Hank Aaron and the Filing Cabinet Full of Death Threats

The nineteen seventy-three baseball season was the closest Henry Aaron had ever come to breaking a record, and it may have been the hardest year of his life. Babe Ruth's career home run total of seven hundred fourteen had stood since nineteen thirty-five. Aaron ended the season with seven hundred thirteen. One swing away. He would break the record the following spring, and his office knew what that meant before he did, because the mail had already been arriving for months.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation monitored specific credible threats. Aaron's daughter was placed under temporary armed protection. The letters arrived at a rate that his staff had to manage like a second job, sorting them, cataloging them, turning the credible ones over to the bureau. Aaron later estimated the total at close to a million pieces of hate mail over the course of the chase. The precise count is not established in the public record, but the filing cabinet he kept, and kept on the advice of lawyers who told him the documentation might someday be necessary, was a physical measure of what he was carrying.

On April eighth, nineteen seventy-four, Aaron hit his seven hundred fifteenth home run at Fulton County Stadium in Atlanta, in the fourth inning of a game against the Los Angeles Dodgers. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn was absent. He had a previous engagement he chose not to cancel. The choice was read at the time, and is read now, as a deliberate slight.

Aaron spoke afterward about what the year had cost him. He said the statistical pressure of chasing Ruth had been manageable. The hatred had not been manageable. He kept the letters in a filing cabinet. He did not destroy them. He said he wanted there to be a record of what had happened, so that no one could later claim it hadn't.