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