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Man.

This one stings. Was at his first game as a Brewer. We were so excited he was home and it finally made the Brewers relevant to have a legend on the team. Even though he was on fumes his last couple of years, it was awesome. I’ll post some of my favorite Hank memorabilia as I dig through it.

At his first game we were handed a lyric sheet for “Well hello Henry” sung to the tune of “Hello Dolly”. The crowd serenaded him with it. Good times.

Damn.

I still have a vivid memory of a game at County Stadium in the summer of '65 vs the Cubs. The home team won. That was a great night in my youth watching guys like Aaron, Matthews, Torre... 

My dad (A huge Braves fan) took to to one of his last games in Milwaukee (1976?).  It was the night they honored him with a few things before the game.  I don't think he played that night but I don't remember for sure since I was about 9 years old. 

RIP Hammering Hank!

These things come in 3's.  Someone better do a welfare check on 'ueck.

I will take Uecker's loss when it comes as hard as hard as the death of any person I've ever met that is not a family member or close friend. I want him so badly to be able to call the final out of a Brewers' World Series win. Unfortunately, I don't think it's going to happen.

Last edited by MichiganPacker2

Our family went to a game in 1976 (we went to one Brewer game every year as we lived on a dairy farm and got other family members to milk cows for us one night a year to take a day trip to Milwaukee). I was 7 years old, but remember watching him in batting practice. At that time, Aaron was platooning as the DH with Mike Hegan. I remember being almost in tears because they faced a RHP that day and stuck with Hegan the whole game. At least I got to watch Hank on the field at County Stadium, though, even if it was just pre-game.

@Pikes Peak posted:

I always got a kick out the fact that the all time home run leader was also first in the baseball encyclopedia alphabetical listing till Dalvid Aardsma came along.

Pretty cool

Wally Pipped by Dalvid Aardsma.

Jerk.

I was so young when my Dad took me to my first Braves game at county stadium that when the people sang the national anthem, I thought the last line "... and the home of the brave." referred to the baseball team.  Ha, ha.  It is funny now but I was dead serious then. 

And hence my first exposure to "hammering Hank" and company.  Loved it when he came to bat and everyone was chanting for a home run. 

RIP Hank Aaron. 

I had a notebook with his pic in school. Home run hero.

He publicly took covid vaccine 2 wks ago to help promote it to but didn't have covid. No cause of death given but he did have heart disease.

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Last edited by GreenBayLA
@GreenBayLA posted:

I had a notebook with his pic in school. Home run hero.

He publicly took covid vaccine 2 wks ago to help promote it to but didn't have covid. No cause of death given but he did have heart disease.

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I have the same card. It think it's from the back of a Hostess cupcake box.

I have these 1954 and 1955 cards from my father's baseball card collection.

Off the top of my head...the ‘54 would be his rookie card....worth several hundy....that’s the one I couldn’t pull the trigger on—-have every other year thru ‘75

I recall being at a game at good old County Stadium in 1976. It was Bat Day when they gave the kids small bats with the Brewers emblem on it.  Hank came to bat in the 10th inning.   The kids went to the top of the stadium and started banging on the metal that surrounded the top of the seats.   It was so loud you couldn't stand it in there.  Sure enough Hank hit a homer and the Brewers won.  Great memory.  RIP Hank!!!!!!!!!!!!

Forgive me for going further off topic, but if you guys can ever watch a movie called "Long Gone", it is, far and away, THE best baseball movie ever made.
Unfortunately, it was never released on DVD, and the only place I've found it is on youtube, so video quality suffers, and it's 2 1/2 hours long, but still worth it.

It includes a player (Joe Louis Brown), who is a black man basically breaking the color barrier in minor league baseball, so he is introduced to the masses as Jose Brown from Venezuela.

Last edited by Timmy!
@michiganjoe posted:

My father used to talk about watching him play in Eau Claire in the minors.

RIP to one of the greats.

My father-in-law's grandparents owned a couple rentals that they used to rent to Eau Claire Bears players...a few of these names were Hank Aaron, Joe Torre, and Bob Uecker.  Sometimes these players got a few extra bucks for spending cash by babysitting my wife's father.  Can you imagine that - saying you had Hank Aaron babysit you?

Damn, reading that Hank was gone caused me to shed a tear. Such a good, humble man, and a great, great player that was consistently so for two decades. The true home run king. May he Rest In Peace.

"In the course of 35 years working to understand Atlanta, I crossed paths with Hank Aaron, who died on Jan. 22, more times than I can remember. (All of them before the days when you ended up with a photo of everyone you met.)

There was only one time, however, 21 years ago, when he talked with me about the abuses and indignities he suffered during his legendary run in the major leagues. Aaron had received incredible mistreatment from white baseball fans, especially in the earlier years of his career: being driven out of the outfield by spectators raining down rocks from the stands, harrowing stories of the kind of bitterly racist behavior that too many people today want to delude themselves into believing was the sort of thing that only KKKer's ever did. Nothing could be further from the truth.

But Aaron didn't go out of his way to repeat those stories over and over again--a not uncommon response, in my experience, to those kinds of vicious traumas among the generation of pioneering African-Americans who began punching through barriers in our Apartheid even before the support of the broader Civil Rights Movement had fully coalesced.

That one time he talked about those days with me was under circumstances stranger than I could have ever imagined. It was for a Wall Street Journal article revealing the behind the scenes story of how the Atlanta Braves rehabilitated, just long enough to get their investment out of, a briefly sensational, steroid-pumped, white relief pitcher named John Rocker. A Sports Illustrated profile of Rocker came out in late 1999, quoting him spewing a stream of grotesque racial and anti-gay epithets. Eventually, the revelation of Rocker's true inner self destroyed his career (along with his arm quickly wearing out).

But before that happened, he was rescued, incredibly, by a most improbable cavalry. First, Andrew Young, former top aide to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., spoke up for Rocker--in a local op-ed article suggesting that the world shouldn't be so hard on a 20-something white kid from Macon, Georgia who shot his mouth off stupidly in front of a sportswriter. Then, more incredibly, Andy reached out to Hank Aaron, his longtime friend, and asked him to meet with and counsel Rocker. Aaron's first reaction to Rocker's bile had been to call it "sickening." But in Atlanta, you don't turn down requests from Andy Young, especially if he's been your friend for decades. So Aaron agreed to see Rocker. They met up at Aaron's BMW dealership (I think), and Rocker was in his polite, chastened-athlete, please-let-me-play apologetic posture by then. He begged forgiveness profusely, according to Aaron. Afterwards, Aaron gave a pretty tepid public comment that the kid should get another chance to show he was a better person. It was far from a clean bill of health, but the nuance vanished in the breaking news that HANK AARON HAD FORGIVEN the foul-mouthed white punk!

When I went out to Aaron's car dealership to talk to him a few weeks later, he was still being as charitable as he could on the surface. But it was also pretty obvious that there were a lot of other reactions swirling around inside him. He made it clear that his public comments had been interpreted as more of a full blown pardon of Rocker than he intended. The full truth was that Macon, Georgia--Rocker's hometown--was one of the places where Aaron had received some of the most hostile and vulgar treatment ever from white spectators. It was evident to me that the Rocker of 1999 looked a bit too much like those screaming animalistic people in the bleachers that Aaron still remembered very vividly--white people who could be syrupy sweet one minute, and violently crazed the next.

The misgivings Aaron had about the whole Rocker episode were proven out over time. After Rocker's baseball career fully cratered, the pitcher increasingly associated himself with fringy right-wing activities, railing at Barack Obama and immigration, praising Donald Trump when he emerged as a candidate in 2016, living life in the Fox News-and-worse bubble of deceit and hostility--and continuing to make periodic offhand comments that sounded, well, racist. Long gone was the contrite white boy from Macon who begged the greatest slugger in baseball history into giving him a second chance--replaced by the washed out couldabeen-contender glaringly demonstrating that he never deserved it.

My impression was that Hank Aaron wanted to be most remembered for how well he played his game--and that he was the best, ever, at what he did. But inevitably his life took on other meanings, and he was asked to play very different positions, as with Rocker. So he ended up doing that a lot--giving America--and white Americans specifically--another chance to live up to our proclaimed ideals, even when all the evidence said it probably wasn't deserved. He gave that chance over and over again, answering the worst of our society with grace, even for vulgar louts like Rocker.

I'm glad I met the man, and glad to have heard in his own voice at least a little of the reality of how he saw things: a game, a team, a country he clearly loved, but also a place he knew to be wary of, a land still way too vulnerable to its most base instincts, a place where, as we saw in Washington DC earlier this month, too many people are much too able to slip instantly back into the form and irrational fury of those angry mobs in Macon.

Hank Aaron was a wise man."

--Doug Blackmon

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB956011195682507309

Last edited by Coach

Who knew.....from Peter Kings column

2. HANK AARON AND THE BROWNS. The man who broke Babe Ruth’s career home-run record, once thought unbreakable (more about him later in the column), died Friday in Atlanta. Aaron was a huge Cleveland Browns fan. So huge that he used to buy single tickets in the Dawg Pound (the end zone with the crazy fans), fly from his Atlanta home to Cleveland on three or four Sunday mornings every autumn, bundle up, sit anonymously and alone in the stands, and fly back to Atlanta Sunday evening. Who knew? Ernie Accorsi, the GM of the Browns in the eighties, did. One summer day in 1986, at Browns training camp in Kirtland, Ohio, Accorsi thought he spied Aaron behind the ropes, watching practice with fans. Accorsi, a huge baseball fan, sidled up near Aaron and introduced himself. “I know you!” Aaron said. “It’s an honor to meet you.” That started a relationship that Accorsi, of course, was thrilled to have. “He told me he sat in the Dawg Pound, alone, for games, and I told him, ‘Hank, we can get you better seats than that.’ He said, ‘I don’t want ‘em. I love sitting there.’ “

Accorsi said Aaron became a Browns fan early in life because they were the first team, under Paul Brown, to sign and feature black stars—Bill Willis, Marion Motley, Len Ford, all of whom earned busts in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Aaron subscribed to the Cleveland Plain Dealer by mail to follow the team during the season. And once every week or 10 days, Accorsi’s phone would ring, and Aaron would want some scoop on his team. “He’s everything everybody has said about him,” Accorsi said. “A gentleman. Completely humble. And he loved his Browns.”

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