During a recent panel discussion about picture book biographies at the AASL (American Association of School Librarians) National Conference, I talked about uncovering a little bit of baseball history when I was doing research for my book, Henry Aaron's Dream. I've gotten lots of great feedback about that part of the presentation, so I thought I'd post the whole thing here, so librarians and teachers can share it with their students. And I think hardcore baseball fans might find it interesting too. Here goes...
According to just about every book written about Henry Aaron, here's how he first broke into the Braves' starting lineup:
He was a 20-year-old minor leaguer, traveling
with the big-league Braves during
spring training in 1954, playing the last few innings of each game.
Then on March 13, the
Braves'
starting left-fielder, Bobby Thomson, broke his ankle during a spring
training
game. The very next day, on March 14, the Braves played the Boston Red
Sox in
Sarasota, and Henry Aaron was the new starting left-fielder for the
Braves. He
hit a home run that day, and the sound of his bat hitting the ball was
so
spectacular that the great Red Sox superstar Ted Williams came running
out from
the clubhouse to see who had hit
that ball.
As the story goes, if Bobby Thomson hadn't broken his ankle, Henry
Aaron might not have gotten his chance to prove himself in 1954.
This
was
a major moment in Henry
Aaron's journey to the big
leagues, and it's a wonderful story,
especially the part about the great Ted Williams simply hearing the home run, and knowing
that this 20-year-old kid was something special. So of
course I wanted to write about
it in
Henry Aaron's Dream.
Researching this
moment was pretty straightforward, because I
found
several sources which all told basically the same story, including
Henry
Aaron's excellent autobiography, I Had a Hammer. I even found an
article
written by Ted Williams himself where he tells the story. Check any
timeline of Henry Aaron's life, and you'll read about the home run he
hit against the Red Sox in Sarasota on March 14, 1954. No doubt
about it,
that's what happened.
The
problem
came when I tried to
illustrate it. I decided to
show Henry in the dugout, seeing his name in a major-league starting
lineup for
the very
first time. For this picture to work, his name needed
to be
legible, which meant that all the other names on the lineup chart also
needed
to be legible, which meant that I somehow had to find the lineups from
the
March 14, 1954 spring training game between the Milwaukee Braves and
the
Boston Red
Sox.
I found digitized
archives of a couple Wisconsin newspapers that covered the Milwaukee
Braves
1954 spring training games. Here's the March 14, 1954 edition of the
Wisconsin State
Journal, featuring the bold headline, "Ankle Injury May Shelve Thomson
Until June
15".
So
far, so good. Now I just needed to
find the box score from the Red Sox-
Braves game in the next day's paper and I'd
be
done.
And this is where the whole story started to unravel. Here are the
recaps from the spring training games played on March 14, 1954, the day
of Henry Aaron's
legendary
home
run
against the Red Sox in Sarasota. Notice anything strange?
According
to
this newspaper,
the Braves did not play
the Red Sox in Sarasota on March 14, 1954! They played the Cincinnati
Redlegs
in Tampa, while the Red Sox were in Miami playing the Dodgers.
Could
every
book
I had read about Hank Aaron have gotten this wrong? Apparently,
according to
the newspapers from 1954... yes.
I searched through all
the Braves-Red Sox games in the schedule, and couldn't find any home
runs hit by Hank Aaron. Then finally I found it. The Braves and Red Sox
played a make-up game in Sarasota on March 10:
Henry
Aaron's
name
was
in
the
starting
lineup
for the very
first time on March 10, 1954, in a spring training game against the
Boston Red Sox in
Sarasota, three days before Bobby Thomson broke his ankle. Here's
a
close-up of the
box score. Aaron is batting leadoff and playing right field (he
wouldn't
take
over
the
left
field
job until March 29) and Bobby Thomson is batting
cleanup, starting in left field:
Henry
Aaron
hit a home run that day,
and his name remained in the starting lineup for most of the next
twenty-three seasons. This was certainly a big day in young Henry
Aaron's life. But it didn't happen quite the same way as everyone says
it happened.
By the time Bobby Thomson broke his ankle on March 13, Henry Aaron had
already cracked the starting lineup, partly because he was hitting .400
after the first few games of the spring, and party because of injuries
to two other outfielders, Bill Bruton and Walter Peterson, on March 7 and 8,
respectively.
And there's one other little problem I discovered. Check the box score
again. Looking through the Red Sox lineup, you'll notice that Ted
Williams's name is nowhere to be found.
I did a little more research in the
Boston newspapers and
found that Ted Williams broke his collarbone on March 1, 1954. He
underwent surgery in
Boston on March 9, one day before this game. This is what Ted Williams
looked like on March 10, 1954:
He
was not released from the hospital until the following week. Ted
Williams certainly may
have remembered hearing Hank Aaron hit a
home run,
but he wasn't there for this particular
home run on March 10, 1954.
If
there were no illustrations in Henry Aaron's Dream,
I
probably never would have stumbled upon this little piece of history.
If I hadn't decided to draw a picture of the lineup chart, I might
never have looked at the old newspapers. But I'm glad I did. There was
something incredibly exciting about this process of digging through old
newspapers, finding out what really happened. And that
excitement is part of what I
love about making
nonfiction books. There's a
detective-work aspect to it, and oftentimes
my
research takes me to places I did not expect to go.
But this example also shows
how difficult illustrating a non-fiction book can be. It's
one
thing
to
find
a
few
sources
that
tell
how something really happened. But when you actually
try to
draw a picture of what it looked like while it was happening, you might
run
into a whole other set of problems.
In
the end, I included this moment in
Henry Aaron's Dream,
because
whether
it
was
March
10
or
March 14, it was a major moment in
Henry
Aaron's life- even if Ted Williams wasn't
there.
I
relied
mostly
on
the
actual
box
scores
and articles from the 1954 newspapers.
I'm sure some
serious baseball fans will
notice the
discrepancy between my book and other books about Hank Aaron, but maybe
they'll
end up reading this article and hopefully they'll find the whole thing
just as fascinating as
I did.
 |
| images copyright 2010 by Matt Tavares. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Candlewick Press |
Note: A few months after
Henry Aaron's Dream came out,
Howard Bryant's excellent biography,
The Last Hero: The Life of Henry Aaron was released- the first book I've found that accurately told this part of Hank Aaron's story.
