Baseball Home Run Legend Hank Aaron Dies at 86

Baseball Home Run Legend Hank Aaron Dies at 86

Baseball legend Hank Aaron — who transcended sports — has died at 86. 

The Atlanta Braves, with whom Aaron played the majority of his career, confirmed his death on Friday in a message from its chairman, Terry McGuirk. 

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Aaron, one of the greatest all-around players in baseball history, surpassed Babe Ruth as home-run king, hitting 755 home runs and holding the record for more than thirty years. 

Aaron was one of the last major league stars to have played in the Negro leagues, the New York Times reported on Friday.

"But his pursuit of Ruth’s record of 714 home runs proved a deeply troubling affair beyond the pressures of the ball field,” the NYT continued. “When he hit his 715th home run, on the evening of April 8, 1974, against the Los Angeles Dodgers at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, he prevailed in the face of hate mail and even death threats spewing outrage that a Black man could supplant a white baseball icon.”

Aaron was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982 in his first year of eligibility, when he received 97.8 percent of the vote from baseball writers, — second at the time only to Ty Cobb, who was inducted in 1936.

He was a two-time National League batting champion and had a career batting average of .305. He was the league’s most valuable player in 1957, when the Milwaukee Braves won their only World Series championship. 

Aaron was voted an All-Star in all but his first and last seasons, and he won three Gold Glove awards for his play in right field.