Word: bauers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
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...
...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...
...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...