The Wrist-Hitter

In the wildly unpredictable street fight for the National League lead, the Milwaukee Braves were last week's gang to beat. After a shaky start the Braves' pitching staff was beginning to live up to preseason expectations, and from second base old (34) ex-Giant Red Schoendienst was spreading his old pro's confidence to the whole team. But the man mainly responsible for the Braves' surge into first place was a lithe Negro outfielder named Hank Aaron, who is hitting the baseball better and more often than any man in the National League.

Hank Aaron is a predictable quantity--he gets his quota of base hits no matter what happens to the Braves. In last week's key series, he peered at the Phillies' pitchers with sleepy eyes, the end of his bat twitching ominously like the tail of a prowling panther. He seemed almost to be napping as the ball started toward him, but at the last instant he snapped his powerful wrists and the bat whistled in a perfectly coordinated arc. When he was through swinging against the Phils, Aaron had smashed out six hits in seven tries, and his Braves were in first place.

Triple Crown? At week's end Wrist-hitter Aaron, a well-knit (5 ft. 11 in., 170 Ibs.), easy-moving man of 23, led the National League in batting with a .352 average. He also led the league in home runs (29) and in runs batted in (78). Though temporarily out of the lineup with a gimpy left ankle, he has a solid chance of becoming the first National Leaguer to win clear title to these three championships since Philadelphia's Chuck Klein turned the trick in 1933 at the age of 27. But for the life of him, Aaron cannot explain how he does it. He just hits the baseball. "I'm up there with a bat, and all the pitcher's got is the ball," says he. "I figure that makes it all in my favor."

Aaron started to learn his trade as a kid on the sand lots of Mobile, Ala. After high school he joined the barnstorming Indianapolis Clowns, an all-Negro team. "One time in 1952 we made a 900-mile hop," he recalls. "We left Chattanooga right after a night game, rode all night, the next day and part of the next too. Then we played that night in Buffalo. I got ten hits in eleven trips."

Watching Aaron that night was a scout from the Milwaukee Braves who soon signed him up. Aaron went up through the Braves' farm system, in 1954 got his big chance when Outfielder Bobby Thomson broke his ankle in spring training. Last year, lashing out at any bad pitch that caught his fancy, Aaron won the league batting championship with a .328 average, led both major leagues with 200 hits.

The Talented Shuffler. Though he was an infielder in the minors, Aaron claims to enjoy playing rightfield for the Braves because "out here I don't have as much to do, especially not as much thinking." Thinking, Aaron likes to imply, is dangerous. But by now everyone knows that Aaron is not as dumb as he looks when he shuffles around the field ("I'm pacing myself"), and some experts think he will ultimately rank among the game's great hitters. Says Manager Birdie Tebbetts of the Cincinnati Redlegs, one of the keenest judges of talent in the game (TIME, July 8): "Aaron could win the batting championship for the next five or six years, if he gets to be a well-rounded hitter and learns to hit to right and drag bunt. He's that good."

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