Hammering on HankHow the media abuse baseball's home run king.
By Tommy CraggsPosted Friday, July 20, 2007, at 3:53 PM ET
This baseball season, it fell to the sporting press to drag a reluctant Hank Aaron once more into public view, the occasion being Barry Bonds' slow-motion pursuit of a stationary number. Now, anytime an old baseball personage hobbles back into frame, he is invariably described in awed, petrifying language better suited to, say, the Archbishop of Canterbury. The treatment of Aaron hasn't been any different. A spin through the sports pages over the past few months reveals that he is a man of "cool dignity," "quiet dignity," "innate dignity," "immense dignity," "eternal dignity," "unfettered dignity," "unimpeachable dignity," the very "picture of dignity" who "brought so much dignity to baseball" and who, "having exuded dignity his entire life," continues to this day "exud[ing] class and dignity." Aaron, proclaimed the inevitable George Will, who perhaps learned about dignity from selling his to Conrad Black, was "The Dignified Slugger From Mobile."
No one would quibble with the sentiment, unctuous and condescending though it may be. Aaron's forbearance was indeed remarkable; in many ways, he holds up better in history's eyes than the peer to whom he is often compared, Jackie Robinson—himself a "pillar of dignity"—whose outspokenness regrettably extended to the odd HUAC hearing and Nixon campaign stop.
No, what's unfortunate about Aaron's latest turn in the public eye is that he has been reduced to a sportswriter's cheap trope. The great slugger's dignity is of interest only insofar as it can be picked up by the likes of George Will and swung in the general direction of Barry Bonds. (As of Friday morning, Bonds stands just two home runs shy of Aaron's 755.) "As Barry Bonds continues his gimpy, joyless pursuit of such glory as he is eligible for," Will wrote, "consider the odyssey of Mobile's greatest native son." Or as a Cincinnati Postheadline pronounced: "Safe To Say Bonds No Aaron." Of course, with Aaron, it has always been thus. It is the singular curse of his career: to be treated like a sandwich board for the prevailing attitudes of the day.
It was uglier a half-century ago. Aaron hit the majors in 1954, after a stint in the Negro Leagues and a year with the Milwaukee Braves' affiliate in the South Atlantic League, which he helped integrate. As baseball historian Jules Tygiel points out, his timing was impeccable—Aaron was one of the first black ballplayers whose career unfolded more or less naturally, without segregation or war chipping away at his prime.
Once in the bigs, he quickly became, as a comically obtuse 1958 New York Times Magazine profile put it, "a symbol of a new era of slugging," a savage of preternatural talent. (The headline: "The Panther at the Plate.") "Aaron brings to baseball an atavistic ... single-mindedness," William Barry Furlong wrote, going on to describe the "somniferous-looking" Aaron's "insouciance" and "indolence" and taking care to twice point out his "shuffling" gait. No mention was made of Aaron's thorough preparation, before which even Ted Williams salaamed. The Times was far from the only offender. Even Aaron's first manager, Charlie Grimm, went in for this nonsense. He liked to call Aaron "Stepin Fetchit."
Some of this was surely a product of Aaron's shy and unadorned personality at the time, which offered the media little but a bare armature on which to shape whatever they wished. He didn't have Willie Mays' élan; his hat didn't whip off whenever he rounded second. He drove a Chevy Caprice. "Grace in a gray flannel suit," one writer called him.
Likewise, Aaron's performance over 23 seasons—consistently very good, occasionally great, always a notch or two below Mays'—lacked the dizzying peaks that give a career the flavor of personality. He never hit more than 47 home runs in a year, never hit better than .355, never had an on-base percentage higher than .410.
Hammering on Hank: How the media abuse baseball's home run king.
Tommy Craggs is a writer in New York.
Photograph of Hank Aaron by AP Photo. Photograph of Barry Bonds by Elsa/Getty Images.
COMMENTS
Remarks from the Fray:
Tommy Craggs's article about Hank Aaron's career is at complete odds with my memory of it. I remember my grand parents would take me and my brother to Braves games as cheap entertainment. One night we saw Hank Aaron blast a shot off the right field foul pole to win a game against the Reds. The next night, he hit two consecutive home runs to right center field (he was a brilliant opposite field hitter). Then, he hit a vicious liner into this Howard Johnsons style "Brave" statute they had on the first base line at deceased Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. Memories.
"Flat" "No personality" "Meaningless" What is Cragg talking about?
The article points out that Aaron "never hit more than 47 home runs in a year, never hit better than .355, never had an on-base percentage higher than .410" as evidence of his lack of "flavor." While none of these stats on their own are record breaking, they are all VERY good. When taken together, these numbers are evidence of an incredibly elite player. How many players that have hit 47 HR in a season have also hit .355 in a season? Off the top of my head maybe Ruth, Bonds, Williams, and Mantle? A more correct way of looking at it is that while Aaron was not the all-time best at any one skill, he was one of the best all around players in the history of the game, and he did it consistently for 23 years.
So what's wrong about baseball wanting someone like Aaron over someone like Bonds? Aaron had a career worthy of the Hall of Fame, used his fame to champion worthy causes, and, contrary to the author's subtle attempted swipe, never tainted the legacy by cheating. Bonds, on the other hand, took a perfectly good career that would have gotten him into the hall anyway and tainted it with steroids, giving him access to a record he doesn't deserve, notoriety he (apparently) doesn't want, and espouses no other cause other than the "More Money for Barry" campaign. Bonds does not enjoy public appearances, makes a terrible spokesperson (despite his gifts, he has few endorsement deals), and generally seems to loathe the attention of anyone but close friends and family. The next time someone comes up to this record, will he be mentioned in the same reverential terms as Aaron? Only a fool would say yes. Many of us will breathe a sigh of relief that this False King will be dethroned. There won't be something as ugly as racism or steroids that causes the jeers next time, next time we will be glad for the record coming down, along with its tainted hero, to someone that deserves it and we can cheer for as he approaches the mark.
I don't really give a rat's behind that Barry Bonds is a jerk. He's not the first unlikeable player in baseball history, after all. In fact, Bonds' unbearable arrogance might make him considerably more interesting than the average player.
The problem with Bonds is that he cheated, pure and simple. That home run statistic is probably the holiest in a game obsessed with statistics, and he's going to earn it in an unethical manner. I suppose I'm like a lot of baseball fans; when I think about Bonds getting away with this, it burns me up. Taking steroids is at least as bad as betting on the game or throwing a World Series, but the league lacks the gumption of a Bart Giamatti to do what has to be done. Barry Bonds doesn't disgust me any more than Mark McGwire or Sammy Sosa disgusts me. All of them should have been slammed for using steroids, and none of them should be in the Hall. They won't be forgotten; Joe Jackson isn't forgotten, after all. Bud Selig and the rest of the owners are gutless, and they have been for a long, long time. The greed of the Player's Union and their implicit defense of the players' use of narcotics, which is well-documented, is egregious, but the buck stops with the owners. They get absolutely no sympathy from me.
Two-three hours per day in a gym will get you Barry's body if you have the know-how and the cash to hire a trainer. Not to mention the before pictures everyone is so concerned about show that he had the potential to pack on a lot of muscle despite his seemingly waifish frame. Take another look: big shoulders, big legs and his head was already large, his face already chubby.
The myopic view of members of the media and their belief in a book that was written with the express intent to make money leaves me with more questions than answers. Bonds has spent nearly 20 years as a MLB player, with access to state of the art facilities and trained professionals and had already shown the potential for greatness before he landed in San Francisco. Bottom line: reconsider what you think you know.
Oh, and leave Hank alone. It's bad enough he received death threats while breaking the record, but to have his golden years ruined with constant media attention over someone else's story is unprofessional and inhumane.
We the people are called out as idiotic rabble and maybe rightly so. Ignorant, most definitely, but why shouldn't we be ignorant? Everything almost all of us knows about Henry Aaron comes from media sources. If an assortment of mean dry-drunk buffet hounds tell us of Mr. Aaron's grace and dignity, how are we to know different? If SI tells us Barry Bonds is a puppy-strangling villain who derives not only his power but his batting eye and preparation from pills and syringes, well, GIGO again. There's no practical way for us to 'just know' that the tropes and praxes of hegemony from sportswriters are 'really' allegorical complaints about the cheap blended versus single malt scotch in their hotel mini-bar.
This baseball season, it fell to the sporting press to drag a reluctant Hank Aaron once more into public view, the occasion being Barry Bonds' slow-motion pursuit of a stationary number. Now, anytime an old baseball personage hobbles back into frame, he is invariably described in awed, petrifying language better suited to, say, the Archbishop of Canterbury. The treatment of Aaron hasn't been any different. A spin through the sports pages over the past few months reveals that he is a man of "cool dignity," "quiet dignity," "innate dignity," "immense dignity," "eternal dignity," "unfettered dignity," "unimpeachable dignity," the very "picture of dignity" who "brought so much dignity to baseball" and who, "having exuded dignity his entire life," continues to this day "exud[ing] class and dignity." Aaron, proclaimed the inevitable George Will, who perhaps learned about dignity from selling his to Conrad Black, was "The Dignified Slugger From Mobile."
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No, what's unfortunate about Aaron's latest turn in the public eye is that he has been reduced to a sportswriter's cheap trope. The great slugger's dignity is of interest only insofar as it can be picked up by the likes of George Will and swung in the general direction of Barry Bonds. (As of Friday morning, Bonds stands just two home runs shy of Aaron's 755.) "As Barry Bonds continues his gimpy, joyless pursuit of such glory as he is eligible for," Will wrote, "consider the odyssey of Mobile's greatest native son." Or as a Cincinnati Post headline pronounced: "Safe To Say Bonds No Aaron." Of course, with Aaron, it has always been thus. It is the singular curse of his career: to be treated like a sandwich board for the prevailing attitudes of the day.
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Remarks from the Fray:
Tommy Craggs's article about Hank Aaron's career is at complete odds with my memory of it. I remember my grand parents would take me and my brother to Braves games as cheap entertainment. One night we saw Hank Aaron blast a shot off the right field foul pole to win a game against the Reds. The next night, he hit two consecutive home runs to right center field (he was a brilliant opposite field hitter). Then, he hit a vicious liner into this Howard Johnsons style "Brave" statute they had on the first base line at deceased Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. Memories.
"Flat" "No personality" "Meaningless" What is Cragg talking about?
--bonetone1
(To reply, click here.)
The article points out that Aaron "never hit more than 47 home runs in a year, never hit better than .355, never had an on-base percentage higher than .410" as evidence of his lack of "flavor." While none of these stats on their own are record breaking, they are all VERY good. When taken together, these numbers are evidence of an incredibly elite player. How many players that have hit 47 HR in a season have also hit .355 in a season? Off the top of my head maybe Ruth, Bonds, Williams, and Mantle? A more correct way of looking at it is that while Aaron was not the all-time best at any one skill, he was one of the best all around players in the history of the game, and he did it consistently for 23 years.
--cddowney
(To reply, click here.)
So what's wrong about baseball wanting someone like Aaron over someone like Bonds? Aaron had a career worthy of the Hall of Fame, used his fame to champion worthy causes, and, contrary to the author's subtle attempted swipe, never tainted the legacy by cheating. Bonds, on the other hand, took a perfectly good career that would have gotten him into the hall anyway and tainted it with steroids, giving him access to a record he doesn't deserve, notoriety he (apparently) doesn't want, and espouses no other cause other than the "More Money for Barry" campaign. Bonds does not enjoy public appearances, makes a terrible spokesperson (despite his gifts, he has few endorsement deals), and generally seems to loathe the attention of anyone but close friends and family. The next time someone comes up to this record, will he be mentioned in the same reverential terms as Aaron? Only a fool would say yes. Many of us will breathe a sigh of relief that this False King will be dethroned. There won't be something as ugly as racism or steroids that causes the jeers next time, next time we will be glad for the record coming down, along with its tainted hero, to someone that deserves it and we can cheer for as he approaches the mark.
--speedracerx
(To reply, click here.)
I don't really give a rat's behind that Barry Bonds is a jerk. He's not the first unlikeable player in baseball history, after all. In fact, Bonds' unbearable arrogance might make him considerably more interesting than the average player.
The problem with Bonds is that he cheated, pure and simple. That home run statistic is probably the holiest in a game obsessed with statistics, and he's going to earn it in an unethical manner. I suppose I'm like a lot of baseball fans; when I think about Bonds getting away with this, it burns me up. Taking steroids is at least as bad as betting on the game or throwing a World Series, but the league lacks the gumption of a Bart Giamatti to do what has to be done. Barry Bonds doesn't disgust me any more than Mark McGwire or Sammy Sosa disgusts me. All of them should have been slammed for using steroids, and none of them should be in the Hall. They won't be forgotten; Joe Jackson isn't forgotten, after all. Bud Selig and the rest of the owners are gutless, and they have been for a long, long time. The greed of the Player's Union and their implicit defense of the players' use of narcotics, which is well-documented, is egregious, but the buck stops with the owners. They get absolutely no sympathy from me.
--Anse
(To reply, click here.)
Two-three hours per day in a gym will get you Barry's body if you have the know-how and the cash to hire a trainer. Not to mention the before pictures everyone is so concerned about show that he had the potential to pack on a lot of muscle despite his seemingly waifish frame. Take another look: big shoulders, big legs and his head was already large, his face already chubby.
The myopic view of members of the media and their belief in a book that was written with the express intent to make money leaves me with more questions than answers. Bonds has spent nearly 20 years as a MLB player, with access to state of the art facilities and trained professionals and had already shown the potential for greatness before he landed in San Francisco. Bottom line: reconsider what you think you know.
Oh, and leave Hank alone. It's bad enough he received death threats while breaking the record, but to have his golden years ruined with constant media attention over someone else's story is unprofessional and inhumane.
--WillJeff
(To reply, click here.)
We the people are called out as idiotic rabble and maybe rightly so. Ignorant, most definitely, but why shouldn't we be ignorant? Everything almost all of us knows about Henry Aaron comes from media sources. If an assortment of mean dry-drunk buffet hounds tell us of Mr. Aaron's grace and dignity, how are we to know different? If SI tells us Barry Bonds is a puppy-strangling villain who derives not only his power but his batting eye and preparation from pills and syringes, well, GIGO again. There's no practical way for us to 'just know' that the tropes and praxes of hegemony from sportswriters are 'really' allegorical complaints about the cheap blended versus single malt scotch in their hotel mini-bar.
--badgolf36
(To reply, click here.)
(7/26)