played one inning of one game one afternoon in October.
Henry would always say Ben Geraghty was the best and most influential manager he had ever had, but Mickey Owen qualified as a close second, for it was Owen who in Puerto Rico took a raw Henry Aaron, a kid who had taught himself everything he knew, and over a tropical winter molded him—made him a ready, big-league package. It wasn’t that Henry didn’t already have Olympian tools, but no one at the professional level ever did anything more than gawk at him and snicker about how unorthodox he was. Owen was different. It was Owen who taught him weight distribution and how to hold his hands steady. Owen received credit from Henry for all the things he did, and for one thing he did not do: change Henry’s peculiar front-footed approach to hitting the ball.
It all started somewhere between Central and Josephine Allen, when during a game Henry injured his right ankle, his plant foot. Rather than rest, he compensated for the pain in his right leg when he swung by shifting his weight to his front foot. Any hitting coach would have been tempted to tinker with Henry’s mechanical footwork, but instead of giving him instructions, Owen gave Henry confidence. During the first week of December, Henry was hitting .295. A week later, he was at .343. A week after Christmas, Henry had scored the batting title at .357.
Still, to the most hard-boiled of baseball men, even those numbers could be tempered. Swinging a bat in the thick breezes and among the uneven talent of the Caribbean was one thing, especially as the rum flowed. Hitting in Ebbets Field with the bags full was quite another.
Dugout chatter was the only advanced billing most of the world ever received about a player—even one considered as special as Henry—and that was one of the beautiful, enduring characteristics of baseball. Anticipation provided that magical component—the verbal mythmaking—that built the American game and set up the inherent challenge (whether or not the kid could make the big time) that resonated with millions of fans … that’s what brought them in. Until a player succeeded with the big club, in the big leagues, even great prospects like Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, or Henry Aaron amounted to nothing more than a string of press clippings. Buzz was the special sauce that heightened anticipation about a prospect, a trait that neither time nor technology would ever change.
B OSTON G LOBE writer Harold Kaese was in town to take his first look at the Red Sox, but he somehow found himself talking about this kid Henry. Well, not exactly somehow . In Red Sox camp, trying to squeeze out another year behind the dish for the Red Sox was none other than Mickey Owen, still raving about Henry. A few days later, the Braves were in Tampa to play the White Sox, and Paul Richards—the Chicago manager who one day would become the Braves general manager—yelled out to a couple of Braves coaches, “Where’s Aaron? I’ve heard a lot of reports on him.” In baseball, words were a carelessly tossed match to dry grass, and Kaese—who two decades later would be awarded with the J. G. Taylor Spink Award, induction into the writers’ wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame—had been around long enough to know a prairie fire had been sparked. Kaese, who was standing at the batting cage, sidled up to Richards and parroted what he’d heard from Mickey Owen. “Over in Sarasota,” Kaese told Richards, “Mickey Owen told me the other day that Aaron is good enough to run Bruton off the ball club.”
Baseball was so different, because with the other sports, all you had to do was follow the paper trail. A college basketball star left a roughly one-hundred-game outline, a skeleton for anticipating the body of work that would soon follow. A college football player left at least thirty games. Nobody who hadn’t been sleeping under a boulder wondered if Lew Alcindor or O. J. Simpson could play; no one was
Henry would always say Ben Geraghty was the best and most influential manager he had ever had, but Mickey Owen qualified as a close second, for it was Owen who in Puerto Rico took a raw Henry Aaron, a kid who had taught himself everything he knew, and over a tropical winter molded him—made him a ready, big-league package. It wasn’t that Henry didn’t already have Olympian tools, but no one at the professional level ever did anything more than gawk at him and snicker about how unorthodox he was. Owen was different. It was Owen who taught him weight distribution and how to hold his hands steady. Owen received credit from Henry for all the things he did, and for one thing he did not do: change Henry’s peculiar front-footed approach to hitting the ball.
It all started somewhere between Central and Josephine Allen, when during a game Henry injured his right ankle, his plant foot. Rather than rest, he compensated for the pain in his right leg when he swung by shifting his weight to his front foot. Any hitting coach would have been tempted to tinker with Henry’s mechanical footwork, but instead of giving him instructions, Owen gave Henry confidence. During the first week of December, Henry was hitting .295. A week later, he was at .343. A week after Christmas, Henry had scored the batting title at .357.
Still, to the most hard-boiled of baseball men, even those numbers could be tempered. Swinging a bat in the thick breezes and among the uneven talent of the Caribbean was one thing, especially as the rum flowed. Hitting in Ebbets Field with the bags full was quite another.
Dugout chatter was the only advanced billing most of the world ever received about a player—even one considered as special as Henry—and that was one of the beautiful, enduring characteristics of baseball. Anticipation provided that magical component—the verbal mythmaking—that built the American game and set up the inherent challenge (whether or not the kid could make the big time) that resonated with millions of fans … that’s what brought them in. Until a player succeeded with the big club, in the big leagues, even great prospects like Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, or Henry Aaron amounted to nothing more than a string of press clippings. Buzz was the special sauce that heightened anticipation about a prospect, a trait that neither time nor technology would ever change.
B OSTON G LOBE writer Harold Kaese was in town to take his first look at the Red Sox, but he somehow found himself talking about this kid Henry. Well, not exactly somehow . In Red Sox camp, trying to squeeze out another year behind the dish for the Red Sox was none other than Mickey Owen, still raving about Henry. A few days later, the Braves were in Tampa to play the White Sox, and Paul Richards—the Chicago manager who one day would become the Braves general manager—yelled out to a couple of Braves coaches, “Where’s Aaron? I’ve heard a lot of reports on him.” In baseball, words were a carelessly tossed match to dry grass, and Kaese—who two decades later would be awarded with the J. G. Taylor Spink Award, induction into the writers’ wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame—had been around long enough to know a prairie fire had been sparked. Kaese, who was standing at the batting cage, sidled up to Richards and parroted what he’d heard from Mickey Owen. “Over in Sarasota,” Kaese told Richards, “Mickey Owen told me the other day that Aaron is good enough to run Bruton off the ball club.”
Baseball was so different, because with the other sports, all you had to do was follow the paper trail. A college basketball star left a roughly one-hundred-game outline, a skeleton for anticipating the body of work that would soon follow. A college football player left at least thirty games. Nobody who hadn’t been sleeping under a boulder wondered if Lew Alcindor or O. J. Simpson could play; no one was
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