Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (44 page)

Hank’s father continued to be perplexed by it all. He did not understand the game of baseball and, more than that, he could not believe that someone would pay his children to play the game. (Years later—after he had joined the New York Yankees—Bauer got his father a box seat ticket near the Yankee dugout when the team came to play the Browns in St. Louis. Hank was proud of his performance that day: a triple and two singles. When he came home that evening, Hank found his father with a beer in hand while sitting in the rocking chair on the front porch. The senior Bauer had a question for his youngest son: “Don’t they ever let you walk?”)

Hank was delighted to hear about the tryout that Herman had arranged. He traveled to North Dakota and performed well enough to secure a contract playing for the Oshkosh Braves in the Wisconsin State League at a pay of $70 a month. It was not much—Hank would remember eating a lot of “greasy hot dogs and greasy hamburgers” at the Woolworth’s five-and-ten-cent store across the street from the stadium—but it was a start.

That first season of professional baseball produced mixed results. “He was a tremendously crude ballplayer,” recalled teammate Swede Erikson. Hank batted only .259 and the Braves finished in last place. (“We were just a bunch of kids,” Bauer later said, “who had never played professional ball before.”) Hank did have one redeeming quality—an ability to hit with power. He hit a team-leading eleven home runs and, as Erikson remembered, “that made him one of the fan favorites.” But it was not enough to keep Hank Bauer in professional baseball. When the season ended, the Braves released him.

The uncertainty of Hank’s professional baseball career no doubt made the decision on his future that much easier after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Six weeks later, Hank Bauer joined the marines. He knew, of course, that he would soon be drafted in any event. But he also had an interest in shaping his destiny. “I wanted to get in the best outfit,” he later said. “And I didn’t think the army was the best outfit. I thought the marines were.”

Thus began a four-year tenure that would prove to be the most indelible—and rewarding—time of Hank Bauer’s life. (“It was a great experience,” he later told a sportswriter. “But I don’t recommend it if there’s a war going on.”) He would have many accomplishments and associations of which he could be proud after his military service ended—including almost twelve years with the New York Yankees. But nothing could surpass the satisfaction he drew from those four years with the marines. And so, when the question was posed to him by his children many years later, he would always say that he “was proudest of being a marine.”

The marine experience began with boot camp in San Diego and continued with an assignment to the Mare Island Naval Base in Vallejo near San Francisco. Hank had joined the marines to contribute to the war effort, but one of the officers soon learned that the young recruit had played professional baseball. It was not long before he was asked to play for the base team.

Hank was reluctant at first. “I didn’t get in here,” he said, “to play ball.” But pressure was applied, and Bauer soon relented. “What position is open?” he asked. Catcher was the reply. Hank had had only minimal experience as a catcher at Oshkosh, but he was a good marine and immediately agreed to be the team’s backstop. (Hank had the same selfless attitude when he played with the Yankees. In fourteen years of major-league baseball, he played only the outfield—except for that one game against the White Sox at Yankee Stadium on September 10, 1955. Yogi Berra was injured and the two backup catchers had been taken out of the lineup for pinch hitters. “Oh, shit,” said Stengel to no one in particular in the dugout. “I don’t have any more catchers.” Although he had not caught a game in more than ten years, Bauer did not hesitate. “Give me the stuff,” he told his manager.)

In retrospect, Hank made a good decision to play ball with his fellow marines. The team did well, and the commanding officer was reluctant to allow his star catcher to be shipped overseas. As each combat assignment came across his desk, the officer repeatedly took Hank’s name off the list. One of the first assignments would have placed Hank on the USS
Helena
, a light cruiser that sank after being torpedoed in the Battle of Kula Gulf near the Solomon Islands in July 1943. But for his commanding officer’s interest in a winning baseball team, Bauer would have been on that ship.

Hank was forever appreciative of that fortuitous postponement of his combat assignment, but he knew it could not continue indefinitely. Beyond that, he was anxious to see action. So he was receptive to the suggestion of Andy Wackenbush, one of his teammates, that they volunteer for a new unit called the Raiders that would play an advance role in anticipated landings on South Pacific islands. Hank went to the first meeting and learned that one of the requirements for joining the unit was an ability to swim. That was a problem. Hank Bauer did not know how to swim. Wackenbush was not pleased when Hank explained the situation. “You gutless son of a bitch,” his teammate replied. Hank Bauer was anything but gutless. He returned to the Raiders’ commanding officer and said that he could in fact swim. The lie was accepted without question, and the East St. Louis native was made a member of the Raiders’ machine-gun platoon.

In time, Bauer would receive stripes as a sergeant and earn the respect of his fellow marines. (Many years after Hank had left the service, Gil McDougald, who roomed with Bauer on Yankee road trips, spoke with some of the men who served with Hank in the Pacific, and the Yankee infielder was understandably curious about his roommate’s combat experience. “He was a one-man army,” the marine veterans said. “He was a terror.”) In the course of almost two years, Hank was involved in four amphibious landings in the South Pacific. The first landing was in New Georgia. That was followed by one in Guam, where he was hit with shrapnel in the back. (All the shrapnel could not be removed, and, as recalled by Tommy Henrich, one of Bauer’s teammates when he first joined the Yankees in 1948, “Joe Page used to clown around in our dressing room by picking pieces of shrapnel out of Hank’s back.”)

The Guam experience was followed by a landing at the island of Emirau off New Guinea and then by a landing on the Japanese island of Okinawa on Easter Sunday in 1945. With more than thirteen hundred Allied ships and more than fifteen hundred Allied planes, that battle represented the largest amphibious assault of the Pacific campaign. Hank was among the marines who landed on the north side of the island, where they were able to secure the local airport with little difficulty. (Hank later recalled that a Japanese pilot landed his fighter plane on the airstrip after it had been overtaken by the Americans. “He never made it out of the cockpit,” Bauer remembered.)

As the marines moved south, where the bulk of the population lived, the fighting intensified. Of the sixty-four men in Hank’s platoon, only six came back alive. Bauer himself almost became one of those casualties. “I saw this reflection of sunshine on something coming down,” he later recalled. “It was an artillery shell, and it hit right behind me.” The blast threw him to the ground and a piece of shrapnel cut a jagged hole in his thigh (and could never be entirely removed).

Hank Bauer’s fighting days were over. He was sent to Guam for medical treatment, and, after spending two months with the occupational force in Japan, was discharged from the marines on January 19, 1946—exactly four years after he had enlisted—with two Bronze Stars, two Purple Hearts, and eleven campaign ribbons. He also brought back with him a susceptibility to malaria. And, while he could put his marine uniform aside, he could not so easily avoid a recurrence of the dreaded disease (thus requiring him to always maintain access to an adequate supply of quinine water).

Hank returned to East St. Louis and, lacking any prospects in professional baseball, he accepted a job with the ironworkers’ union dismantling an old factory. After work he would often stop by the pub where his older brother Joe tended bar. It was there that Danny Menendez, a local Yankee scout, asked Joe about “his little brother.” Joe laughed. Hank had put on more than thirty pounds in the marines and had now grown to his full height of six feet. “He’s not that little anymore,” said Joe. “Stick around.”

When Hank arrived, Menendez was impressed by the youngest Bauer’s size and made an offer for him to play with the Yankees’ farm team in Quincy, Illinois. It would pay $175 a month, with a $200 bonus and another $25 for each month if he made the team. Hank was reluctant at first, saying that he could make as much money with the ironworkers. But Joe—saddened by the loss of his brother Herman, who surely would have continued as a professional baseball player—pushed his younger brother to accept Menendez’s offer.

Hank relented and spent the summer of 1946 playing in the outfield for the Quincy team. Hank’s batting skills had improved greatly, and he finished the season with twelve home runs, ninety runs batted in, and a very respectable .323 batting average. (There was, however, a moment of panic during a game in July. Hank hit a triple, but by the time he reached third base he was overtaken by the aches and fever that accompany malaria. “You better get me the hell out of here,” he told third-base coach Eddie Marlow, who was also managing the team. “I’ve got malaria.” Marlowe, who depended on Bauer’s presence in the lineup, had no interest in honoring his player’s request. The East St. Louis native was too important to the team’s success. “Hank,” the manager replied, “if I take you out, they’ll run me out of town.” So Bauer played the remainder of the game under the grip of malaria.)

Bauer’s performance at Quincy earned him a promotion to Kansas City for the 1947 season. It was nothing that Hank could not handle. He produced sixteen home runs and a .313 batting average. The next year, his record included twenty-three home runs, a hundred runs batted in, and a .305 batting average. Hank Bauer had demonstrated that he was major-league material.

At the end of the 1948 season, the ex-marine was summoned to the parent club by manager Bucky Harris (inspiring one sportswriter to comment that “Harris has brought up the greatest player in his chain store system”). Hank made his first appearance in a Yankee uniform in the first game of a doubleheader against the Washington Senators on Labor Day. He lined the first pitch to center field for a single to drive in a run. That was followed by two more singles, giving him three hits in his first three plate appearances. “Shit,” Hank said to himself. “This is easy.”

It proved to be a premature judgment. American League pitchers soon discovered that Bauer had difficulty hitting a curve, and by the time the season ended, Hank had only six more hits and a .180 average. But one of those hits was a home run over the roof of Philadelphia’s Shibe Park with Joe DiMaggio and Johnny Mize on base—a display of power that drew uncertain praise from Harris, who was smoking a cigarette when the twenty-seven-year-old rookie returned to the dugout: “It’s about time, you son of a bitch.”

Hank’s late-season stint in New York was not without some emotional strain. He had met Charlene Friede by accident. She was the secretary for Lee MacPhail, the Kansas City Blues’ general manager. A petite woman with long dark hair and olive skin, Charlene was sitting at her desk when Hank came into the office. A couple of his marine buddies were in town, and the young player wanted to know if he could get them tickets to a game. The tickets were given, a relationship was ignited, and the wedding ceremony took place on October 22, 1949. But never would Charlene leave her hometown of Kansas City. So she was not there when Hank played for the Yankees in that month of September 1948.

While his batting record for that month was less than spectacular, Bauer remained on the team’s roster when the team opened the 1949 season. Casey Stengel had replaced Bucky Harris as the manager, and he could see in spring training that the young man from East St. Louis was big-league material.

His teammates, who had had only limited exposure to Bauer in September 1948, were in no position to disagree. He had a physique that exuded power. (“His strength was the talk of the league,” one magazine later reported. “In a playful scuffle one day, he popped a friend on the chest—and sent him to the hospital with a broken rib.”) He had a voice that suited his physical attributes. (One sportswriter likened Bauer’s voice to “a cement mixer being piped through an echo chamber,” and another sportswriter said it “sounds like gravel crunching underfoot.”) And when his teammates saw him play, they knew that Hank would do whatever he could to help them win. “When it came to crunching into the stadium wall after a fly ball,” said one sportswriter in later recounting Bauer’s playing career, “sliding on a raw strawberry to bulldoze a double play, or just plain terrifying the opposition, Bauer was the man.”

For all his skill in intimidating the other team, Hank was, at bottom, a gentle soul. “Crusty on the outside,” said Andy Carey, who later shared an apartment with Bauer in the Bronx, “but a heart of gold.” Gil McDougald, who roomed with Bauer on road trips, agreed, calling him “a supernice guy” who looked out for his teammates.

Elston Howard learned of his teammate’s protective spirit shortly after he arrived in 1955 as the team’s first black player. Like Jackie Robinson before him, Elston often encountered taunts and other verbal abuse in those first days on the field. “Hank took it personally whenever Elston was heckled,” Elston’s wife, Arlene, later remembered. “It was not unusual for Hank to come out of the dugout and confront anybody giving Elston a hard time. ‘He was my friend,’ Bauer would say.”

Hank’s commitment to his teammates was evident in other ways that were not always apparent to people in the stands. That was particularly true after he had been with the team for a number of years. “As a veteran,” said Bobby Richardson, who first came to the Yankees in September 1955 as a twenty-year-old infielder, “he looked out for the younger players. He would not only encourage them but also give them good advice along the way.” (There was the time, for example, when Richardson was playing second base and did not get the ball out fast enough to the first baseman in an attempted double play. As the team trotted into the dugout when the inning was over, Bauer caught up to the young player and quietly said, “Throw the ball harder to first base.”)