Much of Henry Aaron’s legacy in baseball is tied to three numbers – 715, 755 and whatever the total outcome of Barry Bonds’ career – that we often fail to see his brilliance on the pitch. Put it this way: if you turned your 755 home runs into outs, it still ended with more than 3,000 accesses. Or to put it another way: he played 23 seasons in the major league and was 25 times All-Star (there were several All-Star Games in Aaron’s early career).
Despite being widely considered one of the top five players in MLB history, Aaron remained underestimated among the greatest players of all time. He spent most of his career in the shadow of Willie Mays, his contemporary who was the most visually stunning player thanks to Mays’ midfield defense. Many still consider Babe Ruth the greatest defender of the right. So Aaron is only the second best player of his generation and the second best right field player of all time.
When experts and fans talk about the best hitters in the game’s history, they usually talk about Ruth and Ted Williams and Bonds, or even individual hitters like Tony Gwynn, before Aaron’s name appears. No player, however, has played with such consistent and sustained excellence for as long as Aaron.
Appearing every day is not glamorous, but it is a way to take Ruth down and hit 755 home runs. As a debutant at the Milwaukee Braves in 1954, Henry Aaron fractured his ankle in early September, ending his season with 122 games. Maybe he wasn’t exactly Cal Ripken as an Ironman, but Aaron didn’t lose many other games after that. From 1955 to 1968, he played 2,157 of 2,214 games, losing an average of just 4.1 games per season. In 1969 and 1970, then aged 35 and 36, he dropped to 147 and 150 games.
Along the way, he never had a single bad season. His only MVP award came in 1957, but Aaron finished in the top 10 in the MVP vote 13 times during an era when the National League was full of future Hall of Fame members competing for the prize and finished in the top three in three different decades. This is a way to see your high level of play for almost two decades:
More 6-WAR seasons
Aaron 16
Titles 16
15th May
Ruth 14
Speaker Tris 14
Most seasons of 7-WAR
Titles 14
Aaron 13
May 13
Ruth 12
Lou Gehrig 11
Mays is next to Aaron, but even Mays has faded in his 30s. Mays’ last 30 home run season took place at age 35 in 1966. From the age of 36, he made 118 home runs. Aaron reached his career record of 47 home runs at 37 and, from the age of 36, reached 201 home runs.
This is another proof of Aaron’s consistency. Forty-seven other players have made at least 47 home runs in a season – 15 of them more than once – but Aaron is still the second home run of all time. Since finishing his career in 1976, four players have made more home runs at 30 than Aaron. None of them managed to keep it in its 30s:
Up to 30 years
Alex Rodriguez: 464 HR, 85.0 WAR
Ken Griffey Jr .: 438 HR, 76.2 WAR
Albert Pujols: 408 HR, 81.4 WAR
Andruw Jones: 368 RH, 61.0 WAR
Henry Aaron: 366 HR, 80.7 WAR
After 30 years
Rodriguez: 232 HR, 32.5 WAR
Griffey: 192 HR, 7.6 WAR
Pujols: 254 HR, 19.4 WAR
Jones: 66 HR, 1.7 WAR
Aaron: 389 HR, 62.4 WAR
In 1955, in his second season in the majors, at just 21 years old, Aaron hit 0.314 with 27 homers, 105 races and 106 RBIs, his first big season. In 1973, at 39, he hit 0.301 with 40 home runs – in just 120 games. But Aaron was not just a hitter. He ended with a career average of 0.305, hitting 0.300 14 times, although many of his peak periods occurred in the 1960s, under the most difficult hitting conditions since the set-ball era. In an interview with the MLB Network last month, Aaron said that what he was most proud of was that “I was not eliminated”.
In fact, he was never eliminated 100 times in one season and ended up with more hikes than eliminations. Remember that Ruth, playing in an era with far fewer eliminations than in the era of Aaron, led his league five times in eliminations. Ruth fanned 12.5% of his plate appearances, Aaron only 9.9% of his. Maybe that’s why Aaron was a good clutch hitter and RBI guy. He hit 0.324 in his career with runners in scoring position, and in “backward and closed” situations, when the game is more on the line, he hit 0.318 / 0.407 / 0.576 – better than his overall line of 0.305 /.374/ .555.
5:24 am
Tim Kurkjian recalls the impact of Hank Aaron, who stretched far beyond the baseball field.
Bonds may have passed Aaron on the home run list, but Aaron is still the all-time leader in RBIs and total bases. Using the unofficial list at Baseball-Reference.com (RBIs are considered official only since 1920), Aaron’s 2,297 outnumber Ruth’s 2,214. Pujols is at 2,100, but 2021 is likely to be his last season.
Years ago, Aaron entered the ESPN Sunday Night Baseball booth. At one point, there was a runner on second base without eliminated. Joe Morgan asked Aaron how many times he tried to move the corridor to the third – hoping, perhaps, Aaron would say he played the game “the right way” and hit the ball the right way. Aaron let out a big, warm laugh. “Never,” he said. “I always tried to take the guy down.”
The total base record can be even more unbreakable. Aaron has 6,856 – well ahead of Stan Musial’s 6,134. If another player came and reproduced Musial’s numbers, he would still need to do 181 home runs to break Aaron’s record.
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Aaron was not only a dominant hitter, but also an excellent field player and baserunner. He won three gold gloves, and while the fielding metrics of his time are reported estimates, Baseball-Reference ranks him ninth among the right defenders in races saved in 98 for his career. He stole 240 bases with an excellent success rate, and when he hit 44 home runs and 31 bases in 1963, he became only the third player to make 30-30 in the same season (after Ken Williams and Mays). Joe Torre, his former teammate with Braves, said he never saw Aaron make a mistake on the pitch. To top it off, while he appeared in just three post-seasons (the 1957 and 1958 World Series and the 1969 National League Championship), he hit 0.362 / 0.405 / 0.710 with six home runs in 17 games.
He is the fifth player of all time among the position players in the career war:
Titles: 162.8
Ruth: 162.1
May: 156.2
Ty Cobb: 151.0
Aaron: 143.1
You can add Ted Williams to the conversation (121.9 WAR, despite losing several prime years due to World War II and the Korean War) – although Williams was not the fielder or baserunner that Bonds, Mays and Aaron were. So yes, the top five are accurate, probably ahead of Cobb, once you make an adjustment to the timeline and can judge what you want to do with the titles.
How about playing at the same time as Mays? IT’S OK. Right. Mays’ greatness seemed to underestimate Aaron, even at the time of his players. Not everyone at that time necessarily agreed. Here is a quote from the Hall of Fame third baseman, Pie Traynor, in 1964: “I’m taking Hank Aaron any day in May. Give me a guy to go over there and play all the games, he never gets tired, he doesn’t complain he won’t pass out on you … You don’t hear much about Hank, but he’s such a good defender, runner and a more stable and better hitter. “