A real hankering for baseball immortality
Quin Hillyer
MOBILE, Alabama — The Home Run King’s home needs a home.
This coastal town, which has produced more Major League Baseball Hall of Famers per capita than any city on Earth, has long taken special pride in the man who broke Babe Ruth’s career home-run record, Hank Aaron.
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When the city built a facility for the Mobile BayBears (a minor league baseball team) in 1997, it was named Hank Aaron Stadium. And when, in 2007, Aaron’s mother finally moved from the small home her husband built for the family 65 years earlier, the city moved the whole house 7 miles onto stadium property and renovated it into the Hank Aaron Childhood Home and Museum. It opened in 2010 to great fanfare, with ceremonies attended by Aaron and fellow greats Willie Mays (from Alabama), Ozzie Smith (from Mobile), Reggie Jackson, and Rickey Henderson. The museum was full of baseball memorabilia, plenty of items from Aaron’s youth, and stories of his childhood.
Unfortunately, the BayBears team moved away in 2020, and due to a wrinkle in the land lease, the city lost control of the entire piece of property where the stadium and museum both stand. The popular museum, now behind locked gates, had to close and return the memorabilia to the Aaron family and to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, respectively.
Well, if a house can be picked off its foundation and moved 7 miles, it can be picked up and moved another 6 — this time to a spacious but underused city park, hard by Interstate 10.
“Hank is who we were identified with, pretty much around the world,” Danny Corte, the executive director of the Mobile Sports Authority, said. One way or another, the city will find a way to move and reopen the home and again secure its memorabilia. It will take significant building materials and elbow grease to ensure the new location has a firm enough foundation, but nobody minds some hammering to make the home of Hammerin’ Hank a home run.