EDITORIAL: All that matters is if you can play

This isn’t just a commentary about baseball.

It’s a commentary about America.

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Fifty years ago, Henry “Hank” Aaron took a swing at immortality. 

On April 8, 1974, he connected.

As the Atlanta Brave had been closing in on a record long thought untouchable — Babe Ruth’s 714 home runs, set in 1935 — many fans joyously anticipated Aaron writing a new chapter in baseball history. Not only was Hammerin' Hank one of the best all-around ball players of all time; he was quiet, humble, a consummate teammate and a respected father and husband.

But not everyone was cheering for him. 

Fifty years ago in America, racism was alive and unwell. Here was a modest Black man from Mobile, Ala., threatening the record of one of baseball’s greatest legends, an exceptionally popular legend who happened to be White.

According to sportswriter and baseball historian Joe Posnanski, Henry Aaron set another record in 1974 — the Guinness Book world record for most pieces of fan mail received by one person. 

“Some of it was lovely,” Posnanski writes in his best-seller Why We Love Baseball. “But much of it was poisonous, venomous, toxic. Death threats poured in. People threatened to kidnap his children.”

Later Aaron would tell Posnanski that rather than relish the moment, the slugger suffered: “I couldn’t leave the ballpark without an escort. I had to eat most of my dinners in the hotel room. My kids, who were in school, had to be escorted. It was probably one of the saddest moments for me.”

According to Posnanski, Aaron likely was at peace with what he’d gone through by the time he died in early 2021, “able to look back at the home run with perhaps something more than anger and pain… (But) he could never quite look back at the home run without thinking back to the ugly part of America that came with it.”

Yet Aaron also gave voice to the kind of optimism, the kind of ideal, that makes America great.

“On this field,” Posnanski quotes Aaron as saying, “it doesn’t matter what color you are or where you’re from. All that matters is if you can play.”

So here we are, half a century later, and Henry Aaron’s observation is still being tested on all fields.

You decide if we still need an escort.