Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (53 page)

The incident did not hurt the team’s performance. They were nine and half games out of first place on August 19. By September 10, the Mets were in first place—to stay. The team finished with a hundred wins (fifteen more than Hodges had predicted), won the divisional series, and then defeated the Baltimore Orioles in the World Series. The achievement of the “Miracle Mets” did not go unnoticed in the press. “In baseball’s first 100 years,” said one sportswriter, “there was nothing to compare with the spectacular rise of the Mets.”

Hodges continued to press for victories in subsequent seasons, but there were no more miracles. The Mets did far better in 1970 and 1971—with identical records of eighty-three wins against seventy-nine losses and a third-place finish—than they had ever done under the team’s previous managers. Still, Hodges had hopes that 1972 would be better. But then major-league players threatened to strike and spring training was suspended. Joan returned to Brooklyn to be with her family for Easter Sunday while her husband stayed behind.

Gil was a devoted husband who, as Joan recalled, “sent me flowers for everything and anything.” On that Sunday, he ordered flowers for Joan, attended church, and then went to play golf with three of his coaches—Joe Pignatano, Eddie Yost, and Rube Walker—at a course in West Palm Beach.

When they finished, Hodges began to walk to his room at the nearby Ramada Inn. Pignatano turned to Gil and asked, “What time should we meet for dinner?” “Let’s say seven thirty,” came the response. Those were the last words ever spoken by the Mets manager. He stumbled backward and slumped to the ground. Pignatano and Walker hurried to his side while Yost ran into the hotel to call an ambulance. They rushed him to the nearby hospital, but it was all to no avail. Gil Hodges—just a couple days shy of his forty-eighth birthday—was pronounced dead about forty-five minutes after he had fallen to the ground, the victim of another heart attack.

Back in Brooklyn, Joan was with her family at her mother’s house for the Easter festivities and did not see the bulletins being flashed across the nation’s television screens. And then, without explanation, she saw Anthony Terranova, Gil’s good friend, come into her mother’s house. “And I thought,” she remembered, “this is very odd. It’s Easter Sunday. He should be with his family.” But she could see that he had been crying, and she assumed that something had happened to his brother, who, like Gil, had experienced a previous heart attack. “Terry,” she implored him, “what’s the matter?” He struggled to say something for a few seconds and then blurted out, “It’s Gil.” “Okay,” said Joan, trying to stay calm. “Was he hurt?” Terry could not respond to that simple question. But the answer became clear when tears started to stream down his face. “Is he dead?” Joan asked. “Just nod your head.” Terry nodded his head. And, as he did so, her mother’s neighbors, having seen the television bulletins or heard the news on the radio, began to stream into the house. Joan stayed there for a long time, but when she finally went home later that evening, she found the flowers that her husband had ordered that morning.

 

Joe Collins played only sparingly in 1957, and the Yankees announced in March 1958 that they had sold his contract to the Philadelphia Phillies. Within an hour, Collins made his own announcement: he was retiring. “I made up my mind some time ago,” he told the press, “that, if I had to leave New York, I would quit.” Part of the reason was to stay with his family in Union, New Jersey. The other reason was a shoulder injury. “I couldn’t play every day,” he later told Peter Golenbock, “which is what I would have to do down there. I would make an ass of myself.”

Collins’ decision to retire was made that much easier because he already had an alternative to baseball: a job as a public relations executive with People’s Express, a Newark trucking company. He had been working with the company in the off-season, and now he would turn the part-time job into a full-time one. The job was tailored to Collins’ personality. He was, after all, a gregarious guy with an ever-present smile. Meeting people and getting them to sign contracts could be his forte. And, beyond that, success would involve a lot of time on the golf course—and he loved playing golf. Unfortunately, Joe soon learned that there could be too much of a good thing.

About a year after he retired, the newly minted businessman ran into Gil McDougald, who was still with the Yankees. Collins’ former teammate was shocked by what he saw. No longer fit and trim, Collins had gained considerable weight and looked unhealthy (which could not have been helped by Collins’ habit of smoking one or two packs of Marlboros every day). The former first baseman told McDougald that he had played 265 rounds of golf over the past year (which included the lunches and dinners and drinks that go with entertaining clients). McDougald subsequently had lunch with Phil Dameo, the People’s Express president. “You’re killing my buddy,” said McDougald. “Get him working in an area where he learns your business.” The message apparently had some impact—Collins reduced his time on the golf course and ultimately spent thirty years with People’s Express.

In the meantime, Collins continued to enjoy life with Peggy and their five children—which included three boys and two girls. There were dinners, vacations, and, above all, sports and games with the boys, because Joe Collins’ departure from the ballfield did not mean an abandonment of his competitive spirit. “He was a ballbuster,” remembered Joe Jr., his eldest son. “If you were playing golf with him or anything like that, he didn’t want to lose. So if you were getting close to him, he started needling you.” (Joe Jr. remembered that his father would not talk with him for two weeks after he beat him in arm wrestling.)

There was no sign of any physical ailment when Joe turned on the television set in his living room and sat down to watch the Yankee game on the evening of August 29, 1989. The team was not faring well and would finish the season in fourth place. Still, they were his team, and he would always be interested in their fate. Joe’s younger son Jim came home around ten o’clock, talked with his father briefly, and then went to sleep. Around two o’clock in the morning, Jim awoke and heard the television set. He wandered downstairs and found his sixty-six-year-old father slumped in his chair—the victim of a massive heart attack. (Many of Joe’s former teammates would later quip at his funeral that watching the Yankees falter had killed him.)

 

Hank Bauer’s performance continued to slip after 1956, and he was included in the 1959 trade that sent several Yankees to the Kansas City Athletics in exchange for Roger Maris. Hank was not surprised by the trade. “At the age of thirty-seven,” he later said, “I was finished.” Nor was he unhappy with being in Kansas City. In all those years with the Yankees, Charlene had remained in Kansas City with their children (three boys and a girl) while Hank shared the apartment with Andy Carey in New York. (Still, Hank had managed to make an indelible impression on his children during those years. “He was pretty tough,” remembered Hank Jr. “And as the oldest, I got the brunt of his marine-like approach”—which included Bauer’s habit of dropping a quarter on his son’s bed to see if it would bounce—thus indicating that it was made properly.

Hank played sporadically for the Athletics for the next two seasons and was prepared to retire in 1961 when Athletics’ owner Charles O. Finley asked him at the beginning of the season whether he would be interested in continuing to play and simultaneously manage the team. And so, on June 20, Hank Bauer—now sporting a marine crew cut instead of the long dark hair that had been his trademark—became the A’s new manager.

The news was well received in the press. (“This is a great break for a great guy,” Arthur Daley wrote in
The New York Times
.) For his part, Hank was nervous about being both a player and a manager. And so—after getting a single in a game against the Tigers on July 21—Hank retired as a player to a standing ovation.

The Athletics finished in last place in 1961, but the prospects seemed better in 1962 (and, in fact, the team would finish with seventy-two wins—the second-best performance in the club’s history). But Hank had a sense that Finley was making plans to replace him after the 1962 season ended. The Athletics’ owner had hired Eddie Lopat to be the pitching coach—a decision usually made by the manager—and Hank could not help but feel that his former Yankee teammate was nothing more than a manager-in-waiting. And so, when Hank saw speculation of the managerial change in the press, he called Finley. “What is it with this article?” he asked. Finley was circumspect, saying only, “I can’t answer you at this time.”

That was enough of an answer for Bauer. Two days before the season ended, he announced that he was quitting after the 1962 season. “When a man loses his pride,” the ex-marine explained, “he loses everything.”

Three weeks after leaving the Athletics, Hank’s friend Lee MacPhail, now the Baltimore Orioles’ GM, made arrangements for him to become an Orioles coach for the 1963 season. And when the season ended with a disappointing fourth-place finish, MacPhail asked Hank to manage the team in 1964. Ironically, one of the new manager’s first decisions was to platoon his players. “I hated platooning when I was a ballplayer,” he told one sportswriter. “Now that I’m a manager, I know that it’s the only way to operate.”

It may have made the difference. The Orioles vied for first place throughout the season and finished in third place with ninety-seven wins—but only one game behind the second-place White Sox and two games behind the first-place Yankees. The team may not have won the pennant, but Hank Bauer earned the respect of the players and the press—and was selected by
The Sporting News
as the American League Manager of the Year.

The Orioles finished third again in 1965 with ninety-four wins and then coasted to a first-place finish in 1966. As the season drew to a close,
The New York Times
commented that “Bauer has done a smashing managerial job this year,” and
The Sporting News
again selected Hank as the American League’s Manager of the Year.

However much he tried, Bauer could not duplicate the success of those first three years in 1967. The team tied for a sixth-place finish, and Hank was left to think about the next season. “I’m gonna be tougher,” he told one sportswriter, and, by the middle of July, the club was in second place with a 43-37 record. But the club management was not willing to be patient. And so, during the All-Star break in July, Hank was in his ranch house in Prairie Village when Orioles general manager Harry Dalton called to say that he was at the Kansas City airport and wanted to come by to talk with the Orioles manager. “I hung up,” Bauer later recalled, “and told my wife I was getting fired.”

Hank stayed in Prairie Village for the rest of the season, hunting and fishing and waiting for the phone to ring. And ring it did. Charles O. Finley had moved the Athletics to Oakland and was looking for a new manager to breathe fire into his team and bring home a division title. “I’m sticking my neck out,” Finley told the press, “and I don’t mean to put Hank on the spot, but I’m predicting we’ll win our division title next year.”

Hank had access to many talented players (including a twenty-three-year-old Reggie Jackson) and was able to develop a winning record after 149 games (with eighty wins and only sixty-nine losses) that surpassed the record mounted by any other Athletics’ manager since 1955. But Hank could not produce that division title. And that was the end of Bauer’s managerial tenure with the A’s.

Hank once again retreated to Prairie Village to wait for the phone to ring. But this time there was no offer from a big-league club. He spent a couple of years managing the Mets’ farm team in Tidewater, Virginia (and earning
The Sporting News
’ selection as the Minor League Manager of the Year in 1972), before deciding to return to Kansas for good.

The transition to a life without baseball had been made that much easier by Hank’s purchase of a liquor store in Prairie Village. (“I made more money in the liquor store,” he later explained, “than I ever did in baseball.”) And then Mickey Mantle called with an offer for him to be one of the coaches at the fantasy baseball camp that he and Whitey Ford were creating.

When Mantle died in 1995, his sons tried to run the camp, but camp management was not their strong suit. Hank told the Mantle boys that he and Moose Skowron would be happy to take over camp administration (under a new name, “Heroes in Pinstripes”). And so, year after year, Hank would spend countless hours helping plan camp activities.

However much he enjoyed the fantasy camps, they could not insulate him or his family from the problems of advanced age. In 1993, Hank, then seventy-one, was diagnosed with throat cancer. An operation was performed that required the removal of his epiglottis, a small component of the throat that facilitates the swallowing of food, and left Hank with a new voice. (“My biggest recollection of my father,” said his daughter Bea, “was his voice,” and, remembering that one periodical had compared it to “a rusty wrench,” she said the operation made it “rustier.”)

Charlene was not as fortunate. She was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1999 and was gone within a few months.

Hank moved to a ranch condominium in Shawnee Mission near Prairie Village and continued to attend card shows and other events to promote the fantasy camp. One trip took him to Philadelphia in the summer of 2006. He now carried a small bottle of oxygen to assist his breathing, but that proved to be inadequate when he disembarked from the plane. He was placed back on the plane and taken immediately to the hospital when he arrived in Kansas City. The doctors could not determine the cause of Hank’s ailment until the following December: advanced lung cancer that would be resistant to chemotherapy, radiation, or any other treatment.

Hank spent most of the next two months in a recliner chair, surrounded by his four children and their families (all of whom lived in the Kansas City area), enjoying sporting events on television and receiving visits from Moose Skowron and other friends. But then the pain increased and breathing became more difficult. On Friday, February 9, 2007, Hank Bauer, five months shy of his eighty-fifth birthday, died at home while surrounded by members of his family.