Hank Aaron

Hank Aaron's first major-league game was in somebody else's ballpark, on a Tuesday afternoon in Ohio, and his team lost it. On 13 April 1954 the Milwaukee Braves visited the Cincinnati Redlegs at Crosley Field. Milwaukee scored twice in the first, twice in the second and once in the third; Cincinnati answered with one in the second, two in the third and three in the fourth, and by the end of the sixth they were ahead 9–6. The Braves got a run back in the seventh and another in the eighth and finished a run short. Both clubs made thirteen hits. Milwaukee made three errors and Cincinnati two, and one run is exactly the width of that difference. The attendance was 33,185 and the game took three hours and four minutes.

Aaron was twenty. He played 122 games that first season, made 131 hits, hit 13 home runs and finished at .280 — a good first year and not obviously the start of anything.

What followed is better read as a table than as a narrative, because the table is where the shape is. From 1955 to 1974 he hit at least twenty home runs every year. He passed thirty in fifteen seasons and forty in eight. His best average was .355, in 1959, the year he also made 223 hits. His most home runs in a year came much later, in 1971, when he was thirty-seven and hit 47 with an OPS of 1.079 — the highest of his career, in his eighteenth season.

The clubs changed around him more than he did. He signed with the Milwaukee Braves and stayed when the franchise moved to Atlanta for the 1966 season. In 1975, at forty-one, he went back to Milwaukee to play for the Brewers, and it was for them that he played his last game, on 3 October 1976. Those final two seasons read differently from the rest: 12 home runs and a .234 average in 1975, 10 and .229 in 1976, in 85 games.

The totals at the end of it: 3,298 games, 12,364 at-bats, 3,771 hits, 624 doubles, 98 triples, 755 home runs, 2,174 runs, 2,297 runs batted in, 6,856 total bases. A .305 average across twenty-three seasons.