So much of Henry Aaron’s baseball legacy is tied to three numbers: the 715, the 755, and the one that ended Barry Bonds ’career total, which too often overlooks his brilliance on the field. That said, if you turned his 755 into a home, he did yet ended with more than 3,000 hits. Or another way: He played 23 major league seasons and was a twenty-five All-Star (there were several All-Star Games at the start of Aaron’s career).
While widely regarded as one of the top five players in MLB history, Aaron has remained underestimated among the greats of all time. He played most of his career in the shadow of Willie Mays, his contemporary who was the most visually impressive player thanks to Mays defense in the center. Many still consider Babe Ruth the best law player. Therefore, Aaron ranks second best player of his generation i the second best right footballer 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. However, no player played with such sustained and consistent excellence over time as Aaron.
Presenting yourself every day isn’t glamorous, but it’s a way to bring down Ruth and achieve 755 home runs. As a rookie of the Milwaukee Braves in 1954, Henry Aaron fractured his ankle in early September, finishing his season in 122 games. Maybe it wasn’t quite Cal Ripken like Ironman, but Aaron didn’t miss many games afterwards. From 1955 to 1968, he played 2,157 of 2,214 possible games, losing an average of just 4.1 games per season. In 1969 and 1970, when he was 35 and 36, he dropped 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 MVP’s top 10 voting 13 times during a time when the National League was full of future Hall of Fame competing for the award and finished in the top three. in three different decades. . Here’s a way to see his high level of play for almost two decades:
Most seasons of 6 WARS
Aaron 16
Good 16
May 15
Ruth 14
Tris Speaker 14
Most 7-WAR seasons
Bail bonds 14
Aaron 13
May 13
Ruth 12
Lou Gehrig 11
Mays is up there with Aaron, but even Mays fades at 30. Mays ’last 30 home runs season reached 35 in 1966. From the age of 36 he hit 118 home runs. Aaron got a maximum of 47 home runs at age 37 and, from the age of 36, got 201 home runs.
This is another testament to Aaron’s consistency. Forty-seven more players have hit at least 47 homers in a season (15 of them more than once), but Aaron remains the second all-time homer. Since finishing his career in 1976, four players have hit more home runs up to the age of 30 than Aaron. None of them could continue with the thirty:
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 HR, 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
Hills: 254 HR, 19.4 WAR
Jones: 66 HR, 1.7 WAR
Aaron: 389 HR, 62.4 WAR
In 1955, in his second major league season, at just 21 years old, Aaron hit .314 with 27 homers, 105 runs and 106 RBI, his first big season. In 1973, at the age of 39, he reached .301 with 40 homers, in just 120 games. But Aaron wasn’t just a slugger. He finished with a career average of .305 and came in at .300 14 times, although many of his peak seasons reached the 1960s, in the most difficult hitting conditions since the era of the. dead ball. In an interview with MLB Network last month, Aaron said what he was most proud of was that “I didn’t leave out.”
In fact, he never came out a hundred times in a season and ended up with more runs than attacks. Note that Ruth, playing in an era with far fewer attacks than even the Aaronic era, led her league five times in attacks. Ruth was fond of 12.5% of her plate appearances, Aaron only 9.9% of her appearances. Maybe that’s why Aaron was a good clutch player and an RBI man. He hit .324 in his career with runners in scoring position, and in “late and close” situations when the game is more on the line, he hit .318 / .407 / .576, better than his general line of .305 /.374/.555.
5:24
Tim Kurkjian recalls the impact of Hank Aaron, who stretched far beyond baseball’s diamond.
The bonuses could have passed Aaron on the race list, but Aaron remains the all-time leader in RBI and total bases. Using Baseball-Reference.com’s unofficial list (the RBIs have only been considered official since 1920), Aaron’s 2,297 outnumber Ruth’s 2,214. Pujols stands at 2,100, but 2021 will probably be his last season.
Years ago, Aaron entered the ESPN Sunday Night baseball stand. At one point, there was a runner at second base with no exits. Joe Morgan asked Aaron how often he tried to move the runner to third, hoping, perhaps, that Aaron would say he played the game the right way and hit the ball to the right side. Aaron let out a big laugh. “Never,” he said. “I’ve always tried to hit the guy.”
The total registration of bases can be even more unbreakable. Aaron has 6,856, well ahead of Stan Musial’s 6,134. If another player showed up and replicated Musial’s numbers, he would still have to hit 181 homers to break Aaron’s record.
More tributes: Eternal Connection with Black Baseball BBTN Podcast
Aaron was not only a dominant hitter, but also a prominent field and base player. He won three gold gloves and, while the pitching metrics of his time are informed estimates, Baseball-Reference ranks him ninth among right-wing players in saved saves in plus-98 for his career. He stole 240 bases with an excellent success rate and, when he hit 44 homers and stole 31 bases in 1963, became the third player to go from 30 to 30 the same season (after Ken Williams and Mays). Joe Torre, his former teammate with the Braves, said he never saw Aaron make a mistake on the field. To top it off, while appearing in just three postseason seasons (the 1957 and 1958 world series and the 1969 national league championship series), he won .362 / .405 / .710 with six homers in 17 matches.
He is the fifth player of all time in position in the World War II career:
Bonds: 162.8
Ruth: 162.1
Max: 156.2
Ty Cobb: 151.0
Aaron: 143.1
You can add Ted Williams to the conversation (121.9 WAR despite missing several early years due to World War II and the Korean War), although Williams was not the campaign player or base runner which were Bonds, Mays and Aaron. So, yes, the top five are accurate, probably ahead of Cobb once you’ve made a timeline adjustment, and you’ll be able to judge what you want to do with Bonds.
What about playing at the same time as Mays? OKAY. For sure. Mays ’greatness seemed to make Aaron a little underrated, even in his playing days. However, not everyone necessarily agreed. Here’s a quote from Hall of Fame third baseman Pie Traynor in 1964: “I take Hank Aaron any day for Mays. Give me a guy who goes out to play every game, who never gets tired, no complain and I won’t let you down … You don’t hear much about Hank, but he’s just as much a camper, runner and a more stable and better hitter.