IN SPORTS:“Hammerin’ Hank” accomplished one of sports’ most impressive milestones, then used his fame to speak out against racial injustice.
With poise and dignity, ‘Hammerin’ Hank’ accomplished one of sports’ most impressive milestones, then used his fame to speak out against racial injustice. He died Friday at 86.
Baseball has lost its legitimate all-time home run king. Hank Aaron, who fought vile racial prejudice in his lonely vigil to break Babe Ruth’s all-time major league home run record, and went on to also establish the all-time records for RBI, total bases and extra base hits as one of the greatest hitters in baseball history, died peacefully in his sleep Friday morning. He was 86.
In a 23-year career, mostly with the Milwaukee/ Atlanta Braves, Aaron hit .305, with 755 homers, a record that stood until Barry Bonds surpassed it in April 2007 en route to a career total 762.
That’s the listed record, although Bonds’ use of steroids, which led to a phenomenal increase in his
“A breaker of records and racial barriers, his remarkable legacy will continue to inspire countless athletes and admirers for generations to come.”
— Former President Jimmy Carter
home run totals late in his career, served to de-legitimatize his records in the minds of the public, as evidenced by the fact that he still has not been voted into the Hall of Fame.
But there was nothing artificial or illegitimate about Aaron, a lithe six-foot, wrist-hitting slugger whose frame and 175⁄180-pound playing weight hardly varied as he methodically compiled 20 or more homers in 20 consecutive seasons, and scored 100 or more runs 15 times including a record 13 straight seasons.
Aaron becomes the 10th Hall of Famer to die since the start of 2020, joining Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, Al Kaline, Tom Seaver, Whitey Ford, Joe Morgan, Phil Niekro, Tommy Lasorda and Don Sutton.
In a career that resulted in his first-ballot election to the Hall of Fame in 1982, Aaron led the league in homers, RBI and doubles four times, runs three times and won two batting titles, .328 in 1956 and .355 in 1959. In leading the Braves to the world championship in 1957, Aaron was named National League Most Valuable player, hitting .322 while leading the league with 44 homers and 132 RBI.
His 2,297 RBI, 1,477 extra base hits and 6,856 total bases are all the most all-time and his 2,174 runs are fourth behind Rickey Henderson, Ty Cobb and the asterisked Bonds. In his only two World Series, against the Yankees in 1957 and 1958, Aaron hit .364 with three homers and nine RBI in 14 games. He also played in 29 All-Star Games from 1955-75.
A product of Mobile, Ala., Aaron was one of eight children living in a home without electricity or indoor bathrooms. He played only football in high school because they didn’t have a baseball team, and at age 17, signed a $10 per game contract with the local semi-pro team, the Mobile Black Bears. In between playing baseball, he helped the family out in the summers by delivering ice around town — a job he later attributed to helping him develop the strong wrists that became his trademark as a hitter.
Aaron signed his first professional contract at 17 with the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro Leagues, and was hitting well over .450 for the Clowns in 1952 when major league scouts began flocking around them. Both the Giants and the Braves offered Aaron contracts, but he wound up signing with the Braves when they offered a salary of $100-a-month more. “Imagine” he said years later, “for the difference of $100 a month I could have been in the same outfield with Willie Mays.”
His rookie season, 1954, Aaron hit .280 with 13 homers and 69 RBI in just 122 games before suffering a broken ankle sliding into third base, Sept. 5. Still, he finished second in the NL Rookie of the Year Award to the St. Louis Cardinals’ Wally Moon.
But it was long after he’d established himself as one of the premier hitters in the game that Aaron was forced to endure the worst kind of prejudice as he closed in on Ruth’s longstanding lifetime record of 714 home runs. It seemed a lot of white America was not ready for a Black man to hold baseball’s most hallowed record.
In his 1991 memoir, “I Had a Hammer,” Aaron detailed the hundreds of threatening letters, telegrams and death threats he got and how it only served to drive him harder. “In 1972 when people finally realized I was climbing up Ruth’s back, the “Dear N——r” letters started showing up with alarming regularity,” he said. “They told me no n——-r had any right to go where I was going. There’s no way to measure the effect those letters had on me, but I like to think every one of them added another homerun to my total.”
In the end, when he finally surpassed Ruth, hitting No. 715, April 8, 1974, off the Los Angeles Dodgers right-hander, Al Downing, at Atlanta’s Fulton County Stadium, a lot of Aaron’s bitterness had shifted to Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn. Aaron began the ’74 season needing only one homer to tie the record, but because the Braves opened the season in Cincinnati, they had wanted him to sit out the three games there so he could break the record at home.
Invoking his “integrity of the game” powers, Kuhn decreed that Aaron had to play at least two of the games in Cincinnati and, sure enough, on Opening Day, he hit a three-run homer in the first inning off the Reds Jack Billingham for No. 714. After resting the second game in Cincy, the 40-year-old Aaron went hitless in the series finale and then connected for the two-run, game-tying shot off Downing in the fourth inning of the Braves’ opener in Atlanta the next day, touching off Atlanta broadcaster, Milo Hamilton’s immortal call: “There’s a new home run champion of all time and it’s Henry Aaron!”
Aaron ended the ’74 season with 733 homers and then, with his blessing, the Braves sent him back to Milwaukee to play his final two seasons as a designated hitter in the American League with the Brewers.
After his retirement, Aaron served in the Braves’ front office for many years as a vice president, and Selig further honored him by creating the Hank Aaron Award for the major leagues’ best hitter, presented annually at the World Series.
Aaron is survived by his wife, Billye, and five children, Gaile, Hank Jr., Lary, Dorinda and Ceci.