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"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