The Last Hero

by Howard Bryant

  Henry was not on the Braves major-league roster, but Charlie Grimm wouldn’t let the kid out of his sight. One Saturday morning in early March, Henry was told to remain in Bradenton with the rest of the minor leaguers while the big club played four games on the east side of the state. Grimm would have none of it. Grimm told Henry—who had not yet even been issued a Braves uniform—that while he did not know what position Henry would be playing, he was to take orders only from him. “Pack a bag,” Grimm told Henry, “and stick with me.” That meant games against the Dodgers in Miami and the Philadelphia A’s in West Palm Beach and Pittsburgh in Fort Pierce.

  Each day, Grimm would watch Henry hit, and the baseball men would look at each other slyly—grim-faced on the outside, because no matter how good a player might be, you couldn’t ever give away too much praise too early. That could ruin a kid. But inside, where it counted, Henry’s talent reduced them all to giddy schoolboys bubbling with a secret. And smile they would at their good fortune, because Henry belonged to them, and the general manager, John Quinn, always made it a point to remind the newsmen first of his shrewdness: He’d got Henry for the bargain price of ten thousand dollars, and he would reaffirm his belief that the Braves could fetch ten times that sum from other teams. “I understand now,” Paul Richards said, “why everyone raves about that kid. He’s got powerful wrists, the kind all great hitters have.”

  The only man in the Braves organization who wasn’t smiling was George “Twinkletoes” Selkirk, the former Yankee outfielder, who through the thirties and forties had teamed with Ruth, Gehrig, and DiMaggio during an all-star career and won five World Series championships. He was now the manager of the Toledo Sox, Milwaukee’s Class AA affiliate, and in January, Quinn told Selkirk he would have Henry for the entire 1954 season. Yet here it was, not even St. Patrick’s Day, and Selkirk was already groaning to Red Thisted of the Milwaukee Sentinel. “I don’t think,” Selkirk said, “that we’ll ever have him in a Toledo uniform.” And he hated himself even more because he knew he was right.

  FOR ALL THE commotion, young Henry Aaron was not a particularly comfortable or secure baseball player. He received the most attention of any rookie in any spring camp in baseball, but he was still not a member of the Milwaukee Braves, still not a major leaguer. He did not have a position. He knew he wasn’t a major-league-caliber second baseman, and yet he didn’t feel comfortable in the outfield. Second base would not be an option anyway. The day after Christmas, 1953, the Braves had given $200,000 and traded seven players to Pittsburgh for the rugged Irishman, second baseman Danny O’Connell. A month later, Milwaukee traded the promising left-hander Johnny Antonelli to the New York Giants for Bobby Thomson, the man who never had to buy another drink in his life in New York City after winning the pennant for the Giants over the Dodgers in the famed 1951 play-off game, the man a seventeen-year-old Henry had dreamed about at Josephine Allen.

  Henry figured there was no place on the big-club roster for him with Thomson in left field, Billy Bruton in center, and Andy Pafko in right. Pafko was the man who had played left field for Brooklyn when Thomson’s two-out, ninth-inning, pennant-winning three-run home run sailed over his head. Even the Milwaukee bench was crowded. Grimm was counting on Jim Pendleton, the former Negro League utility man who surprised the Braves in 1953 as a twenty-nine-year-old reserve with a .299 average and seven home runs. Moreover, Henry knew he was too talented to sit on the bench with the big club. Prized prospects needed to play every day, and that wouldn’t happen on a veteran team that believed, even without him, it would be contending for the pennant.

  However realistic or pessimistic Henry was about making the big club in 1954, he still handled his daily chores by crushing the baseball every day in the spring. Henry’s hitting wove a tale that blended fact with the spurious. It was true that the best baseball minds wanted a piece of him, if for no other reason than to solidify their reputations as acute talent evaluators. Branch Rickey had been on the Grapefruit League scene less than a week before he declared Henry the “top prospect in the country.” Rickey said he’d offered the Braves $150,000 for Henry, a figure confirmed with no shortage of glee (even the great “Mahatma” wanted in on Henry, although it wasn’t as if Ed Scott hadn’t warned him) by John Quinn.

  When Henry took his cuts in the batting cage in Sarasota, and later in that game mashed a 450-foot home run against the Red Sox, a story was born that grew sweeter with each retelling. As Henry whipped blistering line drives through the strike zone, the contact of ball and bat was so pure that one man could recognize its significance by pitch alone. That man was none other than Theodore Samuel Williams.

  “In his first spring training, during a game against the Red Sox,” George F. Will wrote of Henry in 2007, “Ted Williams came running from the clubhouse to see whose bat was making that distinctive sound.” In the book Hammering Hank: How the Media Made Henry Aaron, the authors Mark Stewart and Mike Kennedy offered a slightly different version:

  Aaron laid claim to a permanent roster40 spot with the Braves after slamming a long home run against the Red Sox. The blast even got the attention of Ted Williams. “Who the hell is that,” Williams demanded of some nearby sportswriters after hearing the crack of the ball off Aaron’s bat. When told it was a newcomer named Aaron, he responded, “Write it down and remember it. You’ll be hearing that name often.”

  And still another version existed, the one that had Williams sitting in a lounge chair, his eyes closed, his back to the field, but aroused by the perfection of Henry’s swing cutting the Florida air. Even Williams himself, in a 1999 book about Henry by the writer Dick Schaap, recalled the moment with trademark Williams aplomb:

  I was playing in Sarasota,41 and because I was an older, more experienced player I got to play the first three innings and then—Boom!—they take me out. I went in and showered because I wanted to watch the rest of the game. In Sarasota there was a nice little field and you had to go through a little dugout door and then sit on the bench. So I went out, and just as I dove through the door, I hear ‘WHACK!’ and then the roar of the crowd—it was a small crowd but it was a helluva roar anyhow—and one of my teammates said, “Did you see the guy hit that ball?”

  It was a great story, with plenty of local detail—especially regarding the intimacy of Payne Park, the old Sarasota ballpark—except for one key point: It never happened, at least not the way the legend had it. Williams did not play against the Braves in March 1954. In fact, he did not play against anyone, because he wasn’t even in Red Sox camp that year. He was on the operating table twelve hundred miles away in Cambridge, Massachusetts, having a four-inch metal spike inserted into his left collarbone. On March 1, while Henry was making the old-timers drool, Williams broke his collarbone shagging fly balls and was then admitted to Sancta Maria Hospital in Cambridge, where he remained from March 9 until his discharge from surgery a week later. He stayed in Boston following his discharge and didn’t play his first game until May 15.

  For the record, only the Williams portion of the story was fiction. The rest was true: Henry had them talking.

  RED SOX SHADE BRAVES, 3–2;42

  AARON’S HOMER STEALS SHOW

  SARASOTA, FLA.—… However, even the final result … could not detract from the stir created in the third inning by a tremendous home run by Hank Aaron, the 20-year-old Negro rookie outfielder. Veteran observers called the blow the longest ever hit at Payne Field here.

  True or not, the hype machine had accomplished the desired effect, and Williams and Aaron were both well served by repeating the tale: Williams because it reinforced his considerable reputation, proof that the Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived not only had the keenest eye but also the sharpest ear (it wouldn’t have done the Splinter any good if he’d told future generations of hungry listeners that the sweet sound that day was produced by the hitless bat of Jim Pendleton); and Henry because no greater authority than Williams had instantly elevated him into the honors class of power hitters—before he had eve
r played in a single big-league game that counted. He had been anointed, first by Cobb, and now by Williams. It was true that Williams had seen Henry swing a bat, for the Red Sox and Braves played numerous times that spring and, later, in All-Star Games (they appeared in seven All-Star Games together). He also might have seen Henry during subsequent spring-training seasons, as the Red Sox trained just a dozen or so miles away. It just didn’t happen in 1954, when everyone believed it had.

  The Williams story was emblematic of how legend could feed upon itself and how, as the tale was repeated, the names grew bigger, everyone just a bit closer to the simple and titillating beginnings of the Henry Aaron story, making it easier for him to be adopted by the baseball people, who, because of their reputations, couldn’t allow anyone to think Henry had taken them by surprise.

  The next day, March 2, Henry helped destroy the Yankees 11–3 by turning the baseball into a white blur that hit the base of the wall of the 433-foot marker in center field, over the head of outfielder Irv Noren. “It was not hit as hard as the tremendous home run at Sarasota Wednesday but went almost as far,” the Journal reported. “The young Negro now has a .417 batting mark (5 for 12) and looks more like a fixture every day.”

  And it was at that precise moment when fate took over at the keyboard and tapped out a new narrative. When he arrived at Braves camp, Henry was not incorrect about his prospects. The club was set and he was headed to Toledo. He wouldn’t be part of the Braves until 1955. The Braves paid handsomely for Thomson, an established power player and veteran outfielder acquired to provide protection for Mathews and first baseman Joe Adcock. And it was true that at the end of the 1953 season, Charlie Grimm so liked what he saw from Pendleton that he began to rely on him as a reserve.

  But what Henry did not anticipate was that at the end of 1953, Jim Pendleton was feeling so good about himself and his sudden contribution that by January, he had decided to hold out for a better contract. A week away from the opening of camp, Pendleton still wasn’t signed. When camp opened on February 28, and Henry was slashing line drives while the old-timers drooled over his potential, Pendleton was nowhere to be seen. Two days later, on March 2, Pendleton arrived in camp, a big, mushy tire around his waist. He and Henry would room together, but the challenge for a roster spot, for all intents and purposes, ceased the day Pendleton arrived, twenty pounds overweight, at 205.

  Pendleton chomping away at the buffet table while Henry tore the cover off of the ball was fate just warming up. In the eighth inning of a spring game between the Braves and Yankees eleven days later, on March 13 at Al Lang Field in St. Petersburg, Pafko bounced a one-hopper to the mound. The Yankee pitcher, Bob Wiesler, caught and fired to second baseman Woody Held, who threw to first for a routine double play. But when the play was over, Held looked down, to find the first out of the double play, Bobby Thomson, crumpled in a heap over second base, yowling in pain. Held yelled over to the Braves bench, fear in his eyes at the sight of Thomson’s twisted frame, and the world changed in an instant. Thomson had slid to avoid Held’s relay and suffered a triple fracture of the right ankle. He was taken off the field on a stretcher and was put in a temporary splint by the Yankees physician, Dr. Sidney Gaynor. When Thomson arrived at St. Anthony’s Hospital, he received the news that he would be out at least six to twelve weeks.

  The next day, March 14, 1954, at a game against Cincinnati, Charlie Grimm wrote Henry’s name into the lineup. He would be starting in right field, batting fourth. Henry rapped out two hits.

  WITH THOMSON GONE for three months, Pendleton wearing a rubber suit to, in the words of the Sentinel, “work off the extra blubber,” and Henry’s incessant pasting of the baseball (“Aaron Shows Power Again But Phils Down Braves, 12–10,” announced the Journal after Henry homered and tripled over the head of the center fielder Richie Ashburn), a job on the big-league club seemed all but certain. His new teammates, however, were not exactly sure what to make of him. Despite his wrists, his surprising power, and his obvious ability, there was still something about the kid that just didn’t quite compute. The scouting reports said Henry could run, and since he never was thrown out on close plays, it was clear that the scouts were not exaggerating his speed. But instead of blazing down the line in a thrust and flash, Henry would beat throws easily but somehow unconvincingly. Mickey Owen raved about Henry’s arm, and at second base, Henry made all the necessary plays. He would snap off a throw that would beat the runner, but the ball didn’t pop into the first baseman’s glove, the way a throw from a legitimate major-league arm should. He would release his throws sidearm, at a three o’clock angle, his arm never higher than his shoulder. In the outfield, the sidearm delivery was the same languid motion, producing the impression that he was not concentrating enough on improving his mechanics. In the outfield, Henry would catch the baseball the old-fashioned way, two hands directly in front of the chest, allowing the ball to travel as close to his body as possible, to cushion the sting of the ball. That was the way poor kids caught the ball, the ones who played baseball every day without gloves or with gloves whose pockets had been worn painfully thin.

  He was reticent to engage. Henry did not often speak to many players on the team, preferring, in the eyes of some teammates and writers, to position himself at a distance, yet no one accused him of possessing a rude demeanor. When he did speak, it was largely to the other Negro players on the team, Bill Bruton, Jim Pendleton, and Charlie White. At no point was he considered by the coaching staff to be lazy, but nor did he move with the frothy enthusiasm and frightened eagerness of most rookies.

  So what was the reason for the disconnection? Was it simply that Henry was a green twenty-year-old of blossoming expectation, unsure exactly how to navigate his vast and rapidly expanding universe? Upon his arrival in Bradenton, he knew only three members of the Braves: catcher Bill Casey and pitcher Ray Crone, both of whom were white teammates of Henry in Jacksonville, and Bob Buhl, the promising young right-hander with the serious face and distinctively dark brows, who had earned a slot in the starting rotation by winning thirteen games in 1953 and was quickly being viewed as a potential third starter behind the snarling Burdette and the great Spahn. Buhl hailed from Saginaw, Michigan, and as a teenager had been a paratrooper in World War II. Henry and Buhl were teammates under Mickey Owen in the winter of 1953 in Caguas, and, like Owen, Buhl had made it his personal crusade during the spring to talk up Henry as the next great player.

  The opposite was more likely true. In Henry, the Braves had the kind of player who could reverse the fortunes of an entire franchise, but no one in the organization—or in the game, really—knew quite how to deal with what Henry truly represented: the first signature black player in Braves history. Henry’s invitation to the Braves training camp was a telegram with the address in Bradenton of Mrs. Lulu Mae Gibson.

  Although Henry did not expect an invitation to stay at the Dixie Grande, the posh hotel in Bradenton where the white players lived during the spring, he was not comfortable with the accommodations provided him. The Gibson house was located in the colored section of Bradenton, and it had been the spring-training home for the Braves black players since 1950, when Sam Jethroe arrived as the first black member of the franchise.

  In the spring of 1954, Barbara remained home in Alabama, pregnant for the first time. Henry and Barbara had already agreed that the spring-training conditions would not be conducive to living together as a family, as it was unlikely that apartment rentals would be available for colored players, and he was certain that the ball club would not pay for him and his pregnant new wife to be together. Henry would simply follow the other black players—Bruton, Charlie White, Jim Pendleton, and George Crowe—from Mrs. Gibson’s house to the ballpark.

  The Gibson house was a brick five-bedroom duplex. The main house was connected to a smaller addition, “a little house on stilts,”43 as Henry recalled. During that first spring, he lived in the addition. “Mrs. Gibson was a schoolteacher, and I remember the house was right next to
the J. D. Rogers funeral home. She would cook and clean for us and was happy to have us in her home. I remember living in the small house when I first came up.”

  Henry and the black players were treated better in the private homes of black professionals than in the mainstream, but housing represented the first stage in confronting what it meant for a black prospect to be a full member of the organization. A common attitude regarding racial questions in baseball was that with the arrival of Jackie Robinson in 1947, long inequitable scales had now been balanced. Blacks had been allowed to play at the big-league level for seven years, and thus it was believed that nothing much was left to be discussed. It was a perspective that didn’t take into consideration the racial distinctions that existed despite the initial breakthrough. When Henry arrived at the clubhouse at Braves Field that first day, Joe Taylor, the Braves clubhouse man, showed him his locker, a wooden stall with a couple of diagonal nails inside for his jerseys, which would be clumped in with those of the other black players. The lockers of the white players were set apart. During the early weeks that spring, Henry noticed an unspoken practice that was common in baseball: The white players would shower first, then the black players.