these guys so rich for four or five years. I mean, hell, can you imagine all the money these guys make? I really can’t count that high.”
“What’s the most you ever made for a season?”
“Just over $200,000 [actually $240,000 each in 1975 and 1976] when I was with the Brewers.”
“And that was at the end of your career.”
“Yes, it was. And then I remember somebody coming into the clubhouse when I was making $100,000-something dollars with the Braves, and it was one of the newspaper guys, trying to play mind games, and he said, ‘Well, I want to talk to the guy who is making all this money in here. Who is he? There he is.’ That’s the kind of crap I had to deal with. I’ll tell you.”
“Well, you know I know about mind games,” I said, leading us both to laugh.
“Here’s my last question, and then I’ll let you go.”
“Oh, take you time. I’m in for the evening. That’s fine.”
“If you were in your prime today, how much money do you think you would be making per year right now?”
“Uh, let’s put it this way, Terence: who’s the highest paid player? Whoever that guy is, I could make as much money as that guy. Damn sure could. No question about it. I wouldn’t see any reason why not. I don’t think there’s anything that he did that I couldn’t do and couldn’t do it better.”