Word: bauer
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...