(AP Photo)
The death last night of the great Henry Louis Aaron, the REAL home run king, was both sad and sobering. When I was a kid in the '60's, sports were my lifeblood. My heroes were all athletes: Willie Mays, Jim Brown, Sam Jones, Wilt Chamberlain, and too many others to list. Every spare minute of my seemingly endless days was spent playing sports and imagining myself to be the heroes I dreamed about--shoveling snow in winter at Grasslyn Playground in Havertown, PA to play basketball; playing football in my back yard with my brother, my dad, and neighborhood pals; and especially playing baseball at Grasslyn or wiffle ball in my back yard, pretending to be both Mays and, with relentless running commentary, announcers Bill Campbell, By Saam, and Richie Ashburn (my neighbors were, as I only later understood, remarkably longsuffering). I enthusiastically collected both Topps baseball cards and Philadelphia Chewing Gum football cards. I faithfully listened to WCAU 1210's Phillies broadcasts every night on Philly's muggy summer evenings (indeed, I was listening when, on April 20, 1966, Hank homered off Ray Culp and Bo Belinsky for his 399th and 400th career homers, leading the newly relocated Atlanta Braves to an 8-1 win over the Phils at Connie Mack Stadium before all of 6855 fans). Fall Sunday afternoons were spent watching ex-Eagle Tom Brookshire call Eagles games and, often before the game was over, reliving the game by playing ball in our yard. And both Sixers road games and Big 5 basketball games from Penn's Palestra were on UHF channels 3 or 4 nights a week in winter. Sports, and the men who played them, were everything.
The Hammer--the historian in me likes to refer to him as Henricus Maccabeus--despite playing in smaller markets (Milwaukee and Atlanta) and with a quieter, more workmanlike style than the more visually spectacular Mays and Mickey Mantle, who had made their names in the hegemonic New York of the '50's, was certainly, along with them, one of the "Holy Trinity" of Major League ballplayers of that, the greatest era of the sport. His career numbers are both astounding and legendary: 25 all star games, 3771 hits, 2174 runs scored, a major league record 2297 RBI, a once-record (and, IMO, still legitimate one) 755 home runs, a record 6856 total bases, a .305 lifetime batting average, 240 stolen bases (with 44 homers and 31 steals in 1963, he became only the third player, after Mays (1956-57) and Ken Williams (1922), to garner both 30 homers and 30 steals in a season, and the first 40/30 player), and 3 Gold Gloves (1958-60). His .555 career slugging percentage only slightly trails the .557 of both Mays and Mantle. His 143.1 career Wins Above Replacement ranks 5th all time among position players, behind only Barry Bonds*, Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, and Ty Cobb. His Peak (i.e., 7 year) WAR (WAR7) of 60.3 ranks 16th (behind, inter alia, Babe Ruth [84.8], Mays [73.5], Cobb [69.0], Mike Trout [65.6], and Mantle [64.7]). This latter number highlights the most amazing aspect of his career, namely, his longevity, a longevity not enabled or enhanced artificially (which certainly cannot be said of the one who eventually broke his career home run record). Mantle, plagued for most of his career by devastating leg injuries, had his last great season, 1964, at the age of 32 (though he had a nearly great season in 1966, at age 34). Mays's last "Maysian" season was in 1966, at age 35 (though he, like Mantle, had very good seasons later at ages 37, 39 and 40). Aaron, by contrast, continued to play at a peak level until he was 40, in 1973, when he hit .301 with 40 homers in just 392 at bats in his 20th Major League season. Indeed, one could make a good case that his best offensive season came in 1971, at age 38, when he hit .327 with a career high 47 homers and a 194 OPS+ in only 495 at bats. That is simply staggering. When, on April 8, 1974, in only the 4th game of the new season, he hammered an Al Downing fastball over the left field fence at Atlanta Stadium for his 715th career home run, breaking Babe Ruth's most iconic record, he was still near, if not at, the top of his game.
I suppose that it is quite common for 64 year old retirees like myself to engage in nostalgia. Accordingly, I quite often find myself reminiscing, indeed longing to relive, as it were, those days and the Philadelphia of my youth. What Aaron's death hammers home, as it were, is the realization that those days are long gone, never to return. Some of my old heroes, such as Mays, Brown, Jones, Juan Marichal, Fran Tarkenton, Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson, and others still survive in their 80's. But most of the rest of the greats I then idolized are gone--some, like Mantle and Chamberlain, for more than 20 years; others, like Aaron, Dick Allen, Al Kaline, Bob Gibson, Herb Adderley, Bobby Mitchell, Timmy Brown, and Gale Sayers, in the past year alone.
Centuries before Christ, the prophet wrote, "All men are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fall, because the breath of the LORD blows on them" (Isaiah 40:6-7). Later James the Just, the Lord's brother, wrote, "What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes" (James 4:14). The older I get, the more this hits home ... and not a minute too soon!
R.I.P., Hank.
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