MINOR MIRACLE

The wind was blowing out that Sunday afternoon in 1954, and the pitcher was Jose Gallardo, a Cuban who threw a fastball on a 1-and-2 count.

It was met by a 35-inch, 34-ounce Vern Stephens-model bat, swung left-handed and with an uppercut. The stick moved a little faster through the strike zone since Joe Bauman had seen the doctor back in Roswell, N.M., a few days before and gotten some help in dealing with the dog days of August and early September.

The ball rocketed over the right-field fence at Artesia, N.M., through the thinner air of 3,600 feet of elevation in the foothills of the southern Rocky Mountains.

He had the record . . . finally.

The record.

More than hits, runs batted in, shutouts, no-hitters and stolen bases, it’s the baseball record: Home runs in a season. Joe Bauman had just hit his 70th, and before the day was over, Nos. 71 and 72. True, they were in the minor leagues, but nobody has hit more anywhere they play baseball for money.

He still gets calls whenever anybody gets close to Roger Maris’ 61 homers, reporters looking for something different. Something other than Maris losing his hair and rooming with Mickey Mantle and struggling with media coverage and Tracy Stallard’s pitch and all that went on in 1961.

He obliges.

“I was out cutting the grass,” Bauman, now 76, says. “I was looking for a reason to take a break. Thanks for calling and giving me the reason.”

That’s why Dorothy had been a bit reluctant to call her husband to the phone.

They still live in Roswell, 44 years after they had come to the city for him to play ball, lured by a signing bonus of $1,000 and a $600-a-month salary to play for the Rockets in the Class-C Longhorn League. The bonus helped him buy the Texaco station that kept him there, and he returned the investment in only 138 games:

* With a .400 batting average.

* 224 RBIs.

* A .916 slugging percentage.

* 199 hits.

* 188 runs.

But who cares about that? Joe Bauman hit 72 homers.

He had been a rebel from Oklahoma City, an oil-patch kid who signed a professional contract after finishing high school in 1941 and found himself in Newport, Ark., in the Northeast Arkansas League, rooming with eventual Hall of Famer George Kell in an antebellum mansion for $2.50 a week.

And then he went to war, only World War II for Bauman was in Norman, Okla., 18 miles from home, where the Navy had him play baseball for four years.

He returned to professional baseball, then quit after he had played a year in Hartford, Conn., in the Class-A Eastern League.

“The Boston Braves had bought my contract, and they were going to cut my salary by a third,” Bauman said. “I told them I could make more money selling 24-inch black shoestrings on a corner in Oklahoma City than they were going to pay me.”

So he went back to Elk City, Okla., and played semipro baseball, making more money than he could in Hartford.

“You’ve got to remember, I played ball to make a living,” he says. “That was before Curt Flood came along and challenged the slavery part of baseball. You played for what they would pay you, wherever they told you to play.

“And back then, they didn’t make all that much money in the major leagues, and for me to play for less money just to try to get to the major leagues would have just been ego. And you can’t spend ego at the grocery store.”

Instead, he opened a service station in Oklahoma and was happy there, playing semipro ball nights and weekends.

“One day a doctor came by the station and said he had a ballclub in Artesia, New Mexico, “ Bauman said. “Said he wanted me to play at Artesia. I got a map and looked where it was, and I told him, ‘I don’t know. I have a business here and all,’ but he signed me and I went there.”

He hit 50 home runs in his first season, in 1952, and 53 the next before gaining his release to play 40 miles up the road in Roswell because Artesia was just too small.

In Roswell, he found a home. And a place to set the record.

“We all knew that the record was 69 home runs, by Joe Hauser in Minneapolis in 1933,” Bauman said.

Bauman hit balls far distances in bandbox ballparks with trailing winds against bad pitching in the Longhorn League, which had four teams in New Mexico and four in Texas.

Home runs were greeted by a little bonus, and sometimes a big one. Fans would shove dollar bills and sometimes even $5 bills through the chicken-wire backstops, and a tour of the bases was followed by a tour of the grandstand.

“I never got less than about $40 for a home run,” Bauman says. “Sometimes a lot more.”

Homer Glover had a packing house, and a home run would earn you a ham in Roswell, where Bauman got so tired of ham salad in 1954, he quit picking up the pork.

“I was never sick, and I was never injured,” he says of that season. “And the ball just looked like a cantaloupe all year long, and you stayed confident. Probably Ruth and Maris felt the same thing.”

And when he grew weary in the summer heat, he got a little pick-me-up.

“It got so the bat was heavy, so I went to a doctor for fatigue,” Bauman says. “He gave me a B-12 shot. I remember I got the shot and then it felt like I could taste liver. The next day, though, I felt pretty good.”

It’s why he can’t understand the fuss over Mark McGwire and his taking androstenedione, an over-the-counter muscle enhancer.

“I thought about [the B-12 injections] the other day when I read about what they’re saying he did,” says Bauman, who identifies with McGwire. Bauman, like McGwire a first baseman, was a 6-foot-4 1/2, 245-pounder, slow of foot, fair of glove, gentle of nature.

“They’re making a mountain out of a molehill.”

With seven games left in 1954, Bauman was six home runs from breaking Hauser’s record, a longshot, and he pondered the six rainouts that wouldn’t be made up.

With six games left in 1954, he was two home runs from breaking Hauser’s record after hitting four homers and a double and driving in 10 runs against Sweetwater on Aug. 31.

Only 524 were there in Roswell to see it, but word got out and photographers from national magazines and wire services were soon following him around, making a nuisance of themselves, clicking cameras from close to home plate during games as he cocked his bat to swing.

“There was pressure,” he says. “Nothing like they [McGwire and Sammy Sosa] feel now, but there was definitely pressure, particularly after I hit the four homers against Sweetwater.”

Anybody who has been in a homer chase can recognize the pressure. Dick Stuart, later with the Boston Red Sox and Pittsburgh Pirates, hit 66 home runs in 1956 in Lincoln, Neb. Late in that season, the winning run was scored while he was in the on-deck circle, and after the runner picked himself up and dusted himself off, Stuart slugged him in the mouth for costing him an at-bat.

No. 69 came for Bauman at Roswell against Midland, a drive over the right-field fence against left-handed junkballer Ralph Atkinson. He had tied the record, but it had been tied before, by Bob Crues, in 1948, with Amarillo, in the West Texas-New Mexico League. That league was so lacking in pitching that year that a pitcher hit 15 home runs and 35 of 64 regulars hit .300 or better.

Bauman went on the road to Big Springs and hit no homers in two games. The pressure grew.

And then it was the last day of the season, a Sunday doubleheader, Sept. 5, 1954, Games No. 137 and 138.

The Roswell Rockets drove 40 miles down the road to Artesia, which had brought him to New Mexico two years before.

Manager Pat Stasey moved him to the leadoff spot to try to get him as many at-bats as possible. Stasey needn’t have bothered.

In the first inning. Bauman fouled off two pitches before hitting one he liked 365 feet, over the right-field fence for No. 70.

First, the grand tour around the bases. Then the grand tour of the grandstands.

“I think I got about $800,” Bauman says. “There was so much, Artesia players were helping me collect it.”

The pressure was off and he hit Nos. 71 and 72 in the second game of the doubleheader.

He rode back to Roswell, had a couple of beers and at 9 the next morning, he was back in the Texaco station, pumping gas.

“The home runs kinda helped business, you know?” Bauman says.

He was 32 and had done all he wanted to do in baseball. “I had gotten it out of my system, but the city fathers came to me and asked me to play again the next year,” Bauman says. “I told them I didn’t want to, but they signed me and I played.”

He told them to sign a team and pay him what was left in the budget. He ended up at $600 a month again, but without a bonus. Bauman had taken a pay cut after hitting 72 homers.

“I don’t remember what I did that year,” he says. “I think I hit about 40.”

A month into the 1956 season, he quit, finishing his career with 337 home runs, all hit far from the major leagues.

He sold the Texaco station in 1967, when they closed nearby Walker Air Force Base, and went to work for the Schlitz beer distributor until retiring in 1984 to a tidy house that needed some grass cut.

No regrets about missing out on the big leagues. Well, not many. A season wouldn’t have moved him. Ten might have.

The park is still there, but it’s a chain link affair now. The bat that hit No. 72 was given to Hillerich & Bradsby, which made the Louisville Slugger. He got nothing for it. After all, it hadn’t cost him anything.

And who knows where the ball is now?

What remains is a scrapbook and some memories. And the occasional phone call, whenever anybody gets close to Maris’ 61.

Nobody has gotten close to Bauman’s 72.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

60 and Up

Players who hit at least 60 home runs in one professional season: *--*

Joe Bauman 72 Roswell, N.M. (Longhorn League) 1954 Joe Hauser 69 Minneapolis (Amer. Assn.) 1933 Bob Crues 69 Amarillo, Texas (West Texas-N.M League) 1948 Dick Stuart 66 Lincoln, Neb. (Western League) 1956 Bob Lennon 64 Nashville (Southern Assn) 1954 Joe Hauser 63 Baltimore (International League) 1930 Moose Clabaugh 62 Tyler, Texas (East Texas League) 1926 Ken Guettler 62 Shreveport, La. (Texas League) 1956 Roger Maris 61 New York (American League) 1961 Tony Lazzeri 60 Salt Lake City (Pacific Coast League) 1925 Forest Kennedy 60 Plainview, Texas (Southwest League) 1956 Babe Ruth 60 New York (American League) 1927

*--*

Source: National Assn.