 Aaron's ascent was all business
Home run king hammered his way past detractors, Ruth
By Mark Newman / MLB.com
• Hank Aaron's top five homers
He was all business, this man who began as a Clown.
No flashy theatrics. No moonshots over the roof. No circus act, no media controversy, just business. That is how Henry Aaron lived his life and played the game he loved, and that is how the standard of 755 home runs looks today.
It is serious business, that number. It is the final product of day after day of a no-nonsense approach to baseball, spanning 23 years and five U.S. presidents. Hammerin' Hank never hit more than 47 homers in a season, and never fewer than 10. He was just a man doing his job one game at a time with consistency, patience, dignity, a thick skin made for withstanding the world. And the best wrists in baseball. He let his numbers speak for themselves, and there are surely a lot of people now who would like to go back a quarter century and appreciate them for what they meant.
"I came to the Braves on business," Aaron once said, "and I intended to see that business was good as long as I could."
Whereas Babe Ruth and Willie Mays built their careers as exciting New York sluggers, thriving in the glare, Aaron spent his first 12 seasons and his final two seasons in the slower pace of Milwaukee, a fact he always believed was important to his baseball longevity. He has said he doesn't think he would have lasted in New York. Not for a man who grew up in Mobile, Ala., came up on business and, ironically, had to accept his role as a Clown to make people take him seriously.
The Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro Leagues first signed Aaron as a crosshand-hitting, knock-kneed, scrawny, 150-pound shortstop. Mark Ribowsky's book A Complete History of the Negro Leagues describes how the Clowns changed Aaron at least temporarily to fit the team's shtick. Although Jackie Robinson already had broken baseball's color barrier, Aaron went by the name of "Pork Chops." Ribowsky writes that this meant "hamming it up, acting out a vision of Negroes otherwise last seen in minstrel shows ... that people still paid to see Negroes perform as, well, clowns."
True to his nature, Aaron did what it took, and scouts noticed him. The Braves outbid the New York Giants -- imagine a future outfield of Hank and Willie -- and in 1954 the wonderful Major League career of Henry Louis Aaron was born.
|
|
News
Bonds' 600th: 
Radio calls: 
Photo Galleries: 
Wallpaper: 