The Futility Infielder

A Baseball Journal by Jay Jaffe I'm a baseball fan living in New York City. In between long tirades about the New York Yankees and the national pastime in general, I'm a graphic designer.

Thursday, April 22, 2004

 

Hammerin' Hank's Home Cookin'

A funny thing happened on the way to my blog. What had started out on Sunday morning as an email to Dayn Perry in appreciation for last week's Baseball Prospectus article on Hank Aaron turned into a quick and dirty research project. That in turn grew to a multi-spreadsheet undertaking and then into an overlong, caffeine-fueled blog entry. On a whim, I decided to run it by the BP editors before publishing it myself, braced for a quick but polite "no thanks." But the editors liked it, and within the hour I was revising the piece for publication on Prospectus. To paraphrase the great Eddie Izzard on the discovery of the Heimlich Maneuver, the way it all came together was like, "A fist, a hand, hoocha hoocha hoocha... lobster!" (If you don't know what I'm talking about you really need to watch Dress to Kill.)

Perry's article was an affectionate if belated tribute to Aaron, the 30th anniversary of whose 715th home run was on April 8. Noting Barry Bonds' progress up the all-time home run charts, Dayn began with a sentiment which I share: "With all due kudos to Barry Bonds for passing Willie Mays on the all-time home run leaderboard, I'm hoping his efforts to fell Hank Aaron's mark of 755 come to grief." Perry's desire has less to do with a dislike of Bonds for his arrogance or for any taint of BALCO-related mischief. It's based squarely on his admiration for Aaron and the obstacles which he overcame; a southerner himself, Perry's acutely aware of what he calls the region's "crueler natures."

He reminds readers that Aaron started in the Negro Leagues with the Indianapolis Clowns, encountering segregation and racism at several turns, including an ugly incident where a D.C. diner destroyed the plates which the players had eaten off rather than serve food on them to their white clientele. As a 19-year-old, Aaron broke the color line of the South Atlantic (Sally) League and would have done so in the Southern League as well when he got a break, literally. Bobby Thomson (yes, that one) fractured his leg, giving Aaron an opening on the Milwaukee Braves at the tender age of 20. Seven years after Jackie Robinson broke the color line, Aaron was the last Negro Leaguer to make it to the majors.

Perry notes that Aaron's superficially declining stats in 1968 (the Year of the Pitcher) led him to consider retirement, but that historian Lee Allen reminded him of the milestones which lay ahead. Two years later, Aaron became the first black player to cross the 3,000 hit threshold, two months ahead of Willie Mays. By then Aaron was chasing 600 homers and climbing into some rarefied air among the top power hitters of all time.

It's Aaron's late-career heroics where I stepped into the picture. Intending to make a point about how Hammerin' Hank's homer totals were boosted by Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, a/k/a "the Launching Pad," I dug out my old Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (the '87 version) which contains home and road HR splits for a select group of players, and jotted some numbers down; lo and behold, during his Atlanta tenure, Aaron had hit 192 homers at home and 145 on the road. A big boost, to be sure, but then I began wondering how other top sluggers, particularly the Bambino, compared. Here's the home-road breakdown for the Top 20 homer hitters of all time as of April 20 (asterisks denote an active players):
Rk   Player             HR   HHR   RHR

1 Hank Aaron 755 385 370
2 Babe Ruth 714 347 367
3 Barry Bonds* 667 327 340
4 Willie Mays 660 335 325
5 Frank Robinson 586 321 265
6 Mark McGwire 583 285 298
7 Harmon Killebrew 573 291 282
8 Reggie Jackson 563 280 283
9 Mike Schmidt 548 265 283
10 Sammy Sosa* 543 292 251
11 Mickey Mantle 536 266 270
12 Jimmie Foxx 534 299 235
13 Rafael Palmeiro* 529 288 241
14T Willie McCovey 521 264 257
14T Ted Williams 521 248 273
16T Ernie Banks 512 290 222
16T Eddie Mathews 512 237 275
18 Mel Ott 511 323 188
19 Eddie Murray 504 248 256
20 Lou Gehrig 493 251 242
Who knew Babe Ruth hit more homers on the road than at home? I surely did not. As you might expect, there's plenty of fun to be had with these numbers. That fun, accompanied by several other charts, is part of my BP article, which is a freebie this time (so I'll hear no whining about how broke you are this week). Check it out, and post your comments here if you have any.

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