Henry Aaron and Eddie Mathews: Powerful Partners
This article was written by Dan Schlossberg
This article was published in Henry Aaron book essays (2026)
A Henry Aaron and Eddie Mathews baseball card from Topps. (Courtesy of Topps)
Hank Aaron and Eddie Mathews shared a baseball card in the 1959 Topps set.
The horizontal card, with a green-and-yellow background, showed the sluggers admiring their bats under the words FENCE BUSTERS.
That they were.
Aaron and Mathews combined for a record 863 home runs during the time they were teammates with the Braves from 1954, when Henry surfaced as a 20-year-old infielder, through 1966, when the team moved from Milwaukee to Atlanta before trading Eddie at the end of the season.
The number 863 may not be as famous as 714, 73, or 61 as home-run records go, but it was a huge though little-known milestone.
“I would have to say that was my proudest accomplishment in baseball,” Mathews said years later. “Not just because of the number or because no one else did it but because I shared the accomplishment with Hank. He was the best.
“He wasn’t flashy like Mays but he did everything well. I never saw Aaron throw to the wrong base or overthrow the cut-off man and he did it so well that nobody noticed. Maybe because his cap didn’t fly off.”1
When Mathews led both leagues with 47 homers in 1953, he not only ended Ralph Kiner’s streak of seven straight home-run crowns but produced more than any third baseman in baseball history up to then.
Over the next 13 seasons, Mathews combined with Aaron to hit more home runs than any tandem of teammates from Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig (859) to Willie Mays and Willie McCovey (801).
Mathews and Aaron followed each other in the batting order – with Mathews usually third and Aaron fourth but not always – and homered in the same game 75 times, another major-league record.
For years, they shared the single-season franchise record for home runs. That peak of 47, which Aaron produced in 1971, eventually fell to both Andruw Jones (51 in 2005) and Matt Olson (54 in 2023).
“We weren’t jealous of each other,” Aaron said of Mathews. “That’s one reason we were successful.”2
If anything, Mathews resented any slights directed at Aaron – especially when they involved Willie Mays.
The slugging third baseman disdained the adulation the Giants star received from players, writers, and fans – especially when it came at Aaron’s expense. Never mind Willie, Mickey, and The Duke.
“Eddie couldn’t stand Mays,” wrote John Klima in Bushville Wins! “He didn’t like how he played the game and he hated Mays’ obsession with drawing attention to himself. He hated how Willie fiddled with his hat to make it fly off his head when he was on the run. Eddie didn’t mind Willie’s talent. It was his mouth and self-importance he couldn’t tolerate.”3
His contempt for the Giants’ center fielder even prompted Mathews to destroy framed Mays pictures in two separate bars. Both incidents sparked brawls in which the player was outnumbered.4
“Only Eddie could be crazy enough, drunk enough, and fearlessly insane enough to piss off a bar full of boxers,” Klima wrote.5
Mathews imagined himself Aaron’s defender, though the introverted, modest outfielder owned a personality that was the polar opposite of Mays.
“Eddie loved Henry Aaron for all the reasons he disliked Mays,” according to Klima. “Eddie made it known that anyone who wants a piece of Henry gets a piece of him. Eddie didn’t give a shit what anybody thought about that. Henry was his man.
“He was very loyal to Hank and vice versa. A lot of it was to protect Hank. Hank felt Eddie protected him on and off the field. It wasn’t anything ever said. It was in Eddie’s actions. Hank was his teammate and he loved him.”6
Mathews and Aaron competed against each other only in the original Home Run Derby television series, which enabled the latter to earn more than double his rookie salary of 1954, 12 years before the advent of free agency set salaries spiraling.
Friends but not drinking buddies, Aaron and Mathews invariably went to All-Star Games together, along with teammates Warren Spahn and Lew Burdette, a pitching tandem almost as prolific as Aaron and Mathews.
Consistency helped the pair become the best left-right punch in the big leagues. For his part, Mathews hit at least 30 for nine straight seasons before incurring an injury that stopped the streak in 1962. Then he hurt his shoulder with an overzealous swing against Houston’s Turk Farrell.
Before the injury, Aaron and Mathews often shared the headlines.
In the 1957 World Series, Aaron led both teams with a .393 batting average and three homers, but Mathews won Game Four with a 10th-inning homer and Game Seven with a spectacular grab of a Moose Skowron smash with the bases loaded in the ninth.
Two years later, they teamed to nullify a perfect game by Pittsburgh’s Harvey Haddix, who took a scoreless game into the 13th inning at Milwaukee County Stadium. After Felix Mantilla was safe on Don Hoak’s error, Mathews executed a rare sacrifice, moving the winning run to second. Not surprisingly, Aaron drew an intentional walk. But Joe Adcock then hit the ball over the fence for the only Milwaukee hit of the game. Aaron, seeing the winning run score, went directly from second base to the dugout, allowing Adcock to pass him on the basepaths. As a result, the final score was 1-0 rather than 3-0.
Aaron and Mathews both had their best years in that 1959 season, when the Braves finished in a first-place tie with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Mathews homered in the best-of-three pennant playoff, breaking a tie for the home-run title with Ernie Banks of the lowly Chicago Cubs. In the MVP voting, however, Mathews was runner-up for the second time in his career while Aaron finished third. Banks won the trophy for the second year in a row even though his team went nowhere.
Two years later, when the 1961 Milwaukee Braves became the first team to hit four consecutive home runs, Mathews and Aaron hit the first two, followed by Joe Adcock and Frank Thomas.
By the time the Braves moved from Milwaukee to Atlanta in 1966, however, Mathews had physical issues (mainly shoulder and back) that sapped his power. He hit only 16 home runs, though one of them left a lasting impression.
Elevated to the ceremonial role of team captain by manager Bobby Bragan, who had hoped the title would inspire the player to conform to team rules regarding curfew-breaking and carousing, Mathews had such a rough first half that he had fallen into a platoon at third base. But he got his job back the minute the Braves booted Bragan for first-base coach Billy Hitchcock.
On the rainy night of August 9, 1966, with sensational southpaw Sandy Koufax working for Los Angeles, Mathews turned an 0-and-2 pitch into a game-winning solo home run, ending a 2-1 contest that sent 40,000 Atlanta Stadium fans into a frenzy.7 But their response was temporary.
“I do believe it’s true that as great as Eddie Mathews was, he’d have been even greater if he’d taken better care of himself,” said Bragan, who had moved with the team to Atlanta after the 1965 season.8
Aaron provided no such agita. But Mathews was still popular in the clubhouse and had the support of his teammates.
“Eddie was a gamer,” remembered Denny Lemaster, the winning pitcher in the game against Koufax. “He was always ready to play no matter what shape he was in. What Eddie did after he left the ballpark I always felt was his own business. Bobby was a teetotaler who didn’t think anybody else should drink either.”9
Eddie Mathews managed Henry Aaron and the Braves for parts of three seasons. (Photograph by Dan Schlossberg)
Nothing could curb Mathews’ appetite for alcohol. His penchant for drinking eventually led to his demise as manager even though the team had a winning record at the time.
That happened in 1974, less than two months after his longtime friend became the career home run king.
Mathews reached the manager’s chair when Luman Harris was fired in 1972. That put him into the limelight – which he never cherished as a player – when Aaron was on the cusp of breaking Ruth’s record two years later.
“Mathews stuck his neck out to bench Aaron after he hit home run No. 714 so that he could hit No. 715 at home,” said broadcaster Milo Hamilton, whose call of the historic home run on Atlanta radio station WSB is often paired with the video.10
Needing one homer to tie Ruth but two to top him, Aaron would have sat out the 1974 opening series in Cincinnati if the Braves and Mathews had their way. But Commissioner Bowie Kuhn threatened the team and the manager if Aaron didn’t play. Although Mathews planned to bench Aaron for the middle game of the series, the aging slugger tied the record with his first swing of the new season, collecting a three-run home run against Jack Billingham.
He didn’t connect again until the fourth inning of the Atlanta home opener against Al Downing of the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Mathews could not have imagined how difficult it was for a Black man from Alabama to break a record of a White man from Maryland – especially in a country that could not protect President John F. Kennedy, presidential contender Robert F. Kennedy, or Martin Luther King from assassins. Deluged by hate mail that threatened his family, Aaron told young Black outfielders Dusty Baker and Ralph Garr not to sit near him in the dugout. Just in case.
Aaron needed a security detail, road accommodations away from the team, and a private secretary to sort the 930,000 pieces of mail – a record for someone who was not a politician – as he approached Ruth’s record. He never discussed their content but threw them on the clubhouse floor so that Baker, Garr, and other Black players could read them too.
After finishing one short of Ruth’s record in 1973 (thanks to a September rainout that was not rescheduled), Aaron spent the whole winter wondering whether he would ever get the chance to best the Babe. Any of the threats could have materialized, he reasoned.
Then came spring training 1974 and the controversy over playing the first three games on the road. When the quest for the mark finally shifted to Atlanta, the Aaron children were sequestered with their natural mother in Jacksonville – for their own safety.
No wonder Aaron’s first words after No. 715 were, “I just thank God it’s over with.”
Even Mathews, the often-combustible manager, heaved a big sigh of relief.
For both men, that was their last hurrah in Atlanta. The former was soon fired while the latter played out the string with a mediocre team before requesting and receiving a trade to Milwaukee, where his big-league career began.
“Mathews’ tenure as the Braves’ manager ended a few months after Aaron broke [Ruth’s] record,” wrote Mark Bowman in The Franchise: a Curated History of the Braves. “Like with a few of his marriages, alcohol was to blame. He had allowed the traveling sportswriters to drink on the team’s tab at a bar in St. Louis. Then he got into a drunken argument with traveling secretary Donald Davidson when the bus didn’t arrive in time to pick up the team after a middle-of-the-night landing.”11
Mathews and Aaron played together for 13 years but combined for only one MVP award (Aaron’s in 1957) and two second-place finishes (by Mathews in 1953 and 1959).
One of the first third basemen to reach the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Mathews never played Robin to Aaron’s Batman. He was a legitimate star on his own – and a team leader as a player, captain, coach, and manager for the Braves in three different cities.
The seventh man to join the 500 Home Run Club, Mathews is often mentioned – perhaps behind Mike Schmidt, Brooks Robinson, or George Brett – when historians debate the greatest third basemen of all time.
The numbers support that argument. He had 10 30-homer seasons, eight years of 100 runs scored, and five 100-RBI campaigns. He led the National League in home runs twice, walks four times, and on-base percentage once. In three different seasons, Mathews posted an OPS above 1.000. A 12-time All-Star, he slugged over .500 eight times – topping .600 in three of those years.
“Eddie Mathews was my hero,” said Joe Torre, his teammate for six seasons. “He was Captain and I always called him that. He never backed off, never was tentative.”12
According to longtime Braves executive Donald Davidson, the Texarkana, Texas, native could have been a professional boxer.
“Mathews was a natural athlete, 195 pounds, 6-foot-1 tall, and I’m confident he could have been a contender for the heavyweight boxing title,” the diminutive Davidson wrote in his book Caught Short. “He had shoulders like Rocky Marciano and was the undefeated heavyweight champ of the National League during his playing career.”13
A study in contrasts, Henry Louis Aaron was a wiry right-handed hitter who kept his cool. Edwin Lee Mathews was a muscular left-handed hitter whose temper was as hot as his bat.
A man who never missed an opportunity to take a swing – on or off the field – he was involved in memorable baseball brawls with Don Drysdale, Jim O’Toole, Frank Robinson, and myriad others.
“He was a muscular Marine who drank and could fight,” Ralph Kiner said of Mathews in his autobiography Baseball Forever. “He and his imposing roommate, pitcher Bob Buhl, loved to leave anybody who harassed them lying outside bars and in elevators.
“Mathews saved the life of his smaller teammate, shortstop Johnny Logan, a hundred times. Logan would challenge some big lug to a bar fight and Mathews would end up clocking the guy.”14
He established his star early – when the Braves moved from Boston to Milwaukee during 1953 spring training. His 47-homer season helped the Braves finish second in the Na tional League and first in overall attendance.
One year later, when Sports Illustrated published its first issue, Mathews wound up on the cover under the words Volume One, Number One, August 16, 1954.15 The cover was used again when the magazine published its 40th-anniversary edition.
Mathews averaged 37.5 home runs in his first nine seasons, cementing his reputation as a handsome matinee idol. Yet Fred Haney, who succeeded Grimm as manager during the 1956 season, thought Mathews still needed extra reps in the infield. A former infielder himself, Haney spent hours hitting grounders to the star slugger.
Thanks to Mathews and Aaron, the Milwaukee Braves won two pennants, just missed two others, and never had a losing season – a major-league record.
In the clubhouse, Aaron and Mathews engaged in good-natured needling. But outside the ballpark, the sluggers seldom socialized – partly because Aaron wasn’t a drinker but also because he felt uncomfortable as a Black man mixing with a White crowd in the racially-charged days of his tenure. Away from the field, Mathews most enjoyed the company of Spahn, Burdette, and especially burly pitcher Bob Buhl, not only his roommate but also his hunting partner and drinking buddy.
A later Mathews roommate was the late Bob Uecker, later a longtime Milwaukee Brewers broadcaster.
“Rooming with Uecker was like rooming with the Marx Brothers,” Mathews wrote in his autobiography. “You never knew what to expect.”16
Uecker once boasted that his room was responsible for 400 home runs (Mathews had 399 and Uecker just one).
Competitive, combative, and often combustible, Mathews left his mark on the Braves and the game. Teammates, rivals, writers, and fans knew exactly what to expect: a chiseled, power-packed player who would do anything to win – no matter what the cost.
So did Aaron, though he did it in his own, quiet way. No wonder Drysdale once said he was so relaxed at the plate that he looked like he was falling asleep between pitches.
In at least 17 of those at-bats, Aaron was wide awake; he hit 17 of his 755 home runs against the towering Dodgers right-hander. No other pitcher yielded more.
The identity of the man on the mound hardly mattered to Hank Aaron. He hit .362 against Koufax and .342 against Steve Carlton. A quick learner, he fanned seven times against Tom Seaver when the pitcher was a rookie with the Mets but never more than once in any other season.
In 1982 Aaron had the biggest hit of his career: enshrinement in the Hall of Fame. He and Mathews, the game’s greatest tandem, would not be separated again.
DAN SCHLOSSBERG is the author, co-author, or editor of 43 baseball books, including biographies of Hank Aaron written 50 years apart and collaborations with Ron Blomberg, Al Clark, and Milo Hamilton. The former AP sportswriter, who has covered baseball since he graduated from Syracuse University in 1969, has been the weekend editor of the Here’s the Pitch newsletter since its creation in 2020 and the national baseball writer for forbes.com since June 2018. A SABR member since 1981, he is also an award-winning travel writer and founder of the North American Travel Journalists Association. He is a lifelong resident of Northern New Jersey.
NOTES
1 Eddie Mathews and Bob Buege, Eddie Mathews and the National Pastime (Milwaukee: Douglas American Sports Publications, 1994), 181-2.
2 Mark Bowman, The Franchise: A Curated History of the Braves (Chicago: Triumph, 2024), 129.
3 John Klima, Bushville Wins! (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2012), 61.
4 Klima, 61.
5 Klima, 61.
6 Klima, 62.
7 J. Hudson Couch, The Braves First Fifteen Years in Atlanta (Atlanta: The Other Alligator Creek Company, 1984), 53.
8 William Povletich, Milwaukee Braves: Heroes and Heartbreak (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2009), 164.
9 Povletich, 164.
10 Milo Hamilton and Dan Schlossberg with Bob Ibach, Making Airwaves (Champaign, Illinois: Sports Publishing, 2007), 79.
11 Bowman, 132.
12 Robert W. Cohen, The 50 Greatest Players in Braves History (Lanham, Maryland: Lyons Press, 2023), 35.
13 Donald Davidson with Jesse Outlar, Caught Short (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 52.
14 Ralph Kiner, Baseball Forever: Reflections on 60 Years in the Game (Chicago: Triumph Books, 2004), 9.
15 Gary Caruso, ed., The Braves Encyclopedia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 211.
16 Mathews, 218.