Homer History: Hank Aaron passes Babe Ruth with No. 715

In our Homer History series, writers re-tell the stories of memorable home runs from their perspective. In this installment, Yahoo Sports managing editor Steve McAllister recalls the night Hank Aaron passed Babe Ruth on the all-time home run list.

“What a marvelous moment for baseball. What a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia. What a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A black man is getting a standing ovation in the deep south for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. And it is a great moment for all of us and particularly for Henry Aaron” – Vin Scully, calling Hank Aaron’s 715th home run on April 8, 1974.

Cito Gaston was sitting beside Nate Colbert in the San Diego Padres clubhouse at Jack Murphy Stadium the night his one-time roommate passed Babe Ruth as baseball’s all-time home run leader. Gaston was some 1,900 miles way from Fulton County Stadium, the place where Hammerin’ Hank belted an Al Downing fastball over the left-field fence.

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(AP/Yahoo Sports) He wished he’d been there, even if his team was on the wrong side of history being made.

“I wish we had been playing them,” said Gaston, who still speaks about Aaron as a father figure. “I would have loved to have been there, to have been on that team.

“We were keeping up with the chase. Every day I was pulling for him. I know he wanted to hurry up and get it over with.”

Gaston didn’t phone Aaron that night or the next day. He wanted to congratulate baseball’s new home run king in person, which he did a week later when the Braves and Padres met.

“I wanted to wait until I saw him in person. . . just him and I.”

* * *

Yours truly was 1,200 miles away from the site of Aaron’s historic hit, a thermometer-thin 13-year-old living in a small Canadian town a two-hour drive west of Montreal.

In a time before cable TV, the internet and social media, the opportunity to watch baseball during the regular season was limited to a Montreal Expos mid-week game and NBC’s Game of the Week on Saturday afternoons.

Like Gaston, Aaron was my boyhood idol. In neighbourhood baseball games, I’d try to imitate the way Hammerin’ Hank waved the bat with those strong wrists like a twig in his two hands. When I was able to have a number put on a new baseball jersey or T-shirt, it was always No. 44. When Wayne Gretzky made it alright for hockey players to wear higher numbers, 44 went on the back of my hockey jerseys.

It was a tribute to an athlete whom I idolized more for his pursuit of the Babe’s record. It was about the grace that Aaron showed as one of baseball’s greats and in dealing with the prejudice he faced as a black person. For a high-school kid living in smalltown Canada, hating a person for his colour was unfathomable.

Gaston saw it first-hand.

“Lots of times he and I would go out for dinner. We’d have to leave some places because people would say things that weren’t so nice. He had death threats. In Chicago, he got hit on the head with a beer can.

“Hank handled everything as well as he could. It was amazing to see how people could treat someone (so horribly) that was breaking a record. They should have been happy for him.”

Said Aaron, 40 years later: “People were not ready to accept me as a baseball player. The easiest part of that whole thing, chasing the Babe’s record, was playing the game itself. The hardest thing was after the game was over, dealing with the press. They could never understand. Here comes a young black player from Alabama, he’s challenging one of the most prestigious records in the world, and they couldn’t handle it.”

[Homer History: Ryne Sandberg takes Bruce Sutter deep twice]

“It is over at 10 minutes after 9 in Atlanta, Georgia. Henry Aaron has eclipsed the mark set by Babe Ruth. You could not, I guess, get two more opposite men. The Babe, big and garrulous and all so sociable, and all so immense in all of his appetites. And then the quiet lad out of Mobile, Alabama, slender and stayed slender through his career.” – Vin Scully

I remember several moments from that night.

Aaron, taking a first-pitch changeup in the dirt from Downing, and then using those lightning-quick wrists to redirect an inside fastball over the fence. Aaron would go on to hit 20 home runs in that ’74 season, the 20th year in a row reaching that plateau.

The ball went over the head of Dodgers left fielder Bill Buckner, forever to be remembered for the ball that went between his legs in the 1986 World Series and kept alive (a little ironically) The Curse of the Bambino.

Aaron circling the bases, getting handshakes from Davey Lopes and Bill Russell, the double-play tandem for a Dodgers team that would go on to win 102 games that season before losing to Charlie O. Finley’s wild and crazy Oakland Athletics in the World Series. The Braves, with future managers Johnny Oates, Dusty Baker and Davey Johnson along with knuckleballing brothers Phil and Joe Niekro, finished third in the National League West and fired manager Eddie Mathews in favour of Clyde King.

Two fans running onto the field and slapping Aaron on the back between first and second. Given the racial tension around Aaron’s pursuit of the Babe’s record, and modern-day security measures at sports venues around the world, it’s shocking that a couple of 17-year-olds were able to join Aaron on his magical tour of the bases.

Tom House, having caught the historic baseball in the Braves bullpen, racing to home plate and trying to wedge himself among the sea of Aaron’s parents and teammates, fans, photographers and cameramen into a position so he could hand over the historic ball to the home-run hero.

Finally, I remember Aaron’s mother Estrella hugging and kissing her son “for all she was worth”, in the words of Scully during his all-so-eloquent call of the moment

* * *

(AP) “I’ve never seen a guy hit a ball so hard so consistently. He’d go 0-for-4 in a game and hit four line drives. I’ve seen Willie Mays, Billie Williams, Roberto Clemente. This guy (Aaron was unbelievable). To this day the only guy I’ve seen who hit the ball as hard as Hank was (Barry) Bonds when I was in Japan with him (for an exhibition series).” – Cito Gaston

Bonds ’ 762 home runs is tops among all of the players that have put on a Major League Baseball jersey. From this corner, Hank Aaron and his 755 dingers make him the home-run king.

Pardon me?

Forget the “slippery slope” assertion from former commissioner Bud Selig. Bonds, whose physique was enhanced to Incredible Hulk-like proportions over his career in the majors, should have an asterisk attached to his records.

It would be justice served to the man who faced down so much in setting one of the greatest sporting marks on the planet.

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