I had the great pleasure of meeting Hank back in the mid-80s at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park. He was a roving minor league hitting instructor for the Braves and I was drinking Schlitz Malt Liquor Bull on 50-Cent Hot Dog Night. It was a thrill and he was very gracious.
RIP Hammerin’ Hank.
Been a rough couple years for baseball Hall of Famers!
Inner circle of the inner circle.
I thought he would have been much older. I don’t know much about sportsball.
In north Florida back in the 70s, the only baseball you got was the games broadcast by the Atlanta Braves southern radio network. Nearly every evening during the summer my dad and I would listen to Milo Hamilton and Ernie Johnson call the action and listen to them extoll the exploits of Hammerin’ Hank Aaron. He was a great player and a class act all around. He was one of the very few sports heroes I’ve looked up to in my life and I’m sad that he’s gone.
I’ve never been happy about a 'roided up Barry Bonds breaking his record. That was a MLB travesty. In my mind Aaron is still the home run king.
Damn right. Calling him a Hall of Famer is doing a disservice.
I never got to see him play, he retired 8 years before I was born, but he had so many great plays and moments that I was able to see them after.
Oh yeah, WSB AM 750! Went to sleep many a summer night in the seventies in Atlanta listening to those guys on the radio. And spent a few afternoons at the old Fulton County Stadium in the cheap seats (well, the way the Braves played back then, all the seats were cheap, and usually empty). One of the big draws was seeing Hank Aaron.
My dad is a Braves fan because of Hank and Eddie Matthews.
Another piece of my childhood gone, a BIG piece this time.
Fare well, Hank, wherever you are.
RIP. An extraordinary man.
My first introduction to Hank Aaron was actually from reading a Peanuts comics collection as a little kid, before I even knew that professional baseball was a thing. Schulz was angered by the shit being thrown at Aaron by people all butthurt that Ruth’s record was going to be surpassed (and by a black player no less), so he wrote a story about Snoopy chasing a little league HR record and getting inundated with hate mail. It raised a lot of questions in my mind.
https://twitter.com/bubbaprog/status/1352657421982953474
https://twitter.com/bubbaprog/status/1352658177809117189
That was before my time, but I believe that arc concerned a single season HR record and ended with Charlie Brown getting picked off while attempting to steal during Snoopy’s last at bat of the season. Off topic, but Peanuts was brilliant, especially the baseball ones.
My favorite is the Baseball Rash/Mister Sack storyline.
My three older brothers are 13, 15, and 17 years older than I am. The summer of 1965, well before I was born, one of my brothers was gifted a couple of tickets to a Cardinals game at old Busch Stadium (which was really Sportsman’s Park) for good grades. My dad was able to scrape together some money for him and my other brothers to sit in the bleachers under the pavilion so they could all go.
Dad took my four brothers to that game. It was to see the hometown defending World Series champs play the Milwaukee Braves and Henry Aaron.
Pitching that night for the Cardinals was a journeyman pitcher named Curt Simmons. Simmons had been (somewhat improbably) terrific in 1964, playing a huge role in the Cardinals getting to the World Series. In 1965 he was back to being pretty mediocre, and Father Time was clearly bearing down hard on him the way he does for all athletes.
But…Hank Aaron hated facing Curt Simmons, regardless. Simmons had a funky, twisting delivery, and then brought his pitches home at a speed described by one writer as “Slow, slower, and slowest.” Simmons was the master of a fluttering changeup, and for an aggressive hitter like Aaron it was kryptonite. Hammerin’ Hank would often seem to corkscrew himself right into the ground in the batter’s box trying to make good contact. More often than not he’d just pop the ball up or get over the top of it and slap an easy grounder at an infielder.
And so on this night in 1965 at old Busch Stadium I, Hank Aaron came up in the 8th inning of a 3-3 ballgame. Aaron had had a typical night against Simmons to that point. In the first inning, he popped up into foul territory and been retired by catcher Tim McCarver. In the 6th, Aaron had once again swung out of his shoes and lifted a lazy can of corn to centerfielder Curt Flood. He’d scratched out a single in the 4th, hitting s seeing-eye 6-hop ground ball through the infield. For Aaron, that marked a success against Curt Simmons.
But here it was in the 8th. Simmons was likely running on fumes and Aaron came to the plate with one thing on his mind. On a 1-0 pitch, Aaron did everything he could to stay back and wait on a fluttering Curt Simmons changeup nothingball, and then strode into the pitch and whacked the ball onto the right field pavilion roof for a home run.
Aaron put his head down and jogged around the bases with his brisk stride. As he stepped on home after circling the bases, home plate umpire Chris Pelekoudas stuck his fist in the air and called Hank Aaron out. Aaron was, understandably, incredulous. What the hell? Pelekoudas ruled that when Aaron swung at the pitch, he’d stepped so far forward that his front foot had completely gone out of the batter’s box. Aaron was out.
Milwaukee manager Bobby Bragan was having none of that. Bragan shielded off his star player and got in the umpires face, spluttering and yelling. And you can understand why – if the umpire is going to make that rare call of a batter hitting a ball by stepping out of the batter’s box (technically, it’s called batter’s interference) the umpire is supposed to make the call immediately – not wait until the batter has circled the bases on a home run.
The call stood, though the Braves rallied and won anyway. After the game, the normally soft-spoken Aaron called it the worst call he’d ever seen. My dad – a diehard Cardinals fan – told my brothers the same thing on the drive home. One of my brothers had been to the game with his leg in a cast, having broken it in two places playing football in the back yard a few weeks earlier.
Nearly a decade later, my brother – a kid just out of college and writing for the local paper as a cub sports reporter, wrote a column in the Spring of 1974. MLB teams had just broken camp at Spring Training, and Hank Aaron was just two home runs away from surpassing Babe Ruth as baseball’s all time champion. My brother wrote that column about the night back in 1965 when Hank had hit a home run that didn’t count, reminiscing about the evening and seeing the ballgame in person as a teenager on crutches. It was a pretty great column. Sports Illustrated inquired about picking it up for a guest column. It got my brother promoted to sports editor, and started a 40+ year career as a sports journalist that just ended a year or two ago at the San Francisco Chronicle.
And thus and so, now you know that Hank Aaron really probably hit 756 home runs, not 755, thanks to the dinger that was probably unjustly taken away from him. With that said, local Cardinals beat writer Neal Russo probably got in the best line about that night, writing in the Post-Dispatch. Quoth Russo: “Pelekoudas is a Greek, and a Greek ought to know a Homer when he sees one.”
I don’t remember a lot of historical moments as a kid but I do remember watching his record breaking home run inside some store like Fred Meyers when I was a kid…it was so cool and amazing. RIP
In case anyone hasn’t had the pleasure of seeing Hank Aaron’s sublime swing, this is my favorite exhibition:
RIP
Thanks for posting that, @Douglas! I figured I’d watch a minute or two but wound up watching the entire thing. Henry Aaron was an amazing man.
I heard a quote on NPR this morning: Muhammad Ali once said, “The only person I admire more than myself is Hank Aaron.”
Great story! Did your brother write the ump a thank you note?
