Hank Bauer

October 4, 1958. Yankee Stadium, Game 3 of the World Series. The New York Yankees were in trouble.

They'd lost the first two games in Milwaukee. Warren Spahn had shut them out in Game 2, Lew Burdette had dominated in Game 1, and the Braves had run the Series back to New York with a 2-0 lead and all the momentum. The Yankees needed somebody to stop the bleeding.

In the fifth inning, Bauer singled in two runs. He'd always done that -- just gotten on base, just made something happen. Then in the seventh he drove a two-run homer 400 feet into the left-field stands. All four of the Yankees' runs in a 4-0 win. The Series was now 2-1, and the Yankees were alive.

Bauer hit in that game. He'd been hitting in World Series games for three years straight.

The Marine in Right Field

Henry Albert Bauer was born July 31, 1922, in East St. Louis, Illinois, the fourth of eight children in a German immigrant family. His father worked long shifts and the neighborhood was the kind that produced men who kept their heads down and never complained about anything -- at least not out loud. East St. Louis was a steel town, a furnace town, a place where the options were narrow and the work was hard.

Bauer played baseball and basketball at East St. Louis Central Catholic High School. In one basketball game, an opponent's elbow broke his nose. It never healed properly, giving him the lived-in face that Tommy Lasorda would later describe as able to "hold two days of rain." After graduation in 1941, he got a job repairing furnaces at a beer-bottling plant. His professional baseball career had barely started -- he'd signed with Oshkosh of the Class-D Wisconsin State League -- when Pearl Harbor happened.

He enlisted in the Marines in January 1942.

What followed was four years in the Pacific theater: Guadalcanal, Guam, and Okinawa (where an artillery shell peppered his left thigh and back with shrapnel, some of which he'd carry the rest of his life). He contracted malaria twenty-four separate times. He came home with two Bronze Stars, two Purple Hearts, and a Commendation Medal. He was twenty-three years old.

The Yankees scout Danny Menendez signed him as a free agent. Bauer hit .323 at Quincy in the Three-I League in 1946, .313 with the Kansas City Blues in 1947, and .305 with Kansas City in 1948. The Yankees called him up in September. He was twenty-six, with a face that looked older, and bits of Japanese metal still lodged in his back.

Five Straight

The Yankees of the early 1950s were one of the most dominant teams in baseball history, and Hank Bauer was their right fielder. Not their best player -- not with Mickey Mantle emerging in 1951 and Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford already at their peaks -- but their enforcer. The player who made clear, through body language and box-score competence, that this organization didn't tolerate anything less than full effort.

His catchphrase was blunt: "Don't mess with money!" He meant the World Series share. The Yankees reached the Fall Classic nine times in his twelve seasons, which meant October money was real money, and slacking your way through September was stealing from your teammates. Whitey Ford remembered Bauer pushing him against a clubhouse wall once and delivering the warning directly. Ford didn't need a second reminder.

From 1949 through 1953, the Yankees won five straight World Series. That had never been done before and hasn't been done since. Bauer played in all five -- 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953 -- against Brooklyn three times (1949, 1952, 1953), the Phillies once, and the Giants once. He wasn't the hero of any single Series. He was the baseline, the constant, the man who showed up and did his job every October the way he'd shown up and done harder jobs in the Pacific.

He made three consecutive AL All-Star teams from 1952 to 1954. His peak season came in 1952: .293, 17 home runs, 74 RBI -- good enough to finish in the AL MVP conversation. In 1956, he posted career highs in power (26 HR, 84 RBI) while his average dipped to .241 -- a combination that tells you he was aging into a different kind of player, the kind who could still hurt you but on his own timetable.

The Whodunit at the Copa

On May 15, 1957, Billy Martin turned twenty-nine. To celebrate, a group of Yankees went to the Copacabana nightclub in midtown Manhattan: Martin and his wife, Mickey Mantle and Merlyn, Whitey Ford and Joan, Yogi Berra and Carmen, Johnny Kucks and his wife, and Hank Bauer and Charlene. They were there to see Sammy Davis Jr. perform.

A group of heavily-drunk bowlers from the Bronx had also come in that evening. The bowlers got loud. They started heckling Davis, including slurs directed at him from across the room. Bauer, who'd climbed on top of the Yankees' dugout the previous season to search the stands for a fan shouting racial slurs at Elston Howard (teammates talked about that for years), wasn't the kind of man who let that pass. Words were exchanged. Then a deli owner from the Bronx ended up with a concussion and a broken jaw on the nightclub floor.

A grand jury voted "no bill." No indictment, no charges, no proof of who threw the punch. The Yankees fined each player $1,000, and Manager Casey Stengel kept his opinions to himself. The Yankees shipped Billy Martin to the Kansas City Athletics within the month (George Weiss had wanted him gone for years anyway; the Copa gave him the pretext). Bauer stayed in New York. The deli owner's jaw healed. Nobody ever said, definitively, who'd done it.

October, Again

In 1956, the Yankees won the World Series over the Brooklyn Dodgers in seven games. Bauer hit in every game -- seven for seven, a perfect run through the Fall Classic. The Dodgers weren't going to stop him.

In 1957, the Yankees played the Milwaukee Braves, and lost -- the Braves won four games to three, with Lew Burdette pitching brilliantly. Bauer hit in every one of those seven games too. Fourteen straight World Series games with a hit, the streak running through two consecutive Fall Classics, a win and a loss, against two different teams. Nobody had ever done that.

Then 1958 came around. The Yankees faced Milwaukee again. The Braves won the first two. Bauer's Game 3 performance gave the Yankees life. He hit in the first three games of that Series, extending the streak to seventeen. In Game 4, his streak ended -- but the Yankees kept winning. New York rallied from the 3-1 deficit to win the Series four games to three, completing one of the great comebacks in postseason history.

Bauer's final line for the 1958 World Series: .323 average, 4 home runs, 8 RBI, 10 hits, 6 runs scored in 7 games. Bob Turley won the Series MVP. By most measures, the award should've gone to the right fielder. His 17-game World Series hitting streak still stands as the longest in history.

Traded for His Replacement

On December 11, 1959, the Yankees made one of the most consequential trades in franchise history. They sent Bauer, Don Larsen, Norm Siebern, and Marv Throneberry to the Kansas City Athletics and received Joe DeMaestri, Kent Hadley, and Roger Maris.

Bauer was thirty-seven. He'd hit .238 in 1959, and his time had run its course. Maris was twenty-five, had slugged 28 home runs between Cleveland and Kansas City in 1958, and an appendix operation had limited him to 16 in an injury-shortened 1959 -- but the Yankees had seen enough. In his first Yankee season, Maris hit 39 home runs and won the AL MVP. In his second season, he hit 61 and broke Babe Ruth's record.

Hank Bauer was literally traded for his own replacement -- and the replacement turned out to be one of the most famous seasons in the history of the sport. Baseball works like that sometimes.

He played two more seasons in Kansas City, retired in 1961, and moved into managing. In 1966, Bauer managed the Baltimore Orioles to a World Series title -- a four-game sweep of the Los Angeles Dodgers, the same franchise he'd faced and beaten in 1956. He became one of the rare men to win a World Series as both player and manager.

Seven in October

The number on Hank Bauer's career is seven -- the number of World Series rings he earned in a Yankees uniform, spread across a twelve-year span from 1949 to 1958. He appeared in 53 World Series games, batted .245 in those games with 7 home runs and 24 RBI, and hit safely in 17 consecutive Fall Classic contests across three different Series.

There's no Hall of Fame plaque for him in Cooperstown. His career numbers (.277 batting average, 164 home runs, 703 RBI) don't make a compelling case on their own, not when you're measuring him against the legends of his era. But the October record is what it is -- a man who delivered, consistently, in the moments that mattered most. It's not nothing. It's actually quite a lot.

He died on February 9, 2007, in Lenexa, Kansas. He was eighty-four years old. He'd spent sixty-five of those years -- from the moment he first put on a baseball uniform in Oshkosh, through the Pacific and back, through twelve Yankee seasons and the 1958 comeback and the trade and the 1966 championship in Baltimore -- trying to win.

He mostly did.