The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (60 page)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
MORTAL

O
N
A
PRIL
8, the record-breaking home run had been Henry’s only hit in three at bats. In his first three games of the season, he’d hit two home runs, and then came the swings and the misses, and, following them, the embarrassed looks, the pity, and the doubts. The night after Henry broke the record, a kid named Tommy John collared him zero for four. So did Andy Messersmith, Clay Kirby, and Randy Jones, the future winner of the Cy Young Award, who at that time couldn’t get anyone out. Jones would lose twenty-two games for San Diego in 1974. Over the first sixteen at bats after hitting 715, Henry produced exactly one hit, home run number 716, off the Dodger knuckleballer Charlie Hough. His batting average was .179.

With each weak swing against a weaker opponent, Garr and Baker looked at Henry, and you could see the hurt in their eyes. Nobody wanted to suggest that Supe, of all people, could no longer get around on a fastball. It was one thing to accept on an intellectual level that eventually baseball would get all of them, that even the immortals would inevitably sag and succumb as the calendar flipped forward. But it was quite another to see the Hammer getting beaten inside by a ham-and-egg fastball, needing a two-hit game, as he did April 21 in Houston, to get his average over .200. As the sun set, Henry fell deeper into himself. He was in the lineup less, playing left field now (Garr was the everyday right fielder), producing a running commentary of rejuvenation and avoidance, of willpower and resignation. “The problem is,
²⁵⁰
when you’ve pounded baseballs for twenty years, it takes a lot of convincing to make you believe you can’t do it anymore,” Henry would reflect years later in his autobiography,
I Had a Hammer
. “I didn’t believe it yet.”

Henry did his best not to let on that he was spending more of his time in the company of doubt. “You have to understand that we looked up to him
²⁵¹
so much,” Garr said. “Sure, there were pitches that he wasn’t getting anymore. He was definitely missing a few, but that was what made him great to me. If you came around looking for someone to cry, you came looking for the wrong man.”

T
HE RECORD NOW
broken, the easier it became for the Atlanta front office to reach the inevitable, hard assessment that Henry Aaron could no longer play. The record belonged to him and his name could never again be mentioned without the accompanying appositive, Hank Aaron, Home Run King, but Henry was also something far less regal: a forty-year-old outfielder making $200,000 a year, a player who was a full nine years older than Davey Johnson, the next-oldest position regular on the club. He was a player for whom—at least while wearing a baseball uniform—the past held far more glory than the future. The physical traits, certainly, were still apparent and they still gave Aaron watchers a nostalgic tingle: Henry resting on one knee in the on-deck circle, sometimes holding two bats to limber up, walking slowly to the plate, batting helmet in his right hand, Del Crandall–model bat dragging along behind him, leaving a caterpillar’s trail. He still stepped into the batter’s box as he always had, adjusting his helmet and scooping up a cupful of dirt (even in 1974, when the modern kids wore wristbands and sometimes
two
gloves, Henry did not wear even a single batting glove), as always his hitting prefaced by that deep, majestic clearing of the throat, an operatic harbinger. The routines were familiar and, in many ways, even more poignant as they yellowed.

It was his consistency that had always left his contemporaries in so much awe, how he could always hit, regardless of the circumstances, and his ability to dial it up against the best fastballs, adjust to the sharpest curves. That was what was missing right now. “With Henry Aaron, it didn’t matter,”
²⁵²
Ralph Garr reflected. “He could have just come back from a funeral and you wouldn’t know. You never knew what was weighing on his mind, what his mood was. You wouldn’t know, because his approach was always the same to hitting. Nobody ever had that kind of concentration. If he had problems at home, you’d never know. You couldn’t do anything to break him of his plan.” Garr used to watch Henry’s computerized mind dissect a pitcher’s patterns while he sat in the dugout waiting his turn. He could be in the tunnel smoking a butt and yet he knew that he could apply the snippet of information he’d gleaned when it came his time to hit. The macho guys trying to establish themselves, guys like Kirby and Billingham, might start him out with a fastball away, a curveball in, then try to finish him with the one pitch Henry would never completely master, the slider away. Starting Henry off the plate meant that a pitcher believed he had his good stuff and could come in hard with a fastball, but only when absolutely necessary. When a pitcher started him off with a fastball in, well, that was just a show-me pitch, because unless your last named happened to be Gibson or Koufax, you didn’t dare try to come inside twice on Henry in the same at bat. Gibson never gave you a chance to guess whether or not he had it on a given day, so Henry knew never to look for anything but hard and inside, and then adjust. Approaching Gibson any other way was just asking for it, for the last thing Bob Gibson would do was show weakness to a hitter, even if it meant throwing a substandard (by Gibson’s measure) fastball in a dangerous location to a dangerous hitter. Against the rest of the league, Henry had the pitching sequences against him so perfectly memorized that Garr would sit back with delight and watch the guy on the mound take his inevitable pounding at the hands of the master.

The difference now was that Henry possessed the knowledge but was not producing the results, and day after day, the great man lunged where he once strode. The swagger remained intact, but now it was accompanied by fewer hits. The vaunted wrists were still plenty quick enough—until the day he walked off the field for good, nobody would easily strike out Henry Aaron—but instead of providing the gunpowder, the wrists now provided only protection, keeping him from striking out. There were times when the kids, with their hormones and muscles, would fire a fastball past Henry early in the game, thinking time had gotten the better of him. And then there he’d be, watching the fastball, sensing its movement, just as always, as some young catcher sat back, self-satisfied, waiting to watch the ball zip past the old man once more in a rush of hot air … only then, the wrists would spark to life, and the old baseball men, the scouts, with their Cadillacs and suspenders and their round bellies, their pens and pads and charts (in a few years, they’d be carrying radar guns, too), sitting behind the backstop would give one another that wry, wrinkly nod.
That’s Henry for you. He’s still got it
. And they would dig deep into their endless bags of folklore and chuckle.
You got to get up early in the morning to sneak a fastball by ole Henry Aaron…
. And it was right there, at that hundredth of a second in time—that unit of measure for the millionth percentiles that differentiated Mount Olympus from Cooperstown—when the universe, once so predictable, flew completely off of its axis. Once, there had been that automatic thunderclap. Now, when Henry swung, the baseball would just slide weakly off of the barrel of his bat and ricochet backward into the netting, and Henry would turn and watch the ball sail foul, poker-faced, trying to ignore the doubt. The next night, he might be beautiful again, slashing through the zone, doubles one-hopping deadly off the base of the outfield wall. And on the very next night, an average fastball might catch the bottom of his bat and trickle harmlessly toward the third-base dugout, coughing up chalk as it spun along, giving life to more whispers. And his guts would churn, because he knew better than anybody that those were the pitches that through two wars and five presidents had routinely gotten tattooed. The wrists were no longer sparking fires, no longer doing the executioner’s work. Once they’d been torpedoes, but now the legendary wrists of the great Henry Aaron were just life preservers, prolonging hopeless at bats for one more pitch.

H
E WAS STILL
Henry Aaron. That was why Eddie Mathews batted him fourth the whole season, the same spot he had hit since the Korean War. Whatever changes Mathews might have made to the lineup, he didn’t mess with one spot: When Henry played, he batted cleanup, which, whatever evidence to the contrary, made life feel normal. He fought time, even as he increasingly lost the battle. Every now and again, the old Henry would rise.

“When we would fly from Atlanta overnight to California, he normally wouldn’t play the next day. We did a cross-country trip to San Francisco one time and when we got there there was a newspaper article in the
San Francisco Chronicle
about this ‘Count’ Montefusco, a young pitcher, maybe twenty-two years old,” recalled Davey Johnson, then a Braves infielder. “He had great stuff, a nasty slider—an unhittable slider. He was complaining that he was having to pitch against the Braves. He said something like ‘They’re not a good team; why am I pitching against them?’ And Henry read the paper and he went to [Clyde King] and said, ‘I’m in the lineup.’ And it was a day game after an all-night flight. I’ll never forget it. We all knew what was going to happen. We’d seen it too many times. A couple of guys got on base in front of him and Henry looked for his best pitch, which was a nasty down-and-away slider. He reached out there and popped it over the left center-field wall. He came back into the dugout and said, ‘I hope that kid gained more respect for us now.’ Henry put him in his place. This kid was cocky. He had a really great year and felt above pitching against any club. That’s what Henry said, ‘We can’t let this go.’ And I mean to tell you, it was a wicked low-and-away slider. That was in 1974, Montefusco’s first year.”

Johnson could be forgiven for flashbulb memory, but the kernel of the story is nevertheless true. The game was September 18, 1974, the finale of a three-game set in San Francisco. It was true that Henry did not usually play in the opener of a West Coast series following a cross-country flight, nor did he play in this case: a day-game travel day following a night game. John Montefusco woke him, and Henry had been scheduled an off-day but put himself in the lineup. Montfusco was a rising star, twenty-four years old. He had been called up fifteen days earlier and the next year would win Rookie of the Year in the National League.

Henry led off the second, and boomed home run number 732 off Montefusco, a long, slashing drive to left center. In his next at-bat, with two on in the third, Henry singled home another run off Montefusco. Henry had put the kid down, but what didn’t make sense was why Montefusco would want to upset any opponent, as the Giants would finish sixteen games behind the Braves in 1974. Pressure was like the wind, unseen by the human eye, but it could easily and obviously be detected when it descended, exerting its suffocating, downward force. The pressure Henry felt stemmed not only from his inability to catch a fastball but from
why he couldn’t
. The truth was that he had indeed started the marathoner’s kick to get to Ruth, gave it everything he had and soared at an age when so many of his contemporaries were washed up. Between the ages of thirty-five and thirty-nine, Mays had wilted as a baseball player. So had Frank Robinson and the rest of them. But Henry had hit 199 home runs, so suddenly, at age forty, it did not compute that the skill was no longer there. Even when he was hitting under .200, his strikeout totals were still low, and that was all the more reason for him to believe that he suffered from mechanical flaws more than from physical erosion.

In the years to come, with reflection, Henry understood the reasons were not mostly physical (other than that the nagging aches persisted a bit longer), but mental: There was, after Ruth, nothing left to chase. For five years, Ruth had been the obsession, and for the ten before that, the goal had been to prove he belonged with Mays, Mantle, and Musial, on the red carpet with the all-time greats, the ones who defined Cooperstown, instead of the other way around, and during his initial five years in the big leagues, the motivating force had been proving to himself that there was a bigger, more rewarding life beyond Mobile in which he was entitled to share. He would say he always believed he would quit the game after he had achieved three thousand hits, but the proximity to Ruth kept him going, five years after that milestone. He had wanted desperately for the chase to be over, to put an end to the pressures and the anxieties and the fears. Billye and his closest friends would spend the next three decades trying to repair the blows to his humanity that had been exacted during the chase. “There is no question he lost something
²⁵³
he could never get back, a piece of himself,” said his close friend and attorney, Allan Tanenbaum. “The chase did that.”

But now that the record belonged to him, Henry realized how much the goal of vanquishing Ruth had gotten inside of him. He had weakened as a complete player since 1968, harassed by his back, his ankles, all the parts of his body that hurt. He had stolen at least fifteen bases a year for nine straight seasons, but since turning thirty-five in 1969, he hadn’t stolen ten in a single season, and would not again. He did not know what would provide the inner motivation to continue playing ball.

For a time, it appeared that the pennant race would energize him. In the month before the all-star break, the Braves contended with the Reds and Dodgers, both hungry, muscular clubs. June 21, opening game of the series at Riverfront Stadium, Carl Morton against Jack Billingham: The two traded zeroes until the seventh, when Henry stroked a one-out double and later scored on a ground ball. The rest was tension, the Big Red Machine loading the bases in the bottom of the ninth, Tom House facing the murderous Johnny Bench for the game. Bench flied out to left, and the Braves took a 1–0 win. They were in second place, only five games behind Los Angeles and two ahead of Cincinnati. The Braves were making a pennant run, and it was Henry who had scored the only run of the game. Intermittently in 1974, he had spoken of retirement, but maybe there was some fun to be had after all, one last charge. Phil Niekro, the other old head on the club (even Niekro, who looked like he was seventy even when he was in his thirties, was five years younger than Henry), led the pitching staff. The kid Buzz Capra was surprising the league at 7–2, and that self-described “low-end guy, happy to be there” Tom House possessed a microscopic ERA. Where there was pitching, there was October, so even though he was no longer as dangerous, Henry somehow still found himself in the middle of big wins as the summer progressed.