Henry Aaron

Hank Aaron, or Henry Aaron as he preferred to be called, died today at the age of 86. No one in baseball ever hit more homeruns without benefit of performance-enhancing drugs. I can’t say that I ever saw Aaron play in person. My initial encounter with him came through Strat-O-Matic baseball. Once I became addicted to the board game in eighth grade, I did what any young White Sox fan would, seek out and play a team with honest-to-goodness power. In 1965 (or the spring of 1966, as Strat-O-Matic was always a year behind), that meant the Milwaukee Braves. What a team for me to manage, with a lineup featuring Aaron in addition to Felipe Alou, Rico Carty, Mack Jones, Eddie Mathews and Joe Torre. All these years later, and I can still name those players without needing to check with baseballreference.com. The Braves moved to Atlanta the next year, and for that an ex-owner of the White Sox played a major role. Thomas Reynolds, a Chicago lawyer, was part of a group that bought out the Comiskey-family share of the team in 1961only to fail in securing majority control. The group sold their interest in the Sox within a year and bought controlling interest in the Braves. I shudder to think what they would’ve done had they managed to win control of the Sox. Reynolds and his buddies moved the Braves because they couldn’t get lease concessions at County Stadium. “I would have made the same decision today,” Reynolds told a Tribune reporter for a 1987 profile after being named head of the new stadium authority. Comiskey Park didn’t stand a chance, or Chicago taxpayers, for that matter. Never had a less-deserving fox been put in charge of a chicken coup. Aaron didn’t feel the love from Atlanta fans the way he seems to have in Milwaukee, at least early on when the Braves were the darlings of Wisconsin and the upper Midwest. I imagine Milwaukee must’ve been a kind of oasis. When I played Aaron and the Braves or watched them on TV against the Cubs, I had no idea what any black player went through in the minor leagues, spring training or on the road in places like Cincinnati and St. Louis. I was a kid, and dumb that way. For whatever reason(s), many of my favorite Sox players early on were Black—Don Buford, Tommy McCraw, Floyd Robinson, Walt Williams. I can only imagine what they endured in order to reach the major leagues. For that, I can only feel shame. I’m thankful, though, to have watched their careers unfold and that of Henry Aaron. What a beautiful swing.