But it was the year before--1973--that was arguably the most suspenseful and remarkable season in Aaron's career, coming after an off-year in which his continuing momentum toward the magic 714 came under a cloud of increasing age and injury.
AND the 1973 season, with Aaron back in the outfield at age 39, began ominously when he hit just .125 in April. (He still had his home run stroke, though--five homers, but only eight hits for the entire month!) His slash line (.125/.300/.411) looked more like Joey Gallo than a man less than forty homers away from the all-time record.
It was clear that Aaron was swinging for the fences every time he was at the plate, and that approach kept things sharply up-and-down for the first half of the season. After a hot streak in early May, Hank hit just .205 from May 15 through June 17, adding eight more homers along the way.
IN early July, the tide began to turn, aided by a rhythm of judicious off-days instituted by manager Eddie Mathews (Aaron's former slugging partner in Milwaukee). On July 21st, Hank hit his 700th homer, at home against the Phillies, and his seasonal SLG had reached .598. The home run watch in the national media was now on in earnest.
What followed, though, was a protracted plateau in which Hank hit just one homer over the next 22 games (seven of which he missed due to a nagging heal injury). He adjusted his swing in batting practice to take some pressure off his front foot.
THAT adjustment ushered in one of the greatest protracted hot streaks in Hank's career: from August 15th to the end of the season (September 30), Aaron hit .442 (4*-for-104), with 12 homers and a SLG of .857. This transcendent late-season surge rekindled the media frenzy as Hank hit career homer #710 on September 10th, with fifteen games left to go. The way he was hitting, it began to seem likely that he'd tie of break the record before the season concluded...
Which, of course, was not to be. Aaron hit #713 in the second-to-last game of the year. The next day he had three hits, but none were homers--the nation would have to wait until 1974 for him to set a new home run record. But his six-for-seven performance over those final two games improbably lifted his batting average over .300 for the season--a feat that had seemed literally impossible just a month earlier.
AND there's another astonishing stat hidden in Aaron's 1973 season that we stumbled over while revisiting its details. It's definitely "inside baseball" even as we practice it now, but it's remarkable enough in the context of our expanded view of stat splits to warrant inclusion here. With so much discussion of "times through the batting order" vis-a-vis starting pitcher viability, it's interesting to note that managers should have considered switching pitchers whenever their starter was due to face Aaron for the third time in a game. 
At Forman et soeur you can look at stat splits such as these historically (at least as far back as they've got play-by-play data. And when you do that, you'll find that, as measured by OPS+, Aaron's 1973 performance against starting pitchers he faced for the third time in the game is the third best in baseball history.
Here's the Top 25 all-time for players with 50+ PAs (above at right). Note that Hank slugged an even 1.000 in such situations in 1973, a feat matched by David Ortiz in 2004, and bested only by the very strange bedfellows of Ted Williams (twice) and the not-so-unsinkable Danny Santana (a fact which reminds us that this is definitely SSSS--small sample size stuff--that we're dealing with).
Still--ten of the Top 25 on this list are in the Hall of Fame, with twelve slots taken up by them (Aaron and Williams are the only guys to be on the list twice)--and we can argue that Dick Allen and Don Mattingly and George Foster belong there as well, plus there are recent folks like Shohei Ohtani and Bryce Harper who might find their way to Cooperstown as well.
All in all, this "inside the inside" stat seems highly appropriate in its intersection with Aaron's incredible 1973 season, one that's even more amazing when you break it down into its details. Here's to you, Hank, for memories that transcend mere lifetimes...
