By BILL PUCKO
The more things change, the more they stay the same. By anyone’s measure Henry Aaron is one of the top five greatest baseball players ever. The career home run leader when he retired at age 42 in 1976, he hit 24 or more home runs for 19 consecutive seasons. Which is still a record. He hit 40 when he was 39. But those are just numbers. How Henry got there is the story.
Aaron was born in the “Down by the Bay” section of segregated Mobile, Alabama in 1934. He was a self-taught ball player. He learned to bat by hitting bottle caps with sticks. He became a right-handed, cross handed power hitter. Nobody ever thought to teach him a proper grip on the bat, with his right hand on top. It wasn’t remedied until years later in his second year as a professional.
He left Mobile for the first time, his mother in tears at the train station, to play pro ball for the Negro League Indianapolis Clowns for 200 dollars a month. Among the countless instances of racism Aaron encountered, one stood out. Playing for the Clowns in Washington DC. The sound of the kitchen staff smashing the dishes used by the black players at a restaurant. Destroyed rather than being re-used.
Aaron was the last to play in both the Negro and Major Leagues. His career skyrocketed upon his callup to the Milwaukee Braves in 1954. He eclipsed Babe Ruth career home run mark in 1974. Coming full circle, his mother, who had cried at the train station decades before, was there to witness it.
Fast forward 48 years. You may have missed this. Lorenzo Cain was released marking the possible end of a solid ten-year Major-League career. Cain is a universally respected man. He left the game with a dignity that he, like Aaron, learned the hard way. While he didn’t face the same degree of overt racism, Cain was the product of single parent upbringing in the poverty of the deep south. His father died when Lorenzo was four. He didn’t play baseball until his second year in high school. He showed up for a tryout with borrowed equipment dressed in a collared short. Cain went on to become a Major League All Star, the 2014 ALCS Most Valuable Player and won a World Series title with the Kansas City Royals.
I met Hank Aaron once. His is the only autograph I ever asked for. I think I’d like to meet Lorenzo Cain someday. We could all use a little more perspective.
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