One for the Record

THE PITCHER

The poor goon. All those years toiling on the mound, the area Early Wynn referred to as the "office"—peering down the long alley toward the plate at those constant disturbers of his sense of well-being settling into their stances and flicking their bats—to look down one day and find Henry Aaron there, standing easily in the farthest reaches of the batter's box looking out, the large, peaceful, dark face with the big eyes and the high forehead, and knowing that one mistake, one small lapse of concentration and ability would place his name forever in the record book as having thrown one of the "immortal gophers," either the one that tied, or more particularly the one breaking, Ruth's record of 714.

For the last weeks of the 1973 season and now the first games of 1974 those pitchers scheduled in the rotation against the Braves have been involved in a sort of cosmic game of Russian roulette—it being inevitable that a pair of them, or perhaps even one, would be responsible for giving up the 714th and 715th home runs. It is a traumatic situation for them. In the left-field seats a forest of raised fishnets and gloved hands rises and sways in expectation. The pitcher is practically the only person in the park who does not want to see the home run hit. Even some of his own teammates would not be displeased to see the last historic hits of Aaron's chase of Ruth's record, though they might be judicious enough to keep it to themselves. In the penultimate week of the 1973 season, I heard about a scuffle that had almost broken out in the Los Angeles dugout when a couple of the younger Dodgers, casting aside their team affiliation, began urging a long Aaron drive out of the park—"Get on over; get out!"—carried away in their hope to see a part of history; they got some hard stares and shoving from one or two of the more aggressively competitive of their elders, especially Andy Messersmith, who is not only a strong team man but a pitcher hardly agreeable to seeing one of his kind humbled.

On the last day of the 1973 season I remember getting a sense of how it affected a pitcher. Dave Roberts, the Houston Astros right-hander, was scheduled to pitch against the Braves. Before the game, he sat in front of his locker looking crestfallen. He was awfully jittery. "You know what's going on in my mind?" he said to me. "What I should be doing is concentrating on my 17th victory of the year. But I've been thinking about him. I thought about him all last night. He was just deposited there in my mind. What really got me was that I knew that he wasn't thinking about me at all. I wished I'd known his home telephone number, so's I could have called him every 20 minutes—'How's it going, Hank?'—just to let him know I was around."

It turned out that Roberts's hotel room was equipped with a cassette receiver on the TV set which allowed him to choose from a number of films provided by the management. Haphazardly, during the restless night, he made a selection and sat down on the edge of the bed to discover he was watching The Poseidon Adventure, the catastrophe-laden film about a cruise ship overturning in the Mediterranean. "Not the best therapy," he said. "It was so inappropriate considering what I faced the next day that I turned it off after a few minutes."

In that game Roberts survived three Aaron turns at bat by giving up three singles which raised the batter's average to .301; then, with his nervous system perhaps betraying him, the pitcher pulled a muscle in his back in the middle of the seventh inning and was removed. In such a situation the relieving pitcher is allowed as much time as he wants to warm up. Don Wilson, Roberts's reliever, off whom Aaron had hit his 611th home run, said later that as he stood on the mound it crossed his mind just to keep on warming up indefinitely, shaking his head and saying "No, not yet" to the umpires until night fell, and the moon came up, and perhaps at ten thirty the next morning some sort of statute of limitations would run out the season and he would be able to pack up and go home, sore-armed but relieved, to Houston, Texas.

The pitcher Jack Billingham would have done well to go to for advice is the tall, sidearm whip-motion Dodger right-hander, Don Drysdale, now retired from active baseball and working as a broadcaster with the California Angels. Aaron hit the astonishing total of 17 home runs off him. Next down the line is Claude Osteen, who has been touched for 13. He is still active. He once said, "The last time I pitched against Aaron my dad came to the game. He took me aside: 'Don't let Aaron hit one off you.' Then he shook my hand and thought to say, 'Hello, son.'"

When Osteen's rotation comes up against the Braves, Drysdale often calls him on the phone (the two are former teammates) to remind him that he'd be delighted to be taken off the hook for being Aaron's special patsy. ("Now Claude, don't let down. That record is within reach.")

Drysdale is predictably defensive about his past troubles with Aaron. He pointed out to me with the keen recall almost all ballplayers seem to have in regard to their personal statistics that in the first two years he faced Aaron (a total of 17 at bats each year) he only gave up one hit—a triple up the alley in right center which beat him in a game in Milwaukee in the summer of 1957. Thus at the beginning of their rivalry Drysdale was holding Aaron to a sub-.100 batting average.

But then there were the bad years for Drysdale. In both 1959 and 1963 Aaron hit four home runs off him. Drysdale never felt it was possible to establish much of a "book" on how to pitch to Aaron. "Besides, there never is any set way to pitch to a great hitter; if there were, he'd be hitting .220. He's one of those 'five fingers and a prayer on the ball' hitters."

"What does he look like to you at the plate?" I asked.

"I always used to think that he had a lot of Stan Musial in his stance. From the pitcher's mound they both seem to coil at you. The only sensible thing—if you couldn't get the manager to let you skip a turn against him—was to mix the pitches, and keep the ball low, and if you were pitching to spots, it was important to miss bad. If you missed good, and the ball got in his power alley, sometimes you were glad it went out of the park and was not banged up the middle."

Drysdale was just in awe of the concussive nature of Aaron's power. He told me about a 250-foot home run Aaron duck-hooked into the short "Chinese wall" screen in the Los Angeles Coliseum—so hard that Drysdale got a crick in his neck from turning abruptly to watch it go by. "It's bad enough to have him hit any home run off you—turning and looking and saying to yourself, 'My God, how far is that one going to go?' But with the Coliseum home run I ended up not only in mental anguish, but literally in physical pain."

"At least you're not around now," I said.

"I've seen what happens out at the ballpark," he said. "It's a tough thing for a pitcher."

Jack Billingham had good reason to worry about Aaron—having already had some uncomfortable confrontations with him. For sure, he had struck him out with the bases loaded to end one game, but on the other hand, Aaron had hit four home runs off him in five years, including one which cost Billingham what would have been his first win as a Red, and another that beat him in ten innings.

The night before the game in the Cincinnati suburb of Delhi Billingham did not have much time to dwell on such things. Because of the tornadoes rampaging through the area, he spent the night sleeping on the floor of his "family" room in the basement. At about three o'clock that afternoon the rain had begun falling, turning soon into hail, with the hailstones getting larger, first the size of marbles, then golf balls. Billingham said that he'd never heard anything quite like the roar and smack of hail hitting the cars on the street outside. He picked up one in his front yard—though he could hardly believe it—that was twice the size of a golf ball. A neighbor called to say that a tornado had been seen over by the airport, five or six miles away. But then the weather cleared slightly and Billingham went up to his bedroom to take a nap—the Aaron confrontation the next day just barely on the edge of his consciousness and making him yawn. Still, he was somewhat uneasy about the weather. He looked out his bedroom window and on the horizon he saw a huge cloud, ink black, "kind of blowing in a circle."

Billingham had never seen a tornado. He was not sure that this was one. But then, as he ran down and stood in his yard with his wife, the cloud, ugly enough but not especially frightening, suddenly began to disappear, revealing in its place, like a sort of unveiling, the huge funnel of the tornado.

Moving somewhat erratically about five or six miles away it lasted about 15 minutes or so, finally drawing its funnel up into itself.

Billingham never actually heard the tornado itself but the winds in Delhi were hard, and very gusty, and the shingles of one house down the street began tearing off the roof. Upstairs Billingham let his father sleep. He describes him as a very nervous and uneasy person, given that day to fretting about Aaron and how his son was going to do against him, and there was no need to compound matters by introducing the sight of a tornado funnel to him. They woke him up later on when it was evening; he was hard to keep calm; the tornado warnings were still on, and people in the neighborhood sat on their porches, looking up at the sky.

Billingham slept on a mattress on the floor that night. At dawn, he took his pillow and crept upstairs to get a few more hours' sleep. The tornado warnings had been lifted and the day was beautiful, with a sort of snapping, cleansing wind blowing out of the southwest—a wind that would give a lift to anything Aaron hit toward left field in Riverfront Stadium.

In the Billingham household there continued to be almost no talk about Aaron. His father, looking at the faces around the breakfast table, said that he had heard there had been earthquakes around the area. He got on the subject of Aaron only once, and Billingham said, "Dad, just cool it. I'm going out there to do my best. If I have a bad day, please don't get upset about it."

He got to the ballpark about ten thirty. The only damage he could see from the tornado was four telephone poles which were down by the road along the river. As he walked into the stadium he began to get the flutters for the first time.

THE HITTER

On occasion, as Henry Aaron sits in the Braves' dugout, he takes off his baseball cap and holds it close against his face. He moves it around until he is able to peer through one of the ventholes in the crown of the cap at the opposing pitcher on the mound. The practice, like focusing through a telescope, serves to isolate the pitcher, setting him apart in a round frame so that Aaron can scrutinize him and decide how he will deal with him once he reaches the plate.

The thought process he goes through during this is to decide what sort of pitch during his stand at the plate he will almost surely see… engraving this possibility in his mind's eye so that when the pitch comes (almost as if dictating what he wants) he can truly rip at it. Home-run hitters must invariably be "guessers," since their craft depends on seeing a pitch come down that they expect—so they have time to generate a powerful swing. More than one pitcher has said that Aaron seems to hop on a pitch as if he had called for it. Ron Perranoski, an ex-Dodger relief pitcher who in his first six seasons against Aaron held him to an .812 average (13 for 16), once said: "He not only knows what the pitch will be, but where it will be."

Aaron describes his mental preparation as a process of elimination. "Suppose a pitcher has three good pitches—a fastball, a curve, and a slider. What I do, after a lot of consideration and analyzing and studying, is to eliminate two of those pitches, since it's impossible against a good pitcher to keep all three possibilities on my mind at the plate. So in getting rid of two, for example, I convince myself that I'm going to get a fastball down low. When it comes, I'm ready. Now I can have guessed wrong, and if I've set my mind for a fastball it's hard to do much with a curve, short of nibbling it out over the infield. But the chances are that I'll eventually get what I'm looking for."

The procedure of "guessing" has many variants. Roger Maris, for one, went up to the plate always self-prepared to hit a fastball, feeling that he was quick enough to adjust to a different sort of pitch as it flew toward the plate. Most "guess" hitters play a cat-and-mouse game with the pitcher as the count progresses. What distinguishes Aaron's system is that once he makes up his mind what he will see during a time at bat he never deviates. He has disciplined himself to sit and wait for one sort of pitch whatever the situation.

One might suppose that a pitcher with a large repertoire of stuff would trouble Aaron—and that indeed turns out to be the case. He shakes his head when he thinks of Juan Marichal. "When he's at the prime of his game he throws a good fastball, a good screwball, a good changeup, a good slider, a good you-have-it… and obviously the elimination system can't work; you can't throw out five or six different pitches in the hope of seeing one; the odds of seeing it would be too much against the batter."

What to do against a Marichal then? "It's an extra challenge," Aaron says. "I've just got to tune up my bat a little higher. It's a question of confidence, knowing that the pitcher cannot get me out four times without me hitting the ball sharply somewhere."

It is this confrontation between pitcher and hitter that fascinates Aaron, and indeed it is what he likes best about baseball—what he calls "that damn good guessing game."

Obviously there have been bad times. His manager in the mid-1950s, Fred Haney, was thinking of benching him against Don Drysdale, who was giving him such fits in their early confrontations. "I had a psychological block going there. Drysdale was throwing from way out by third base with that sidearm motion of his, and he was mean, and it was hard to hang in there, knowing how mean he was; I had an awful lot of respect for him."

Haney finally decided to stick with Aaron, who fortuitously stroked the triple in Milwaukee, his first hit off Drysdale, which both pitcher and batter have remembered with such clarity since it established a balance of mutual respect.

"So much of it has to do with concentration," Aaron explained to me. "On the day of a night game I begin concentrating at four in the afternoon. Just before I go to bat, from the on-deck circle, I can hear my little girl—she's 12 now—calling from the stands, 'Hey, Daddy! Hey, Daddy!' After the game she says to me, 'Hey, you never look around, Daddy, to wave.' Well, sometimes I look at her, I can't help it, but not too often. I'm looking at the pitcher. I'm thinking very hard about him."

His discipline is so extreme that not only does Aaron not hear anything when he gets to the plate, simply sealed in his vacuum of concentration, but his habits are so strictly adhered to that over the years he has never seen one of his home runs land in the stands. He is too busy getting down the first-base line.

I said I couldn't believe him. I must have sounded petulant about it because his brown eyes looked at me quickly.

"What I mean is," I said, "that I can't imagine denying oneself the pleasure of seeing the results of something like that. I mean it's like finishing a painting with one grand stroke of the brush and not stepping back to look at it."

I knew that most players do watch the home runs drop, at least the long ones, dawdling just out of the batter's box on that slow trot, the head turned. In the films of Bobby Thomson's Miracle home run in 1951 against the Dodgers in the play-offs at the Polo Grounds, it is quite apparent, his face in profile, that he glories in the drive going in; in fact, he does a small hop of delight halfway down the first-base line.

"Well, that's not what I'm supposed to do," Aaron was saying. "I've seen guys miss first base looking to see where the ball went. My job is to get down to first base and touch it. Looking at the ball going over the fence isn't going to help. I don't even look at the home runs in batting practice. No sense to break a good habit."

The odd thing about Aaron's attitude at the plate is that there is nothing to suggest any such intensity of purpose. His approach is slow and lackadaisical. He was called "Snowshoes" for a time by his teammates for the way he sort of pushes himself along. He carries his batting helmet on his way, holding two bats in the other hand. He stares out at the pitcher. He drops the extra bat. Then, just out of the batter's box, resting his bat on the ground with the handle end balanced against his thighs, he uses both hands to jostle the helmet correctly into position. He steps into the box. Even here there is no indication of the kinetic possibility—none of the ferocious tamping of his spikes to get a good toehold that one remembers of Willie Mays, say, and the quick switching of his bat back and forth as he waits. Aaron steps into the batter's box as if he were going to sit down in it somewhere. His attitude is such that Robin Roberts, the Phillies pitcher, once explained, "That's why you can't fool Aaron. He falls asleep between pitches."

Jim Brosnan, ex-pitcher and author of the fine baseball chronicle The Long Season,