Henry, Joe, and Eddie and Baseball Memories

Fifty-five years ago my mother and I celebrated the magic of baseball as our team the Milwaukee Braves won the 1957 World Series against the New York Yankees.  I was only eight then, but I’d already listened to countless Braves baseball games.  My mother was an avid baseball fan and she knew as much about the star players as I did.  Milwaukee had only been a baseball town for five years, so everything about the game and town was filled with excitement.  Besides that, we subscribed to the Milwaukee newspaper, so I could keep up with all the statistics of every game. 

There are three players on that 1957 team who will always be heroes to me.  One of them, Henry Aaron, is one of the top baseball players of all-time, but he’s also a dignified, gracious, and inspiring person.  He’s 78 now and still passionate about baseball and the city and state where he got his start.  In a recent commencement speech at Marquette University in Milwaukee, he received a standing ovation.  Aaron talked about the city where he had spent much of his baseball life:  “The city of Milwaukee helped to shape my dreams and my life and mold me into the man I am today.  I can never forget that here I found acceptance, encouragement, self-confidence, and lifelong friends.”  In another interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Henry said, “I think about all of the good things that happened, not only here in Milwaukee, but Eau Claire, Wisconsin, the first place I played professional baseball.  The people here in Milwaukee and Wisconsin molded me into the person I am today.  I was a young kid when I came here, unfamiliar with everything.  I met so many good friends, people who were dear to my heart and taught me what life was all about, other than baseball.”

As a kid Henry’s family was poor and he grew up picking cotton on a farm.  There was no money for baseball bats, so he improvised and hit bottle caps with sticks.  That young boy grew up to hit more homeruns than Babe Ruth, 755.  Before he accomplished that feat, some people were angry because they didn’t ever want Babe’s record to be broken.  Aaron received hate mail, but he handled himself as always, with a great deal of class and dignity.  Recently Bud Selig, current baseball commissioner and a good friend of Aaron’s for nearly 60 years said, “Hank’s dignity and grace in the face of bigotry was and is inspiring.”

Henry’s nickname during his years in Milwaukee was 'Hammerin’ Hank.  He played on  21 All-Star teams and was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame on the first ballot.  When the Braves moved to Atlanta it was a sad day for me and my mother because we loved Aaron and the Braves.  But thanks to Bud Selig, a Milwaukee resident, Milwaukee eventually acquired another team, the Seattle Pilots, and became the Milwaukee Brewers. Selig traded for Aaron and Henry spent the last two years of his career in Milwaukee, a fitting tribute to a beloved player in all of Wisconsin.

That special 1957 team also included two other fabulous players—Eddie Matthews and Joe Adcock.  Joe is most memorable to me because he was a homerun slugger like Henry, who surpassed Aaron in one career feat—he hit four homeruns in one game, against the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1954 at Ebbets field. I remember listening to that game and feeling ecstatic. Joe had 18 total bases in that game, second in the history of baseball.  He finished his career with 336 round trippers and over 1,100 runs batted in. 

And then there was Eddie Matthews, another amazing slugger for the Braves. He was on the first cover of Sports Illustrated in 1954. Ty Cobb once said about him, “I’ve only known three or four perfect swings in my time.  This lad has one of them.”  Nine years in a row he hit 30 or more homeruns.  He wound up his career with more than 500 homers, but probably his most famous was in the fourth game of the 1957 World Series against the Yankees.  How sweet it was!  Together he and Aaron had more homers (863) than Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig of the Yankees, and along with Aaron, Eddie is in the Baseball Hall of Fame.  How poetic too that he was the manager of the Atlanta Braves when 'Hammerin’ Hank hit his historic number 715 to surpass the Babe. 

My mother and I followed the Braves for many years following that 1957 season and were crushed when the Yankees beat Milwaukee in the 1958 World Series, winning four games in a row after Milwaukee had won the first three. 

Milwaukee was a small market team in those days and didn’t receive much attention, so it was a source of pride that they made it into the World Series against the powerful Yankees.  No doubt if Henry, Joe, and Eddie had played in New York, they would have received a lot more publicity, but we were thrilled to have them in Milwaukee. 

Recently I read a quote by Robert Brault that sums up my feelings about those memorable baseball days with my mom, listening to our heroes:  “Enjoy the little things in life, for one day you’ll look back and realize they were the big things.”