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RIP Henry Aaron

Dan T.

By Dan T.
in The Tailgate

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Spaceman Spiff

Spaceman Spiff

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6 minutes ago, TryTheBeal! said:

2300 rbis?!?

 

BEAST!

 

Played a hell of a long time, was remarkably consistent and remarkably good.  I don't see anyone breaking that record for a long time.  Maybe Pujols has an outside chance but he is a shell of what he used to be and his contract is up at the end of this year.  I don't see anyone signing him in 2022.

 

Hank Aaron was a true 5 tool player.  He got a lot of recognition for hitting homers which is understandable, but he also could hit for average, run, field and throw.  His baseball reference page is absurd.

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Dan T.

Dan T.

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^^^ Side note... how lucky for history that Vin Scully was there to make the call on his record breaking 715th.

 

And the other thing that comes through on that clip viscerally is what his achievement meant for Black America.  He didn't talk about it much at the time, but the hatred, vitriol, and death threats he got from bigots as he neared the record only amped the pressure on him.

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Joe Posnanski ranked him the 4th greatest baseball player ever.

 

https://theathletic.com/1724948/2020/04/06/the-baseball-100-no-4-henry-aaron/

 

Quote

Can a man as beloved and admired and appreciated as Aaron still be underrated? I think so. It comes down to a simple contradiction: His name became synonymous with the home run.

“No matter what it is,” Aaron says, “they’re gonna always say, ‘Hank Aaron and a home run, Hank Aaron and a home run.’”

And Hank Aaron was not a home run hitter.

No, Aaron was a pure hitter. He was an excellent outfielder. He was a superb baserunner. And he was a metronome, pumping out the same brilliant seasons year after year and decade after decade. He led the league in total bases eight times, first as a 22-year-old, last at age 35. Eight times. Nobody — not Ruth, not Williams, not Hornsby, not Musial, not Cobb, not anybody — led the league in total bases as many times.

And the home runs? Well, to turn around the phrase, home runs were a bug, not a feature. Aaron hit the ball very hard and when you hit the ball very hard, some of them go out. He never hit 70 homers in a season like Barry Bonds or 65 homers in a season like Mark McGwire or 60 homers in a season like Babe Ruth or 55 homers in a season like Ken Griffey or 50 homers in a season like Mickey Mantle or even 48 homers in a season like Willie Stargell, Dave Kingman and Jorge Soler.

Home runs were not the chorus of Henry Aaron’s song.

He just hit so many baseballs hard over the years that 755 left the ballpark.

And when a person does something as colossal as hit 755 home runs, it’s hard to think of anything else. The magic inventor and writer Jim Steinmeyer talks about a type of stagecraft device called the “dazzler.” It is a very bright light that is placed on stage and pointed at the audience’s eyes. When that light hits the eyes, everything around the dazzler seems to disappear. “If there’s something dark near the dazzler,” he says, “you can’t see it.”

For Henry Aaron, 755 home runs is the dazzler. It blocks the view. People see that, talk about that, argue about that. (When Bonds hit his 756th home run, people argued about it, raged about it, many insisted that Bonds would never be the Home Run King, no matter what the record books said.)

It’s a bright light that blinds people to the things that made Henry Aaron so special. People can’t see, for instance, how fast Aaron was. He didn’t steal bases when he was a young player — almost nobody stole bases in those days, particularly in Milwaukee. In 1957, the Braves stole 35 bases — we’re talking about the whole team. In 1958, they stole just 26, dead last in the league.

It wasn’t until 1959 that Aaron started feeling the freedom to steal bases. He was 25 years old and had been in the league for five years. He attempted eight stolen bases that year. He was successful all eight times. From 1959 to 1968, Aaron stole 203 bases, seventh in all of baseball, ahead even of Mays. He became just the third player in baseball history to have a 30-30 season.

But here’s the big thing: In those 10 seasons, he was successful on more than 80 percent of his attempts. That was the highest stolen-base percentage in the game over that time. How many stolen bases could he have had if he’d tried? There’s no telling. For his career, Aaron was successful more than 76 percent of the time, a higher percentage than Robinson, Maury Wills, Lou Brock, Juan Pierre and, yes, Mays.

“Henry didn’t steal bases like Willie,” Mathews said, “but goddamn, he could steal bases. He could run like hell, and he didn’t even look like he was running. I’ll bet you in a footrace, Hank would have beaten Willie.”

And what about Aaron as an outfielder? Well, he wasn’t a center fielder (he was actually an infielder when he started) and so historically he has been written off by many. But by the Baseball-Reference stats, Aaron was worth 100 runs more than average. By range factor — number of plays made — he often led the league and always finished in the top two or three, and, remember, he played just about his entire career in the same league as another pretty good right fielder named Roberto Clemente. Aaron won three Gold Gloves and could have won more.

Again, from Mathews: “He never threw to the wrong base, never missed the cutoff man.”

Mostly, though, the dazzler covers up just how complete a hitter Henry Aaron was. If you took away his 755 home runs — just took them away — he would still have had 3,000 hits. Not only does he have the record for most RBIs with 2,297, but he also has the most combined runs and RBIs.

Most runs plus RBIs:

  1. Henry Aaron, 4,471
  2. Babe Ruth, 4,388
  3. Barry Bonds, 4,223
  4. Ty Cobb, 4,189
  5. Alex Rodriguez, 4,107

And then there’s his absurd, almost laughable, breakaway lead in career total bases. If you want to call Henry Aaron the king of something, call him the King of Total Bases. He had 6,856 total bases in his career — 700 more than anyone else.

 

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