Aaron getting due at last

[snopes]

Because some accounts claimed the conversation took place during a late-1950s All-Star Game and others said it was during the 1958 World Series between the Yankees and Braves, it has fallen into urban-legend status. Is it possible the whole incident was apocryphal?

No. Yogi Berra, the Yankees' Hall of Fame catcher, verified that he did, indeed, once tell Hank Aaron to turn his bat around because the label was facing the wrong way, even if Berra couldn't recall the exact circumstances. "He said, 'Yogi, I didn't come up here to read. I came up here to hit.' We always laughed about it," Berra said in March at Legends Field in Tampa, where he attended the Yankees' spring training.

http://www.newsday.com/sports/baseba...,2296085.story

[Johnny Slick]

Wonderful story. Not so wonderful was the way (alluded in the article) baseball almost tried to forget Hammerin' Hank's breaking of Babe Ruth's most storied record. And to think that the man did it while spending a large chunk of his career in the 1960s, when the game reached its most extreme defense-sided level since the dead ball era.

You can take these numbers for what they are worth (not much), but the website baseball-reference.com has this really great tool that allows you to play around with guys' career stats to get an idea of the impact they had on their respective leagues. If you extrapolate Aaron's career to a 750-run environment (a little under what baseball produces today; about comparable to the AL in the mid-1980s), he ends up with 828 runs, 4148 hits, a .322 average. Some other players naturalized to a 750-run environment:

Name		BA      H  HR  RBI
Hank Aaron	.322 4154 828 2639
Babe Ruth	.340 3032 744 2325
Pete Rose	.319 4666 172 1491
Ty Cobb		.381 4732 128 2253
Barry Bonds	.309 3106 803 2157
Ernie Banks	.283 2758 548 1799
Willie Mays	.316 3583 717 2152
Mickey Mantle	.315 2692 594 1745
Lou Gehrig	.331 2744 497 1968
Jose Canseco	.274 2015 497 1550
Mark McGwire	.271 1720 609 1532
Sammy Sosa	.276 2460 617 1694
Stan Musial	.335 3846 500 2077
Al Kaline	.309 3244 430 1760
"Rob" Clemente	.333 3287 263 1499
Carl "Yaz"	.295 3653 481 2037
Ted Williams	.339 2719 536 1854
Rogers Hornsby	.368 3256 321 1768
Joe Morgan	.290 2816 299 1334