Hank Aaron Tied Babe Ruth’s Home Run Record On Opening Day 1974

Hank Aaron - Sports Century
https://youtu.be/7nhdNvNg60M?t=26

Images:
1. The great chase is over for Hank Aaron. 'The Hammer' and his wife, Billie, smile during a news conference after the Atlanta Braves slugger hit his 715th home run
2. Braves outfielder Hank Aaron in Atlanta, c. 1973
3. 1954 Topps Hank Aaron RC #128
4. Hank Aaron bats during the Hall of Fame Game at Doubleday Field on Aug. 12, 1974. The catcher is Pete Varney of the White Sox.

Background from {https://www.baseball-almanac.com/players/hank_aaron_biography.shtml}}
In 1999 Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig announced the creation of "The Hank Aaron Award", initially to honor the 25th anniversary of Hank Aaron breaking Babe Ruth's career home run record. It has since been awarded to the best overall hitter in the National and American Leagues, establishing itself as a fitting tribute to a man arguably recognized as baseball's most complete performer, and premier example of the definition of the games five tool player (hit, hit with power, field, throw, run).
Born in Mobile, Alabama on February 5, 1934, Hank Aaron never played high school baseball and began his playing career in semi-pro ball before moving on to the Negro Leagues to play shortstop for the Indianapolis Clowns, where his talent and ability were quickly noticed. "He's a natural born ballplayer. God done sent me something," said Clowns Manager Buster Haywood. While trying out for the Clowns, Aaron was scouted by the Boston Braves Dewey Griggs and eventually the Braves won out over the Giants for his services. In 1952 he was named the Northern League's Rookie of the Year, despite playing in just 87 games, batting .336. The following year he was promoted to the South Atlantic League (that circuit's first African-American player) and earned Most Valuable Player honors by winning the batting title (.362), and leading the league in runs batted in (125), runs (115) and hits (208).
Aaron began his major league career in 1954 (he was the last Negro League player to play in the major leagues) when a spring training injury to Bobby Thomson opened up a spot on the Braves roster. After going 0-5 in his debut on April 13, he settled in and connected for his first career home run off Vic Raschi ten days later. He finished the season with a respectable .280 average. In 1955 he blossomed into one of the game's best players batting .314 with 27 home runs and 106 runs batted in. He won his first of two National League batting titles in 1956 with a .328 mark and reached the 200 hit plateau for the first time. It all came together for Aaron and the Braves in 1957 as Milwaukee won the NL pennant (with Aaron homering to clinch it.) Hank claimed the Leagues MVP Award and just missing out on winning the Triple Crown, leading in HR (44) and RBI (132), while finishing third in batting with a .322 average. Then it was on to the World Series, Aaron's first appearance on the national scene, and the now star player didn't disappoint. Playing against a superstar he was to be compared with in future years, Mickey Mantle, Hank responded with a .393 average, three home runs and seven RBI as the Braves upset the mighty Yankees in seven games to claim baseball's world championship. 1958 saw the Braves once again win the pennant, but despite another fine World Series performance by Aaron (he batted .333), Milwaukee fell to the Yankees in a seventh and deciding game.
By this time Hank was posting, season after season, the consistent great numbers that were to become his trademark. Another batting title was won in 1959 (.355), and he also led the league in slugging (.636) and had his only lifetime three home run game versus the Giants. As his career moved into the sixties he again just missed winning the Triple Crown in 1963 with league leading totals in HR (44) and RBI (130), while settling for third in batting average (.319). That year he also joined baseball's exclusive 30/30 club (30 home runs, 30 stolen bases) by stealing 31 bases. Keeping himself in peak physical condition, a typical Aaron season for 19 years was to average 33 HR, drive in and score 100 runs or more, and hit .300. Hank often attributed his remarkable consistency to something Jackie Robinson had said to him early in his career. "He said, baseball was a game you played every day, not once a week," said Aaron speaking of Robinson. While many times being overlooked by fans and media when compared to other flashy stars in the 1960's, such as Willie Mays and Roberto Clemente, Aaron was often given his due praise from his competitors. Once after Dodger Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax had struck out young Brave's hitting star Rico Carty three times in one particular game, the shook up youngster confronted Koufax. "You mad at me, Koufax?" asked Carty. Sandy replied "Young man, I don't even know you, but as long as you're hitting in front of Henry Aaron, you're going to have a tough time with me." In 1966 the Braves moved to Atlanta and Hank didn't disappoint his new fans as he clubbed 44 HR and drove in 127 runs. 1969 saw baseball introduce divisional play and Aaron and the Braves were the first winners of the National League's Western Division. Hank put up his usual consistent great numbers for the season and, despite his team being swept by the eventual World Champion Mets, he homered in all three games of the first National League Championship Series, and batted .357 with seven RBI against the young, hard throwing New York pitching staff.
Continued success came to Hank Aaron in the 1970's as he collected his 3000th hit (the first player with 500 home runs to do so) in 1970, attained career highs with a .669 slugging percentage and 47 HR in 1971, and accumulated his 2000th lifetime RBI in 1972. His career home run total reached 639, moving him to third on the all time career HR list behind Willie Mays and Babe Ruth. He was now a clear threat to break what many thought was the insurmountable Ruth total of 714 career HR. "As far as I'm concerned, Aaron is the best ball player of my era…He is to baseball of the last 15 years what Joe DiMaggio was before him," said Mickey Mantle in 1970. While chasing the Ruth mark Aaron continued to speak out and seek racial equality in baseball. He often criticized the game for not having a minority manager and minorities in front office positions. "On the field, Blacks have been able to be super giants. But, once our playing days are over, this is the end of it and we go back to the back of the bus again." said Hank. Sadly, the speaking out and the color of his skin deemed Aaron undeserving of Ruth's hallowed record to many, who showered him and his family with insults at games and death threats through the mail. Hank persevered and, after slamming 40 HR at the age of 39 in 1973, he stood on the threshold of breaking a record few thought would ever be broken.
As if he didn't have enough distractions in his pursuit of Ruth's mark, Aaron faced another controversy as the Braves announced at the start of the 1974 season that Hank would not play in any of the games of the their opening series against the Reds in Cincinnati in hopes of Aaron tying and breaking the record in Atlanta the following week. Then MLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn intervened and ordered the Braves, "in the best interests of baseball", to play Aaron in at least two of the three games versus the Reds. So Hank was in the lineup for the opener against the Reds on April 4. 1974 and rose to the occasion in the first inning, lining a Jack Billingham pitch over the left field fence to join the Babe at 714. Aaron played one of the other two games in Cincinnati and did not homer, so the stage was set for the record breaker to be hit at home. On Monday night, April 8, 1974, against the Dodgers before a National TV audience, in the bottom of the fourth inning, Hank stroked a 1-0 Al Downing pitch over the left field fence for his 715th career homer and baseball history was made.
Aaron finished 1974 with just 20 home runs and after the season was traded to the American League's Milwaukee Brewers, enabling him to finish his career in the city he had helped bring many baseball memories. His playing days ended after the 1976 season and along with his all time total of 755 home runs he holds Major League lifetime marks for runs batted in (2,297), extra base hits (1,477), and total bases (6,856). He ranks second in at bats (12,364) and intentional walks (293), is third in runs (2,174 tied with Ruth), games (3,298), and hits (3771), fourth in sacrifice flies (121), and ninth in doubles (624). He hit .300 or better in 14 seasons (winning two National League batting titles), led the NL in hits twice, won three NL home run crowns (and tied for a fourth), slugged 40 HR's or more eight times, hit 20 or more homers 20 consecutive years, drove in 100 runs on 11 occasions (leading the NL four times), led the NL in slugging percentage four seasons, never struck out 100 times in a year, scored 100 runs in 13 seasons (topping the NL three times), and won three Gold Gloves.
After his retirement as an active player in 1976, Hank Aaron returned to Braves in the front office capacity of Vice President of Player Development. His overseeing of young talent such as former NL MVP Dale Murphy was instrumental in the Braves winning the NL Western Division in 1982. Since 1989 he has served the Braves as Senior Vice President and Assistant to the President. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1982 and was named to Baseball's All-Century Team in 1999."
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The Last Hero: A Life of Henry "Hank" Aaron
In the thirty-four years since his retirement, Henry (Hank) Aaron's reputation has only grown in magnitude: he broke existing records (RBIs, total bases, extra-base hits) and set new ones (hitting at least thirty home runs per season fifteen times, becoming the first player in history to hammer five hundred home runs and three thousand hits). But his influence extends beyond statistics, and at long last here is the first definitive biography of one of baseball's immortal figures.
Based on meticulous research and interviews with former teammates, family, two former presidents, and Aaron himself, The Last Hero/ chronicles Aaron's childhood in segregated Alabama, his brief stardom in the Negro Leagues, his complicated relationship with celebrity, and his historic rivalry with Willie Mays all culminating in the defining event of his life: his shattering of Babe Ruth's all-time home-run record.
Bryant also examines Aaron's more complex second act: his quest to become an important voice beyond the ball field when his playing days had ended, his rediscovery by a public disillusioned with today's tainted heroes, and his disappointment that his career home-run record was finally broken by Barry Bonds during the steroid era, baseball's greatest scandal.
Bryant reveals how Aaron navigated the upheavals of his time fighting against racism while at the same time benefiting from racial progress and how he achieved his goal of continuing Jackie Robinson's mission to obtain full equality for African-Americans, both in baseball and society, while he lived uncomfortably in the public spotlight. Eloquently written, detailed and penetrating, this is a revelatory portrait of a complicated, private man who through sports became an enduring American icon."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RCnn2xlqNw

Images:
1. Milwaukee Braves star Hank Aaron follows through at the plate, c. 1964
2. The Braves moved Hank Aaron (above) to first base in 1972 to accommodate both Ralph Garr and Dusty Baker in the outfield
3. Henry Hank Aaron accepts an award with wife Billie Aaron photo by Jerry Engel
4. The Atlanta Braves honor Henry Hank Aaron with statue at SunTrust Park in March 2017.

Background from {[ https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/hank-aaron/]}
Hank Aaron
This article was written by Bill Johnson
________________________________________
“Henry Aaron in the second inning walked and scored. He’s sittin’ on 714. Here’s the pitch by Downing. Swinging. There’s a drive into left-center field! That ball is gonna be … outta here! It’s gone! It’s 715! There’s a new home run champion of all time, and it’s Henry Aaron!” — Milo Hamilton, April 8, 1974

With that swing of the bat, along with the 714 that preceded it, Hank Aaron not only passed Babe Ruth as Major League Baseball’s career home run leader, but he also made a giant leap in the integration of the game and the nation. Aaron, an African-American, had broken a record set by the immortal Ruth, and not just any record, but the all-time major league home run record, and in doing so moved the game and the nation forward on the journey started by Jackie Robinson in 1947. By 1974 Aaron’s baseball career was within three years of sunset, but the road he’d travelled to arrive at that spring evening in Atlanta had hardened and tempered him, perhaps irrevocably, in ways that only suffering can produce. Aaron finally shrugged off the twin burdens of expectation and fear that evening, and few have ever stood taller.
Henry Louis Aaron was born February 5, 1934, in Mobile Alabama, to Herbert and Estella (Pritchett) Aaron. Among Henry’s seven siblings was a brother, Tommie, who later played in parts of seven different seasons in the major leagues. For whatever such records are worth, the brothers still hold the record for most career home runs by a pair of siblings, 768, with the elder Henry contributing 755 to Tommie’s 13. They were also the first siblings to appear in a League Championship Series as teammates.
Henry was born, and the Aarons lived, in a poorer neighborhood of Mobile called “Down the Bay,” but he spent most of his formative years in the nearby district of Toulminville. The Aaron family lived on the edge of poverty, in part due to the general economic conditions of the Great Depression, so every member of the family worked to contribute. Young Henry picked cotton, among other odd jobs, and while his parents could not afford proper baseball equipment for recreation, Aaron was able to practice in endless sandlot games and by hitting bottle caps with ordinary broom handles and sticks. One of the consequences of this self-coaching was that he developed a cross-handed batting style, a habit he kept until his early days in the professional ranks. Aaron was a gifted athlete and starred in both football and baseball at Central High School for two years. On the diamond he played shortstop, third base, and some outfield on a team that won the Mobile Negro High School Championship during those freshman and sophomore years.

In 1949, the fifteen-year-old Aaron — influenced by the exploits of Jackie Robinson, whom he’d seen on several exhibition passes through Alabama — was allowed to try out with the Brooklyn Dodgers but did not earn a contract offer, likely due to his unorthodox batting grip. Now a high school junior, however, he transferred to the private Josephine Allen Institute for his final two years of education. He had been playing for the semi-pro Pritchett Athletics since age fourteen, and it was during those games, as well as in some of his softball contests, that he drew the attention of Ed Scott. The scout convinced Henry and his mother that it would be a good move to sign with the Mobile Black Bears, a semi-pro team, for $3 a game. Estella granted the boy permission to play, but only on the condition that the he did not travel, thus limiting him to local games.
On November 20, 1951, despite his mother’s concerns about his not continuing on to college, Henry signed a $200/month contract with the Negro American League champion Indianapolis Clowns. Scout Bunny Downs had discovered Aaron playing with the Black Bears during an earlier exhibition, and once with Indianapolis Aaron flourished, helping guide the team to the 1952 Negro League World Series crown. In 26 games that year he posted a .366 batting average, hit five home runs, and stole nine bases. The series, and the season, allowed Aaron to showcase his range of skills not just for regional scouts, but for several major league organizations as well.
Following the championship, two telegrams reached Henry — one with an offer from the New York Giants, and a second with an offer from the Boston Braves. Aaron chose the latter, evidently because of a $50-a-month difference in salary, and Boston immediately purchased his contract from Indianapolis. On June 14, 1952, Aaron signed with Braves scout Dewey Griggs, and reported to the Class C Eau Claire Bears. There the coaches helped him eliminate his cross-handed batting grip, and the results were staggering. The infielder, despite playing in only 87 games, batted .336 with nineteen doubles and not only earned a spot on the league’s All-Star squad, but at the end of the season was selected as the Northern League’s Rookie of the Year. Aaron had also shown the Braves that he was not only a wonderful prospect on the field, but also that he could handle the racist taunts with external detachment.

The next season, 1953, found him and black teammates Horace Garner and Felix Mantilla on the Jacksonville Tars. Along with two other players, Fleming Redy and Al Israel, the quintet broke the color line in the “Sally” League (or, SAL), playing in the heart of old Dixie without the top-cover of a sympathetic national press. Aaron almost single-handedly forced the Jacksonville fans to accept him, regardless of race, by leading the entire league with a batting average of .362, and also being the top producer with 115 runs, 208 hits, 36 doubles, 338 total bases, and 135 runs batted in (RBI) title. To cap the first desegregated season in SAL history Aaron led the Tars to the title and was named the league’s Most Valuable Player. As many parts of the South were still unofficially governed by Jim Crow laws, circumstances that forced the black players to live in separate accommodations on the road and were equally limited in dining choices, one pundit wrote, “Henry Aaron led the league in everything except hotel accommodations.”
That year Henry also met a young woman named Barbara Lewis. On a lark, she had decided to attend a Tars game one night early in the season, and watched Aaron single, double, and homer. By October 6, Aaron, not yet twenty, and Lewis were married and within a year welcomed their first child, a daughter they named Gaile.
Aaron spent part of the offseason playing winter ball in Puerto Rico, learning to play the outfield and working with coach Mickey Owen on his batting stance. The following spring, on March 13, 1954, Milwaukee’s left fielder Bobby Thomson broke an ankle during a spring training game, and on March 14 Henry Aaron made his starting lineup debut as the new left fielder. He homered. Following that performance, the Braves offered Aaron a major league contract.
On Tuesday, April 13, 1954, Aaron made his major league debut in the season opener. Two days later, on April 15, he doubled off Cardinals pitcher Vic Raschi for his first major league hit, and a week later, on April 23, he victimized Raschi again, this time for his first home run. Aaron fractured an ankle on September 5, ending his season, but in his first 122 big league games he batted .280, homered 13 times, and finished fourth in the voting for Rookie of the Year. In 1955 Aaron was moved to right field, and there he earned the first of his twenty-one consecutive All-Star team slots enroute to finishing ninth in National League Most Valuable Player balloting.
During the early days of his career, Milwaukee’s public relations director Don Davidson began referring to Aaron as “Hank,” not “Henry” as he was known by those close to him, in an effort to make the quiet player appear a bit more accessible.
In 1956 Aaron hit .328 to win the first of his two NL batting titles, led the league with 34 doubles, and was named The Sporting News National League Player of the Year. Hank Aaron would lead the league four times in doubles. The next season he was dropped to the cleanup spot in the order, behind Eddie Mathews, and began using a 34-ounce bat instead of the 36-ounce model he’d used before. With the increased bat speed, Aaron led the league with 44 home runs, a career-high 132 RBIs, batted .322 and won his sole National League Most Valuable Player award. On September 23, Aaron enjoyed what he later called the best moment of his career when he homered in the eleventh inning for a win that clinched the Braves’ first pennant in Milwaukee. In the 1957 World Series Aaron batted .393 with three homers against the Yankees, and helped Milwaukee to its only championship.

Aaron’s gift in the batter’s box flowed through his hands and wrists. In the 1990 book Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball, author George Will summarized Hank’s approach: “Henry Aaron once said, ‘I never worried about the fastball. They couldn’t throw it past me. None of them.’ That was true, but that was Aaron, he of the phenomenally quick wrists and whippy, thin-handled bat.” Despite standing six feet tall, Aaron weighed a mere 180 pounds, almost scrawny in comparison to later sluggers, but his unique physical talent allowed him to wait on the pitcher for a split second longer than most other hitters, to seemingly pluck the ball from the catcher’s glove with his bat, and made him one of the most feared sluggers in the league.
The year 1957 was special in another way for the Aarons. In March Barbara delivered their first son, Hank Jr., and in December twins Lary and Gary arrived. Tragically, Gary died in the hospital. The family thrived, though, and would grow once more, in 1962, with the birth of youngest daughter Dorinda.

In 1958, due in large part to Aaron’s 30 home runs, the Braves returned to the World Series, but lost to the Yankees in seven games. Although Henry only finished third in MVP voting for the year, he did win his first Gold Glove award. The following year the rising star appeared on the television show Home Run Derby, and won six consecutive matches — along with $13, 000 — before falling to Wally Post. Afterward, Aaron noted that he changed his swing to promote home runs because “…they never had a show called ‘Singles Derby.’”
Aaron hit his 200th career home run on July 3, 1960, off Cardinals pitcher Ron Kline, and on June 8, 1961, he joined Eddie Mathews, Joe Adcock, and Frank Thomas as the first quartet to hit successive homers in a single game, a loss to the Cincinnati Reds. In 1963 he led the National League in home runs and RBI, and also became the third-ever member of the 30/30 club, stealing 31 bases and knocking 44 homers. That year he barely missed winning the Triple Crown, losing the batting title to Tommy Davis by a scant .007 points.
Henry, or “Hank” as he was often called by the press, continued to excel throughout the decade. In 1966, the first season for the Braves in their new hometown of Atlanta, Aaron hit his 400th career home run off Bo Belinsky in Philadelphia, and crested the 500-plateau two years later, in 1968 against Mike McCormick and the San Francisco Giants. He moved into third place on the all-time career home run list on July 30, 1969, when he passed Mickey Mantle with number 537. Despite his personal successes, and another third-place finish in the MVP race, the Braves were swept by the improbable New York Mets in the new League Championship series.
With his 3,000th career hit, a single against the Cincinnati Reds on May 17, 1970, Henry Aaron became the first player ever to reach the dual milestones of 3,000 hits and 500 home runs. That year, with his thirty-eight homers, he established a new National League record for most seasons by a player with thirty or more home runs. The following year, in April, Aaron hit homer number 600 off future Hall of Fame pitcher Gaylord Perry, joining Ruth and Mays in a most exclusive power-hitting fraternity. With his career-high forty-seven home runs that year he also set a new league record for most seasons with forty or more homers, and set an unofficial mark for “close-but-no-cigar” when he finished third in MVP balloting for a sixth time.
On the personal front, things between Henry and Barbara came to a head. The couple had been having marital difficulties since 1966, and had drifted apart. In February 1971, they formalized their separation with a legal divorce. Two years later, in 1973, Aaron married Billye Williams, a former Atlanta television journalist, in Jamaica.
Despite Major League Baseball’s first labor-related work stoppage in 1972, Aaron passed Willie Mays on the all-time home run list when he hammered number 661 off Reds pitcher Don Gullett on August 6. The impact of the strike wouldn’t really show until the following season. The two weeks that were lost to pension benefit negotiations represented eight lost opportunities for Aaron to continue his chase of Ruth’s career home run record, and by the end of 1973, with the national media working itself into a lather over Aaron’s pursuit of the iconic total, he ended the season with 713, one shy of tying the Bambino.
The stresses on the player, the team, opposing pitchers, and the sport that were spawned — or perhaps revealed – by Aaron’s 1973 season have been chronicled in an array of sources. Henry retained an essential quiet dignity with the media. He never allowed the moment to cause him to break in public, although a lesser man certainly might have cracked. Aaron received, literally, thousands of letters every week, the torment prolonged over the winter of 1973 due to the strike in 1972. In 1973, however, the nation was a scant decade past the passage of the contentious Civil Rights Act, and less than a generation since Rosa Parks had refused to move to the back of her bus, so overt bigotry was not nearly as foreign as it might be now. Some of the letters that Aaron opened, however, are almost unbelievable for any era.
Some of the notable ones from the collection at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown (spelling is verbatim):
“Hi, Hank,
I sees you hit 711 homers. When I goes to sleep every night I pray as follows:
1 — That you’se stop hitting these cheap homers
2 — That the pitchers stop lobbing in the ball for you to hit.
3 — That youse have a good accident when youse hit 713 and never been able to play another game.
4 — That youse get good and sick.
5 — That Babe Ruth is the best homer hitter & 714 is always the record.
6 — That youse get mugged by one of our brothers of the Black Panther Party.”
Another one, from mid-1973, read:
“Dear Hank Aaron,
Why are they making such a big fuss about your hitting 701 home runs.?
Please remember, you have been at bat over 2700 more times than Babe Ruth. If Babe Ruth was at bat 2700 more times he would have hit 814 home runs.
So, Hank what are you bragging about. Lets have the truth. You mentioned if you were white they would give you more credit. That’s ignorance. Stupid.
Hank, there are three things you can’t give a Nigger. A black eye, a puffed lip or a job.
The Cubs stink, the Cubs stink, Hinky Dinky, Stinky Parlevous. The Cubs are through, the Cubs are through, Hinky Pinky Parlevous.”
These are just a tiny sample of the venom and irrational rage directed at Aaron throughout the later stages of his quest. In a third letter, a self-described “50 year old White Woman from Massachusetts” wrote, “To Hank Aaron: A Rotten Nigger….you must have made every intelligent white man hate you and your opinions even more…”. Describing those letters as mere irrational raving is reasonable nearly forty years after the chase, but at the time, with a black player pursuing the record of a white one, the threats seemed very real.
On the positive side, once the nation became aware of the bigotry, public support for Aaron poured in. But Aaron, perhaps channeling his inner Jackie Robinson, took the field without apparent regard for the attention surrounding his play. Atlanta opened the 1974 season in Cincinnati, and although the Braves management wanted Hank to break Ruth’s record in Atlanta, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn decreed that Aaron had to play at least two games of the road series.
Henry sat on his 713 total for one at-bat, hitting number 714 on April 4 off Cincinnati’s Jack Billingham. On April 8, in front of 53,775 fans in Atlanta, Aaron finally broke the record with a fourth-inning shot off the Dodgers’ Al Downing. Dodgers radio announcer Vin Scully captured the moment: “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. … And for the first time in a long time, that poker face of Aaron shows the tremendous strain and relief of what it must have been like to live with for the past several months.”
The euphoria lasted all season, until October 2, when Aaron hammered his 733rd, and final, homer for the Braves. One month later, on November 2, Atlanta traded the all-time home run king to the Milwaukee Brewers for Roger Alexander and Dave May. Hank Aaron became a “designated hitter.” The next season, on May 1, 1975, Aaron became the all time RBI leader, and on July 20, 1976 he hit the 755th home run of his career in Milwaukee’s County Stadium. He appeared in his final major league game on October 3, calling it a career after 3,298 games.
In that career, Aaron scored 2,174 runs, and is the all-time leader in RBIs, with 2,297, total bases, with 6,856, and extra-base hits, with 1,477. His 12,364 at-bats remain the second highest total ever, and he is on many other Major League Baseball “top ten” lists, including doubles, plate appearances, and hits (3,771). All the more remarkable is that he remains on these lists more than thirty years since he last took the field."

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