Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. Vin Scully’s call of Henry Aaron’s 715th home run is my favorite of his unparalleled career, so I was disappointed to see it butchered like this. 

In today’s SI:AM: 
🌟 All-Star Game highlights
😞 Caitlin Clark injured again
⛳ British Open returns to Northern Ireland

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A nearly perfect Henry Aaron tribute

The most powerful moment of Tuesday night’s MLB All-Star Game in Atlanta came before the start of the seventh inning, when the ballpark’s lights were turned out and the field was transformed into a digital recreation of Henry Aaron’s record-breaking 715th career home run. It was an impressive technical feat, with images of Aaron’s historic moment projected onto the field and even a firework shooting toward the outfield to represent the ball in flight, all soundtracked by play-by-play calls of Braves radio announcer Milo Hamilton and Dodgers radio announcer Vin Scully. It was also an emotional moment, paying tribute to a man whose impact on the game of baseball—and especially baseball in Atlanta—cannot be overstated. 

But the display had one major issue. It left out the most important line of Scully’s call. 

Scully’s original call went like this: 

“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, who was met at home plate, not only by every member of the Braves, but by his father and mother.”Vin Scully

The version played on Tuesday in Atlanta, though, included only the first three sentences, leaving out Scully’s acknowledgement of how significant it was that a Black man, playing in the South less than a decade after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, had broken an iconic sports record initially set by a man who played when the sport was still segregated. 

The racial element of Aaron’s achievement cannot be ignored. The story of his record-breaking home run is incomplete without acknowledging the torrent of racist abuse that Aaron endured as he approached Babe Ruth’s mark of 714 career homers. Aaron had hit his 713th home run on the second-to-last day of the 1973 season, and so he spent the offseason sifting through hundreds of thousands of letters from fans, many of them filled with hate. He received roughly 930,000 letters in 1974, more than anyone in the United States besides elected officials. 

The letters were littered with slurs and even death threats, which the FBI deemed credible enough that on one occasion the agency advised Aaron not to take the field. (He refused to sit out.) The FBI also discovered a plan to kidnap Aaron’s daughter, Gaile, who was a college student at the time, and she had to be protected by undercover bodyguards while on campus. 

Aaron continued to feel the weight of that abuse for decades. A 1992 Sports Illustrated article described how Aaron kept many of those letters in a box in his home and would often revisit them. 

So when Scully mentioned what a “marvelous moment” Aaron’s record-breaker was, it was with that context in mind. The first three sentences of Scully’s call told you what a special moment it was. The next sentence told you why. Leaving out the line in which Scully recognizes the wider societal context of the moment not only does a disservice to Scully by erasing an astute and important observation, but it also diminishes Aaron’s achievement by erasing a major element of what made his record chase so grueling. Sanitizing Aaron’s experience of pursuing Ruth’s record is an insult to a man who spent the rest of his life rattled by the hatred he was subjected to. 

It’s possible that the decision to leave out the next line of Scully’s call was completely innocuous. Whoever put together the package might have left it out for timing or pacing reasons. Even if that is the case, it’s still an unfortunate omission, for all the reasons stated above. But it’s also impossible to ignore that the decision to elide the uncomfortable racial context of Aaron’s achievement comes at a time when the country is moving backwards on issues of racial equality. 

MLB is not exempt from that, either. In March, the league caved to the Trump administration and removed all references to “diversity” from its careers website. Even the decision to hold the All-Star Game in Atlanta was controversial. The league had previously pulled the game out of Atlanta when it was scheduled to be played there in 2021 due to a controversial voting rights law passed in the state of Georgia that then President Joe Biden called “Jim Crow in the 21st Century.” The least charitable possible reading of leaving out Scully’s line, then, is that it was another example of the league going out of its way to avoid upsetting racists.

Leaving out Scully’s line is disappointing, regardless of what the reason was. Aaron’s ability to persevere amid a deluge of racist abuse is as important an element of the story of his career as the numbers 715 and 755. If ever there was a time to appreciate the full scope of Aaron’s achievement, it’s now. 

The best of Sports Illustrated

The top five…

… highlights from the All-Star Game: 
5. The standing ovation for former Brave Freddie Freeman. 
4. Matt Olson’s sliding stop to preserve the NL’s lead in the ninth. 
3. Steven Kwan’s infield hit to drive in the tying run for the AL in the ninth. 
2. A beauty of a barehanded play by Eugenio Suárez. 
1. Kyle Schwarber’s 3-for-3 performance in the new swing-off format that replaced extra innings.


This article was originally published on www.si.com as SI:AM | Why MLB’s Henry Aaron Tribute Felt Incomplete.

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