Hank Bauer

While playing baseball and basketball at East St. Louis Central Catholic High School, Bauer suffered permanent damage to his nose, which was caused by an errant elbow from an opponent. Upon graduation in 1941, he was repairing furnaces in a beer-bottling plant when his brother Herman, a minor league player in the Chicago White Sox system, was able to get him a tryout that resulted in a contract with Oshkosh of the Class D Wisconsin State League.

Batting .300 at Quincy and with the team's top minor league unit, the Kansas City Blues, Bauer eventually made his debut with the Yankees in September 1948.

Bauer moved to the Kansas City area Prairie Village, Kansas in 1949 after playing with the Blues of 1947 and 1948. While there, he met and later married Charlene Friede, the club's office secretary. She died in July 1999.

In 1961, the year Maris broke Babe Ruth's single-season home run record, Bauer, at 38 years of age, was coming to the end of the line in his playing career. On June 19, Bauer was named as the playing-manager of the Athletics, and he retired as a player one month later. In Bauer's first stint as the Athletics' manager, through the end of the 1962 season, the Athletics won 107 games and lost 157 (0.405), and his teams finished ninth in the ten-team American League twice.

After his firing at the close of the 1962 campaign, Bauer spent the 1963 season as first-base coach of the Baltimore Orioles. He was promoted to manager on November 19, 1963, succeeding Billy Hitchcock who had been dismissed 51 days earlier. Baltimore contended aggressively for the 1964 American League pennant, finishing third, and then—bolstered by the acquisition of future Hall of Fame outfielder Frank Robinson—its first AL pennant and World Series championship in 1966. However, the ballclub, hampered by an injury to Robinson and major off-years by a number of regulars and pitchers, finished in the second division in 1967. When the Orioles entered the 1968 All-Star break in third place and 10½ games behind the eventual World Series Champion Detroit Tigers, Bauer was dismissed on July 10 in favor of first-base coach Earl Weaver.

Bauer died in his home on February 9, 2007, at the age of 84 from lung cancer.