Major League Baseball will tip its cap Tuesday to Mobile’s outsized influence on America’s pastime, a city that produced five Hall of Famers and contributed a host of legendary players to the game.

Yet few Hall of Fame moments actually happened in Mobile. The city hasn’t hosted professional baseball since the Minor League Bay Bears left in 2019, and baseball has long been overtaken by football and basketball as the most popular sports among today’s youths.

One moment, however, more than 77 years ago, still looms large over the city’s baseball and cultural legacy. It may have been one of the most consequential chance encounters in professional sports history.

The year was 1948. On a stop through Mobile during Spring Training, Jackie Robinson stood on Davis Avenue, the epicenter of Black culture and life in the Jim Crow South, addressing a crowd of onlookers. Among them was a 14-year-old Henry Aaron, just another face in the crowd.

“It’s a beautiful moment we should definitely celebrate when great figures of history overlap and come in contact,” said Jonathan Eig, a Robinson biographer.

No known photographs or newspaper articles document the moment. Even the exact location remains uncertain. Was it inside an auditorium? Outside, in front of a pharmacy?

But the story, retold by Aaron himself and included in biographies ever since, has taken on a life of its own. That chance encounter, Robinson inspiring Aaron, became a symbolic passing of the torch between two generations, even if no one realized it at the time.

It also underscored Robinson’s powerful influence, just one year after breaking Major League Baseball’s color barrier, on young Black Americans across the country.

“He breathed baseball into the Black community, kids and grownups alike,” Aaron recounted in the 1991 book “I Had a Hammer: The Hank Aaron Story.”

Hero comes to town

Robinson was his inspiration.

“Jackie Robinson was the hero of Davis Avenue – he and Joe Louis,” Aaron recalled in his autobiography. “When Louis would fight, everybody would get together and crowd around the (radio) station, and when the Dodgers were on – a Mobile station carried pirated broadcasts from an announcer named Gordon McLendon – it was practically the same thing.”

As the story goes, Aaron skipped shop class to hear Robinson speak in late March 1948.

The speech, according to Aaron, took place inside an auditorium.

Or did it? Other accounts have the speech occurring elsewhere.

In Howard Bryant’s deeply researched biography, “The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron,” he credits Aaron with saying that Robinson’s appearance occurred in front of a drugstore on Davis Avenue. Aaron’s autobiography has the moment happening inside an unnamed auditorium.

“The details of the day would always be sketchy,” Bryant wrote.

One potential spot for the speech would have been inside a drugstore on Davis Avenue, later renamed to today’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue.

The drugstore was located inside a building built and owned by Dr. James Alexander Franklin, Sr., who was a prominent physician within Mobile’s Black neighborhoods for 60 years.

Eric Finley, a historian, tour director and storyteller with the Friends of the African American Heritage Trail, said a drugstore was located on the first floor inside Franklin’s building. In 1948, it was named Davis Avenue Pharmacy.

The store, a few years later, would become part of the Finley family chain of drugstores as Finley’s No. 3. The Finley family operated the first Black-owned chain of drugstores in Alabama.

Adding another layer to this historic connection: A few years later, in the 1950s, there is documented proof that Robinson stayed at the home of Dr. James Franklin on Ann Street, a few miles from the drugstore.

“Jackie Robinson stayed at Dr. Franklin’s house on Ann Street so it would make sense that is where (Robinson) spoke,” Finley said.

A historic marker sits in front of the Ann Street house recognizing Franklin’s influence and the fact that he once opened his home to Black celebrities, including Robinson, who visited Mobile during segregation.

Finley said if the speech occurred inside an auditorium, it would have likely taken place one block away at the International Longshoremen’s Association Hall. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2011. It is where King, in 1959, was the keynote speaker during Mobile’s annual Emancipation Day program.

The area, along with the Longshoremen’s building, is part of a revitalization project highlighted in January with unveiling of Isom Clemons Civil Rights Memorial Park.

“It was a facility, at that time, where all the formal balls were held,” Finley said.

Father-son moment

Aaron, in his autobiography, said a poignant father-son conversation with his dad, Herbert, was also a part of the backdrop to the Robinson visit.

The young Aaron said he had dreams of playing in the big leagues. Before Robinson’s 1947 season, “daddy would set me straight,” Aaron recalled.

“I remember sitting on the back porch once when an airplane flew over, and I told Daddy I’d like to be a pilot when I grow up,” Aaron writes. “He said, ‘Ain’t no colored pilots.’ I said, okay, then, I’ll be a ballplayer. He said, ‘Ain’t no colored ballplayers.’ But he never said that anymore after we sat in the colored section of Hartwell Field and watched Jackie Robinson.”

Hartwell Field was the epicenter of Mobile baseball, opening in 1927. The stadium, which lasted until it was badly damaged by Hurricane Frederic in 1979, was at Tennessee and Ann streets and could seat over 9,300 spectators.

It was home to the Mobile Bears and a variety of minor league teams during its heyday. But it hosted icons in its earliest years, including the New York Yankees teams of the 1930s with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig visiting the Deep South for exhibition games.

It was also where Robinson played a game in 1948, with a youthful Aaron watching from the stands.

The entire day – a speech by Robinson, an exhibition game at Hartwell Field – laid the groundwork for the future Home Run king.

“Henry had skipped school to see Robinson … and for the next six decades of his life, Henry would say that outside those with the members of his own family, no moment ever affected his outlook on what was possible in the world more than that day,” Bryant wrote.

Influential encounter

The chance encounter has, over the years, taken on a life of its own from stories and rehashing by Aaron.

It has been told and retold during events and in books. Joe Formichella, an author from Fairhope, wrote about the encounter in his book about the Prichard Mohawks. The introduction of his book was read aloud by City Attorney Richardo Woods during a 2022 event commemorating the beginning of a project to create statues of Mobile’s Hall of Fame athletes.

Legendary broadcaster Bob Costas also highlighted the story in a eulogy he gave during Aaron’s funeral in 2021.

Costas, in his speech, took note of the conversation between Aaron and his father, who said the dreams of becoming a professional ballplayer was fleeting in the 1940s, before Robinson integrated the game.

But at Hartwell Field in 1948, Aaron “got his first on field look of his idol and inspiration,” Costas said. “As it turned out, Herbert Aaron was mistaken. His son would not only become a big league baseball player, but one of the very greatest of all time. A Mount Rushmore player.”

Robinson’s influence

Formichella said the moment, in retrospect, is so large that it deserves recognition in Mobile – a historic marker, or even a commemoration on Jackie Robinson Day of April 15.

“Even before Hank Aaron was closing in on Ruth’s record, Mobile was renowned for the baseball talent it was producing,” he said. “Talent, like Aaron, that wanted to play baseball in part because of Jackie Robinson.”

Cleon Jones, a member of the New York Mets Hall of Fame and a longtime resident and community advocate for the Africatown community of Mobile, said he was unfamiliar with the particulars of Aaron’s teenage encounter with Robinson. But he said he is aware of similar stories that inspired future Major League Baseball players.

Jones said that Ed Charles, his Mets teammate on the 1969 world championship squad, had a similar encounter with Robinson as a child. The moment was embellished in the 2013 movie, “42.”

“He and Hank were around the same age,” Jone said about Charles. “There was that inspiration.”

Eig, the Robinson biographer, said similar stories abound.

“Robinson knew what he was doing during those public appearances,” Eig said. “That part of his job was to inspire young men like Hank Aaron to think big.”

He added, “You can’t overstate the impact he had on the Black community. There were not Black members of the Senate or the White House cabinet. He was one of the most admired men in the Black community. MLK was a teenager at the time. The civil rights movement, no one was calling it yet. People were traveling for hundreds of miles to see him play, packing lunches and dinners. It was the biggest thing to happen.”

Aaron’s encounter stands out. It was Aaron, as a member of the Atlanta Braves, who broke Ruth’s home run record in 1974 by rising above threatening hate mail and racism that followed him in 1973.

“Jackie Robinson once famously said a life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives,” Costas said during his eulogy of Aaron in 2021. “More than 70 years ago, Jackie Robinson had no way of knowing the impact he would have on a kid who skipped a school to hear him speak and climbed a tree to watch him play. No way to know that the kid would go on to become, in many respects, the most significant baseball player since Jackie Robinson himself.”

Hall of Fame Walk

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Aaron, because of his roots as a Mobile native, will be honored once again in Mobile on Tuesday with the official commemoration of a 9-foot-tall bronze statue on Water Street.

Five other Hall of Famers, all who were born and raised in Mobile, will join Aaron: Satchel Paige, Willie McCovey, Billy Williams, Ozzie Smith and the NFL’s Robert Brazile.

Brazile, Williams and Smith – the three living Hall of Famers – will be at a 1:30 p.m. ribbon cutting ceremony honoring the new $11 million park along Water Street and in front of the Arthur R. Outlaw Mobile Convention Center.

The park features 9-foot bronze statues placed on 1-foot-tall pedestals. A blank pedestal is also part of the park’s feature, allowing visitors to stand on it and have their picture taken among the rest of the Hall of Famers.

“When the child is there and they are looking at the people of old and what they meant to their sport, let them dream,” said former Mobile City Councilman John Williams, who came up with the idea of an empty pedestal that can be used for pictures and selfies with the statues in the background. “A pedestal says, ‘future Hall of Famer,’ and stands among those greats, it allows someone to dream.”

Just like Aaron did on Davis Avenue in 1948, with the real-life Robinson holding court.

“For them to have that moment to cross paths in the same place, that’s beautiful,” Eig said.