A+, as in Aaron

The ball, like the Hammer himself, is larger than life. Much, much larger. How much? Try 100 feet in diameter. Try looking up, up, four or five stories up. Those are the measurements of an enormous color photograph of a baseball. The very ball Henry Aaron lined over the left-field wall one long-ago April evening and into the Atlanta Braves bullpen, into the record and history books, and on into posterity.

It's the 715 ball. The one that broke the Babe's career home run record. In terms of sheer size and significance, the photo is baseball's ultimate tape-measure shot.

Much like that photograph, which adorns the back side of the scoreboard at SunTrust Park, Henry Louis Aaron still hovers over his franchise and his adopted hometown. He is a towering presence in Atlanta, and remains so more than four decades after breaking baseball's most hallowed record.

Aaron played here, brilliantly. He made history here, heroically. He continues to live and thrive here, financially and personally. More than any other citizen of the South's flagship city, Aaron and Atlanta are conjoined at the A. No one else comes close. Not Ted Turner. Not Jimmy Carter. Not Bobby Cox or Beyoncé. Someone says Atlanta, you think Aaron.

The dimensions of the photograph, of course, are just that: merely dimensions. And Aaron, the very best of all Braves, one of baseball's greatest all-around players and now once again the peoples' choice as the legitimate home run king, was anything but one-dimensional as a player.

His greatness is spread all over baseball's hit lists. Aaron holds more major league batting records than any player in the game's long history. He drove in 2,297 runs. He lashed out 1,477 extra-base hits. He amassed 6,856 total bases. He finished in the top 10 in six other major career categories and compiled a lifetime batting average of .305. Yet Aaron also won four RBI titles, three Gold Gloves, two batting titles and the 1957 National League MVP Award, and led the NL in homers four times.

"About the only thing I didn't do," he once said, "is win a stolen base title."

However, it's his home runs we immediately think of when we think of Henry Aaron.

He hit this historic 715th off the Dodgers' Al Downing on April 8, 1974, in Atlanta to surpass Babe Ruth, and endured hell en route to that milestone. The 755th and last he belted back in Milwaukee, where Aaron began his big-league career in 1954 and ended it in 1976. The 109, in September of 1957, which Aaron later acknowledged was his most satisfying, even more so than the 715th. That 11th-inning walk-off blast, one of the young Aaron's National League–leading 44 homers that season, that clinched the pennant for the Braves. Milwaukee went on to win its only World Series championship.

"I galloped around the bases, and when I touched home plate, the whole team was there to pick me up and carry me off the field," Aaron later reflected. "I had always dreamed about a moment like Bobby Thomson had in '51, and this was it."

We know where we were when "Bad Henry," as Don Drysdale, the late Dodgers Hall of Fame pitcher, admiringly called Aaron during their playing days, hit No. 715. Much like we recall where we were when JFK was assassinated, when Neil Armstrong took a small step for man on the Moon, or when the Berlin wall came tumbling down. We remember 715. Long gone. Never forgotten.

It wasn't until Aaron surpassed Ruth, though, that the awful truth eventually came out: the racism he'd endured, the pure hatred and vitriol, the hate mail and death threats aimed squarely at the color of a man's skin. It began in the 1972 season and built throughout '73 as Aaron, at age 39, hit 40 homers to finish the year with 713, one shy of Ruth's record.

"All I've got to do this winter," he said at season's end, "is stay alive."

Of course, long before he challenged Ruth, Aaron had encountered racism in baseball. As a teenager, the young infielder from Mobile, Alabama, briefly played for the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro Leagues. One weekend, their doubleheader in Washington, D.C., at Griffith Stadium — home of the Washington Senators — was rained out. As Aaron recalled in his autobiography I Had a Hammer, written with Lonnie Wheeler: "We had breakfast while they were waiting for the rain to stop, and I can still envision sitting with the Clowns in a restaurant behind Griffith...