The legendary slugger died on Friday at 86 years old.
I want to tell you about a guy named Ed Scott. He was a Black man of the South. Born in Florida, Scott moved to Mobile, Alabama, where he worked for a paper company and played as an outfielder for the Mobile Black Shippers, which were also known as the Mobile Black Bears, a barnstorming semi-professional baseball team that also played in a segregated league. His playing career hit its peak in 1940, when Scott won a 32-piece set of china for getting the first hit off Satchel Paige. His playing days over, and the paper company gig having grown boring, Scott got into scouting, which, in the wake of Jackie Robinson's elevation to the Brooklyn Dodgers, integrated far more quickly than did the rosters of major-league ball clubs. After all, Black scouts would be more likely to know who the great Black players were.
Scott scouted for the Negro League teams, as well as for the major-league franchises. It was in the former capacity that Scott signed a quick-waisted, powerful young man named Henry Aaron for the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro Leagues. (Legend has it that Scott first saw Aaron hitting in a softball game in Mobile and concluded that, if he could hit a softball as far as he did, he would have no problem jacking a baseball out of the 'yard.) By 1952, Aaron had been signed by the Boston Braves of the National League. So, by the mid-1950's, it looked as though Boston baseball fans would be able to ride the Green Line up Commonwealth Avenue to see Ted Williams one day and Henry Aaron the next. (Among Red Sox old-timers, there is a large contingent who maintain that, if Tom Yawkey hadn't been a drooling racist idiot, Williams and Aaron—and/or Willie Mays! – might have been playing in the same outfield. Don't get me started.) But, by 1954, when Aaron finally came up to the big club, the Braves had moved to Milwaukee, and Aaron was hitting home runs in great bunches.
His was not the majestic, sweeping swing that Williams had. Aaron's was quicker and more obviously violent, appearing to come only from his elbows down, his wrists apparently spring-loaded. By 1966, the Braves were in Atlanta and, year after year, people began to notice that Henry Aaron had a shot at breaking Babe Ruth's record of 714 career home runs. As he got closer and closer, he took terrible abuse from the more-than-casual racists who followed baseball. He got death threats. Twenty years later, he explained to Bill Rhoden of The New York Times what the pressures of chasing that record were like. This dignified, reticent man unburdened himself completely.
"April 8th, 1974, really led up to turning me off on baseball," Aaron said. "It really made me see for the first time a clear picture of what this country is about. My kids had to live like they were in prison because of kidnap threats, and I had to live like a pig in a slaughter camp. I had to duck. I had to go out the back door of the ball parks. I had to have a police escort with me all the time. I was getting threatening letters every single day. All of these thing have put a bad taste in my mouth and it won't go away. They carved a piece of my heart away."
As the years went by, Aaron became more and more respected and loved by the baseball community, never more so than when the steroid hysteria hit baseball, and after Barry Bonds blew past Aaron's records. He was used as a moral, yes, hammer on what was perceived to be a generation of "cheaters." It was a strange way to get the prominence in the game's history that he'd always deserved in the first place.