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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.