Baseball: Old Potato Face

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It was a ritual to which he had become accustomed and which he accepted, unwillingly but gracefully. Grouped around the desk in the Baltimore clubhouse were half a dozen reporters for the usual postmortem. They watched Hank Bauer reduce an empty beer can to tin foil with one quick crunch of his hammy fist. “They gotta catch us,” Bauer announced. “And if we keep winning, they can’t, can they?” Silence. “But Hank,” somebody wanted to know, “is the long summer beginning to get to your players?”

Bauer’s mashed-potato face flushed crimson. Muscles rippled malevolently in his chest. Beer from a fresh, full can splattered on the desk. “What the hell kind of question is that?” he rasped. A longer silence. Finally, Bauer smiled and hoisted the dewy can. “Naaaah,” he said. “The heat don’t bother them, ’cause they drink this here good beer.” And with that, the manager of the Baltimore Orioles marched off, stark naked, to the shower.

Haunting Melody. It started back in April, while the buds were still hard on the maple trees and the New York Yankees were losing four of their first five games—the first faint notes of a haunting melody. It grew steadily in volume through the summer, while the Orioles and the Chicago White Sox jockeyed back and forth for the lead. Last week it reached its shimmering, cymbalistic crescendo as all three teams entered the last, climactic month of the 1964 baseball season, locked in a death-or-derring-do battle for the American League pennant. Call it the year the American League made a game out of baseball again.

It is the year the Christians eat the lions, the year the worms grow teeth, the year the sharecroppers foreclose on the banks. The National League race, too, has provided its share of thrills—even if it is winding up as quietly as a Quaker meeting. For two weeks it has been clear to all but bitter-enders and Cincinnatians that Gene Mauch’s amazing Philadelphia Phillies—the laughingstock of the league just three years ago—are too far ahead to be caught. But there are other mysteries to marvel at: the careless collapse of the San Francisco Giants, the frantic frustration of the World Champion Los Angeles Dodgers, the night the Japanese finally broke into the U.S. big leagues. If that is not enough, there is always the curious sale of the Yankees to CBS and the wondrous hitting of Minnesota’s Tony Oliva, a champion in his rookie year.

But not since 1948, when the Cleveland Indians and the Boston Red Sox wound up deadlocked for the lead at season’s end—with the Yankees a bare two games behind—has the American League had a pennant race to compare. In five months the lead has changed hands as often as an Indianhead penny. Yogi Berra’s Yankees, crippled as they were by injuries, have been in first place seven times; Al Lopez’ White Sox, the punchless wonders, have visited there on eleven separate occasions; and Hank Bauer’s Baltimore Orioles have tried twelve times to build themselves a permanent nest on the slippery topmost branch. With just 27 games to play, it is still anybody’s race—and the fans love it.

The pennant-fever bug is even infecting the also-rans—for the simple reason that the three top teams have already played each other all the times the schedule calls for. Now the decision is in the hands of the Angels—or so thought the midweek crowd of 25,033 that turned out to watch Los Angeles play the New York Yankees last week. The same weekday night, up at Minnesota, the Twins packed them in for a game with the league-leading Orioles, and so did the White Sox when they entertained the Detroit Tigers.

Nowhere has the disease struck with more violence than in Baltimore, where the cops patrol their beats with wires to transistor radios dangling from their ears, and a stripper on “The Block” stops in mid-bump to ask, “Any score on the Birds yet?” On urbane Bolton Hill, superstitious fans sit nervously in front of TV sets, crossing left legs over right when a lefthanded Oriole comes to bat, right over left for righthanders. And in a midtown advertising agency, Copywriter Robert Goodman sits down and in four days knocks out music and lyrics for his Pennant Fever record album:

We’ve got a do-the-impossible Oriole team,

We’ve got a palpitating, Yankee-hating Oriole team.

We’ve got a clutch-hitting, never-quitting Oriole team.

In four weeks the album has sold 14,000 copies to the fans who are flocking into Memorial Stadium in such numbers that the team is certain to break its alltime attendance record this year—all of them cheering and hollering and clapping so wildly that no one thought it strange recently when one enthusiastic lady dislocated her shoulder and had to be taken to the hospital.

If the Orioles do win the American League pennant, they will be the most improbable champions in years. There is not a single solid .300 hitter on the club, not a single pitcher remotely able to win 20 games, not a single slugger with a chance for 125 RBIs. The best pitcher, 19-year-old Wally Bunker (season’s record: 14-4), worked only four big-league innings before this year. The best run producer, hulking Outfielder Boog Powell (31 home runs, 80 RBIs), is sidelined with a chipped bone in his wrist. The most promising new acquisition, First Baseman Norm Siebern, is suffering through the worst season of his career at the plate. The No. 1 relief pitcher, Stu Miller, a $30,000 man, has given up 10 runs in his last 17 innings.

Then what do the Orioles have? They have Brooks Robinson, the best third baseman in the American League, who almost singlehanded beat the Chicago

White Sox three out of four last month, clouting eight hits (including two homers) and driving in six runs. They have Pitcher Steve Barber, who can’t lick anybody else but has won three apiece from the White Sox and Yankees. They have Rookie Outfielder Sam Bowens, who hits one home run for every four times he strikes out (19 HRs, 84 Ks), and Shortstop Luis Aparicio, who leads both leagues with 50 stolen bases, and Milt Pappas (né Miltiades Stergios Papastedgios), who might be the best pitcher around if he weren’t bored by the ease of it all.

They also have Henry Albert Bauer, 42, the brightest and ugliest face in baseball, who should be a cinch for Manager of the Year, even if the Orioles lose all their remaining games and wind up 25 games out of first.

Gorgon & Thor. Hank Bauer is the kind of man everybody wants for a friend—because only a suicide would want him for an enemy. When he frowns, Gorgon shudders. When he talks, Thor answers. He is all bituminous at heart, but he is hewn of anthracite. Bauer looks, says one Oriole player, “like an M-l ready to go off.” He commands respect, he commands obedience, and he commands a certain amount of controversy. His own boss, Oriole General Manager Lee MacPhail, calls him “no great shakes as a baseball strategist” and says that he “manages by instinct.” But Third Baseman Robinson, who prides himself on being a strategist, says: “On the plays Hank has pulled that I don’t agree with, he has proved to be right 95% of the time.” One thing is certain: if the Baltimore Orioles do win the pennant, they will win it because of Bauer. Just a year ago, essentially the same Oriole team was stumbling along in fourth place, 14½ games off the pace.

For Baltimore, winning the American League pennant—or just beating those Double Damn Yankees—would be sweet revenge indeed. Baltimore and baseball once went together like Boston and beans: the original Orioles won three straight National League pennants in the 1890s. Then came disaster: Star Players John J. McGraw and Iron Man Joe McGinnity jumped their contracts, and in 1903 the franchise was sold to a group of New Yorkers for $18,000. Renamed the Highlanders, the migrating Birds sang no songs in New York either —until they began calling themselves the Yankees and hired a kid from the sandlots of Baltimore named George Herman Ruth.

It took Baltimore 51 years just to get back to the big leagues. Finally, in 1954, the St. Louis Browns packed up and moved East. Browns or Orioles, they were still the worst team in baseball, but Baltimore greeted them like champs. ON TO THE PENNANT, whooped the normally staid Morning Sun, and a monumental welcoming parade tied up traffic for hours. Baltimore Poet Laureate Ogden Nash dashed off a ditty to celebrate the frabjous day:

Wee Willie Keeler runs through the town,

All along Charles Street in his nightgown,

Belling like a hound dog gathering the pack,

Hey, Wilbert Robinson, the Orioles are back.

Hey, Hughie Jennings, hey, John McGraw,

I got fire in my eye and tobacco in my jaw.

Hughie, hold my halo, I’m sick of being a saint;

Got to teach the youngsters to hit ’em where they ain’t.

Fair or Foul. The fledgling Orioles needed teaching, all right. That first season they wound up 57 games out of first place. Next year they finished seventh; then sixth. Baltimore fans hardly seemed to notice: “Bushers,” visiting players called the crowds for screaming like banshees at every ball the Orioles hit—fair or foul. At last, in 1960, there was something worth cheering about: under Manager Paul Richards, that old shrewdie, the Orioles flew all the way up to second place. In 1961, after a bad start, they won 95 games—a club record. Aha, said the never-die fans—just wait till next year. But then Richards quit to become general manager of the Houston Colts, and the job of winning a pennant went to Billy Hitchcock, softhearted Southerner who had never managed a big-league team.

Quick to take advantage of Hitchcock’s easygoing ways, the Orioles became the playboys of the league, yukked it up at night—and skidded back to seventh place. Attendance plummeted —off 160,000 in 1962, another 16,000 last year. Hitchcock quarreled bitterly with sports writers, insisting: “They’re trying to get me fired.” Oriole players were openly contemptuous of Hitchcock. “What kind of manager does that?” snorted one player, after the Orioles dropped five straight, and Hitchcock cheerfully announced: “Boys, the beer’s on me.” Says General Manager Lee MacPhail: “I don’t think everything that happened was Billy’s fault. But a change had to be made.”

MacPhail put in a call to Yankee Owner Dan Topping. Was Yogi Berra available for the job? No, Topping replied: Yogi was going to manage the Yankees in 1964. Then MacPhail sounded out Eddie Stanky—but Stanky wanted a long-term contract. Finally, MacPhail found his man right in the Baltimore dugout: Oriole Coach Hank Bauer. Said Bauer, “I don’t know whether I’m the first, second, third or 20th choice for this job, but I’ll say one thing—if it was offered to anyone else, they were crazy not to accept. It makes me feel good.”

Make It Hurt. And Bauer obviously intended to keep that happy feeling. To make sure the Orioles knew how to spell boss, he made it extra-clear in his first and just about only clubhouse meeting. “I’ve got a job to do, and you’ve got a job to do,” rasped Bauer. “I’m paid to manage, and you’re paid to play.” Next came Bauer’s Rules of Behavior: a midnight curfew, jacket and tie at all times on the road, no drinking at the hotel where the team was staying.

Then there were Bauer’s Rules of Play—no cute stuff, no tricks, just straightforward baseball. For pitchers: “When I come out to that mound, don’t give me a lot of bull; just give me the ball.” For outfielders: “Make damn sure you don’t miss that cutoff man with your throw.” For base runners: “Break up the double play. Go in hard. Make it hurt.” Labor-management relations would remain cordial, he said, just so long as the employees remembered their place: “If I’m out somewhere and a player comes in, I don’t want him to turn around and walk out just because I’m there. I expect him to say hello, have a drink—and then get out.”

Standing there, studying that face, watching those traplike hands, the Orioles decided that Bauer was for real—at least, most of them. First Baseman Jim Gentile probably thought he was being funny when he walked up to Bauer last winter and grinned: “Hello, Hitler!” Gentile now labors for last-place Kansas City. Outfielder Willie Kirkland showed up three days late for spring training. Bauer fined him $100 for each day, then sold him to Washington—a comedown that could cost Willie approximately $10,000 in bonus money if the Orioles win the pennant. Three young players who missed a midnight curfew by 20 minutes got off with lighter sentences: two laps around the field, double time. “Just remember,” said Bauer, “if you ream me, I got the last ream.”

Always a Bloody Nose. Tough words. Tough man. He has to be, growing up as he did in East St. Louis, Ill., the youngest of nine children born to John Bauer, an Austrian immigrant who turned to bartending after he lost a leg working in an aluminum mill. Money was scarce around the Bauer household: he wore baby clothes made out of old feed sacks. In junior high school, Hank weighed only 102 Ibs., and his sister Mary begged him to give up smoking: “That’s the reason you’re not growing,” she insisted. Hank kept right on smoking—and wading into street fights. “He was a real dead-end kid,” says Brother Joe, 58. “Always going around with a bloody nose.”

At Central Catholic High School, Bauer won his Cs in baseball and basketball—plus a permanently misshapen nose (the result of a collision with an opponent’s elbow under the basket). After graduation, Hank worked for a while repairing furnaces in a beer-bottling plant. In 1941 his older brother Herman, a White Sox farm hand, wangled him a pro tryout. Hank landed with Oshkosh in the Class D Wisconsin State League. But he hardly burned up the bushes. Alternating between infield and outfield, he batted a measly .262. The manager thought he might be a pitcher. Earned-run average in three games: 5.03. “I tried a curve once,” grins Bauer, “but nothing happened.”

“I Can Swim.” Bauer never went back to Oshkosh. One day in January 1942, he stopped by the local court house and enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps. Boot camp was a breeze (“I never had to scrub a barracks with a toothbrush or anything”), and there was even a baseball team at Mare Island, Calif., where Hank was awaiting shipment to the Pacific. But the easy life came to an abrupt halt. “One morning,” says Hank, “this sergeant came up to me and said, ‘Why don’t you volunteer for the Raider battalion?’ I said okay. But the first thing they told me was, ‘You’ve got to swim a mile with a full pack on your back.’ I said, ‘Hell, I can’t even swim,’ and they turned me down. I told the sergeant what happened. He said, ‘You gutless s.o.b., go back down there.’ So I told them I knew how to swim. They took me.”

Bauer came down with malaria almost as soon as he hit the South Pacific. “My weight dropped from 190 Ibs. to 160 Ibs.,” he says. “I was eating atabrine tablets like candy.” Temporarily recovered (over the next four years, Bauer had 24 malarial attacks), he fought on New Georgia, was hit in the back by shrapnel on Guam. (Years later in New York, Yankee Relief Pitcher Joe Page delighted in picking small pieces of debris out of Bauer’s back.) Next came Emirau off New Guinea, then Okinawa. Sixty-four men were in Platoon Sergeant Bauer’s landing group on Okinawa; six got out alive. Hank himself was wounded again. “I saw this reflection of sunshine on something coming down. It was an artillery shell, and it hit right behind me.” A piece of shrapnel tore a jagged hole in Bauer’s left thigh. His part of the war was over —after 32 months of combat, eleven campaign ribbons, two Bronze Stars, two Purple Hearts.

“Damn, You’ve Growed.” Baseball, as far as Bauer could see, was best forgotten. Who wanted a shrapnel-pocked outfielder with malaria? He joined the pipe fitters’ union in East St. Louis, got a job as a wrecker, dismantling an old factory. His Brother Joe Bauer was tending bar at a neighborhood pub, and Hank started dropping by for a beer after work. That was where a roving baseball scout named Danny Menendez found him. “Menendez was asking Joe whatever happened to his ‘little brother, Hank,’ ” laughs Bauer, by then a strapping 190-lb. six-footer. “I tapped him on the shoulder. ‘That’s me.’ He took one look and said, ‘Damn, you’ve growed.’ ” Menendez instantly offered him a tryout with the Quincy, Ill. Gems, a Class B Yankee farm club. Terms: $175 a month, a $25 raise if he made the team, plus a $250 bonus. Bauer went home to pack.

Bauer stayed at Quincy just long enough to demonstrate that the Marines certainly do make men out of boys. His .323 average put him up with the Triple A Kansas City Blues, where he responded by hitting .3 1 3 in 1947,.305 in 1948, and batted even higher with the pretty club secretary, Charlene Friede; they were married in the fall of 1949. By then, Bauer was already the proud possessor of the most cherished emblem in baseball: a set of pinstriped Yankee flannels. Called up in the final weeks of the 1948 pennant race, he arrived like a rookie’s dream: three singles in his first three trips to the plate. The sad awakening came later. In all of September, Hank managed to collect just six more hits. At season’s end his average was .180.

Everything Hard. Around the Yankees, .180 hitters usually catch the first milk train back to the farm. Not Bauer; he was around for eleven years, nine pennants and seven world championships. He was no DiMaggio, no Ruth, no Gehrig, no Mantle. He never hit more than 26 homers in a single season, never made more than $34,500 a year, never led the league in anything—except hustle. And that made him a Yankee great.

When it came to crunching into the stadium wall after a fly ball, sliding on a raw strawberry to bulldoze a double play, or just plain terrifying the opposition, Bauer was the man. His strength was the talk of the league: in a playful scuffle one day, he popped a friend on the chest—and sent him to the hospital with a broken rib. His base running was murderous: “When Hank came down that base path,” shudders ex-Boston Shortstop Johnny Pesky, “the whole earth trembled.” His will to win was awesome. “It’s no fun playing if you don’t make somebody else unhappy,” he once said. “I do everything hard.” Even Manager Casey Stengel tipped his cap: “That fella Bauer, he had qualities of which there were four. He’d report on time. He was there for practice, and he would fight the whole season—with all that was in his body.”

Baseball men still talk about two incredible plays. In 1955 the Yankees were playing the Detroit Tigers when

Pitcher Bob Turley served up a gopher ball to the Tigers’ Harvey Kuenn. “It was right at the Yankee Stadium score-board,” says Turley, now a pitching coach with the Boston Red Sox. “Hank couldn’t quite catch up to the ball. But somehow, God only knows how, he got close enough to tip it with his bare hand —and flip it right into Mickey Mantle’s glove. Hank crashed into the Scoreboard, bounced off and trotted back to right-field.” Then there was the last game of the 1951 World Series, against the New York Giants. Bauer had put the Yankees ahead with a bases-loaded triple. But the Giants rallied in the ninth inning. Two men were on, two were out, and the score was 4-3 when the Giants sent up Sal Yvars as a pinch hitter. Yvars blooped a sinking liner into rightfield. The sensible thing would have been to play it on one hop, let the tying run score, and hold the other base runner. A misplay could mean the ball game. Rushing in, Bauer lunged, stumbled, fell to his knees, slid a good 10 ft. and stuck out his glove. Then, like a gladiator displaying the sawed-off head of his enemy, he triumphantly held the glove high in the air to show everyone the ball, nestled snugly in the pocket.

How to Drink. On or off the field, his value to the Yankees was priceless. “Bauer taught me how to dress, how to talk—and how to drink,” says Mickey Mantle, remembering how he arrived from Commerce, Okla., wearing a straw hat and carrying a $4 cardboard suitcase. “I’ll never forget the first game I pitched for the Yankees,” says Whitey Ford. “I came flying into the locker room at 1 p.m. I had overslept. Nobody said anything, but Bauer gave me that look of his. I dressed and ran. As it turned out, I won the game. Afterward, Bauer came over. ‘Whitey,’ he said, ‘if you’d lost that game, you’d been dead.’ ”

There were bad moments too. There was, for instance, the celebrated “Copacabana incident” in 1957. A Bronx delicatessen owner sued Bauer for $250,000, claiming that Hank had punched him and broken his jaw. That was silly; a Bauer punch would have broken him into little pieces. But Hank was still hauled off to a police station, photographed, fingerprinted and booked—”just like a criminal.” Partly on the strength of Yogi Berra’s now-classic testimony—”Nobody never hit nobody nohow”—a Manhattan grand jury cleared Bauer of the charge. Another sore point: the cavalier way the Yankees traded Bauer off to Kansas City in 1959 —notifying the press, but not him.

Yet that sadly depressing trade proved to be the biggest break of Bauer’s career. After a so-so 1960 season (.275 average, three homers), the aging outfielder was summoned to a meeting with Kansas City Owner Charles O. Finley and General Manager Frank Lane. “How would you like to manage one of our minor-league farm clubs?” asked Lane. Replied Bauer: “I’d like a shot at managing, but I don’t think I’m interested in going back to the minors.” Announced Finley: “Well, then, you’re the new manager of the Kansas City ball club.”

Bauer, naturally, did not get along with Finley. Nobody does. A cigar-chewing Chicago insurance man who made $10 million at his trade, Finley runs his ball club like a child playing with a Roger Maris Baseball Game. He battles constantly with sportswriters, rival owners, league officials. And he discards managers the way women throw away hats.

In 1961 Bauer’s Athletics won 72 games—their second-best showing ever. Finley still insisted that Bauer play certain men, bench others, ordered him to tell Manny Jimenez, the club’s rookie sensation (.301, eleven homers in 1962), to stop slicing singles and start swinging for the fences. Bauer ground his teeth—and followed orders. Last Jimenez’ average plummeted 20 points, and he did not hit a single home run. Bauer, gratefully, had long since left. There were still two days to go in the 1962 season when he announced that he was quitting: “When a man loses his pride, he loses everything.” Then he signed on with the Orioles as a coach under Billy Hitchcock.

Nine Black Bats. Hank Bauer may have quit the A’s—but not Kansas City. It has been his off-season home ever since he arrived in 1947, a young pipe fitter who figured himself “good enough to play Triple A ball, nothing more.” The Bauers’ neat grey-brick house in suburban Prairie Village is stocked with the usual mementos of Hank’s playing career: bronze-dipped spikes and gloves, plaques, pictures, and a rack of nine shiny black World Series bats, one for each of Hank’s years as a member of the champion Yankees. But it is also a repository for athletic equipment of a more humble nature. There are the gloves and bats that belong to Hank Bauer Jr., 13, slugging first baseman and outfielder for Malliar’s champions of the Johnson County Columbia League, and Herman Bauer, 8, winner of the 1964 “Hustle Award” on the Hot Stove League team sponsored by the Johnson County Y.M.C.A. There is the bowling gear of Daughter Bebe Bauer, 10, and the toys of Kelly Bauer, 7. Then there is Papa Bauer’s proudest possession: the gunrack, with its eight shotguns, all oiled and ready for Hank’s annual fall pheasant-hunting trip to South Dakota.

But fall, for Hank Bauer, may come a little late this year. Way back in July the Baltimore Orioles reserved 47 rooms at Philadelphia’s Warwick Hotel for the second week in October. By week’s end it looked as though they might just be picking up the keys. But it was going to be a battle all the way. The second-place Chicago White Sox split with Detroit and beat Cleveland 6-5. The third-place Yankees lost two out of three to Los Angeles, mostly because they scored only six runs in 27 innings— none at all in the nine pitched by Los Angeles Ace Dean Chance, who won his 17th. But they rebounded against Kansas City 9-7. Hank Bauer’s Orioles had all they could do to stay in first place. They took two out of three from Minnesota—one of them on a magnificent one-hitter by Miltiades Stergios Papastedgios—only to run into the red-hot Angels and get burned 7-1. Bauer took the loss in stride. “This is the way I see it,” he said. “We’ll take four out of six against Washington, Kansas City, Minnesota and Los Angeles. We’ll take two out of three from Cleveland. We’ll split four with Detroit. That gives us 99 wins —and that’s enough.”

Hey, Hank, wait a minute! But Hank Bauer had already picked up his towel, slung it over his shoulder, and was striding toward the shower.