The height of summer, 1954: Joe Bauman opens his filling station and tire stores well before the first blush of morning in supernal Roswell, New Mexico.
The amiable Bauman, a certified luminary in the town of 26,000, visits his businesses early to avoid snarls with his second job. After a lengthy stretch in lower minor league ball, Bauman, 32, is in his first hitch with his hometown club, the fittingly titled Roswell Rockets. The 6-foot 4-inch, 235-pound slugger exchanges his Texaco Red Star work attire for a Rockets uniform.
Light years from ‘big city’ baseball, Roswell was a minor league outpost by any standard. The Rockets entry in the Class C Longhorn League served as de facto action for the locals. Fair Park Field, next to US 285, proved the perfect playground for Bauman’s swing dynamics.
Toby Smith, author of Bush League Boys: The Postwar Legends of Baseball in the Southwest (2014), wrote: “Joe would get up in the batter’s box, and he would loop the balls up in the air…They’d really sail, right down the line. Long shots, he golfed the ball essentially from what I remember and from what people tell me.”
Josh Jackson of MiLB.com penned a piece about Bauman, saying the technique served him well at home: “The league — with windy, high-elevation ballparks — was a good one for power hitters, and the Rockets’ Fair Park Field corner in right was 329 feet from home plate.”
According to the Joe Baumann Stadium website: “Roswell was a small town, and Bauman was the biggest local attraction since the 1947 crash and suspected alien landing. After each home run, fans would push dollar bills through the fence, and the game would have to be stopped for a few minutes to collect all the money.”
Home run hitters across the Southwest welcomed their new source of income (fence payments) and former Roswell Journal writer Toby Smith: “[Bauman] went home many nights with several hundred dollars in cash (during 1954).”
The aforementioned income correlated with a postwar economic boon—or the “Golden Age of Capitalism,” as one sobriquet has it. Bolstered by unprecedented growth, a majority of Americans thrived in the decade after the Second World War. Unpinned from their collective sacrifices and wartime struggles, the national economy flourished. Prior to the war, the United States GNP hovered slightly above $100 billion; it soared to $310 billion by 1955. At the end of the 1950s, the median American family had 30% more purchasing power than at the beginning.
So people had the money to push through chain link fences. They had time to unwind with a game. So did a working class man like Bauman, who had the time to perfect his craft.
More than a dozen years prior to his majestic 1954 season, Bauman is a 19 year-old rookie out of his element. He hits three homers in 205 at bats and hits a combined .215 for two Brooklyn Dodgers affiliates in 1941.
The war begins, and nudges Bauman away from pro baseball, or at least his pursuit of it. He exits the game that season, working in Wichita, Kansas, at Beech Aircraft Aviation before joining the Navy in 1942. Bauman is stationed in Norman, Oklahoma, at the Naval Air Station and plays for the amateur club there. Certain of his opportunity to advance after military service, Bauman continues to be a student of the game, culling information from a handful of ex major leaguers on the base’s ball club. He’s eager, waiting. He’ll ascend to the majors…someday.
Bauman’s fecund experience plays out during the 1946 and 1947 seasons. The then-24-year-old contracts with the National League’s Boston Braves, and crafts a reputation across the southwest for his brand of dynamic, towering longballs. Toiling in the West Texas-New Mexico circuit for the Amarillo Gold Sox, he smashes 86 homers, drives in 260 RBI, and hits .301 and .350 respectively in consecutive campaigns.
Bauman and his legions of supporters are certain: this lefthanded slugger will climb the organizational ladder swiftly. The Braves’ management is not so convinced.
As a ‘reward’ for his eye-popping numbers, Bauman is given a one game stint with the Milwaukee Brewers in the American Association (AAA). It’s the highest level of play he’ll achieve in his career. Within days, he is shipped off to Connecticut to play for the Hartford Chiefs of the Eastern League (A). His demotion feels instant, insulting the slugger.
His time in New England does not go well. The ‘enlightened’ big city press call him out frequently. Bill Lee, sports editor of the Hartford Courant, writes: “Last year in the West Texas-New Mexico League, the big first baseman batted .350 and hit 38 home runs. He knocked in 127 runs. What has Bauman done in the Eastern League? His batting average is .265. He has hit only six home runs and knocked in 32. He may have compiled a half-way mark for the number of runners left stranded.”
Following tense contract negotiations with the Braves organization, Bauman says: “I can make more money selling 27-inch shoelaces on the streets of Oklahoma City.”
Boston concurs. A sequel seemed inevitable to Bauman, valuable time away from the professional diamond. Some years later, he tells Lee Banks of Sports Illustrated: “I made several mistakes, especially spending three years of my prime in semipro ball, which might have kept him from ever stepping to the plate in the big leagues. I still have that question in my mind: Could I have done it or not?”
Bauman ships off to Oklahoma again, this time Elk City, for a $500 a month gig with a semipro ballclub. Ex-majors pitcher Rip Collins, who fashioned a lifetime record of 108-82 with four American League teams, skippers the team. Bauman gives Collins his word on his commitment, but his honor is soon tested when the Braves offer him a roster spot on the Atlanta Crackers of the Class AA Southern Association. Bauman refuses. For the next three seasons he takes his Elk City Elks team to the semipro National Championships.
Before the 1952 season kicks off, Bauman gets a new opportunity. “This doctor, I can’t recall his name now, he wanted me to play for Artesia in the Longhorn League,” Bauman told reporters years later. “Hell, I didn’t know they had baseball out there. Anyhow, this doctor wanted to buy my contract from Boston, and he did. I don’t know what he got, maybe a dollar bill or a jockstrap. But he came back and we made the deal on the driveway of my service station. So, I came out to Artesia and played two years for the Drillers.”
Bauman hammers away in Artesia, clubbing 103 and collecting 298 RBI for the Drillers, who, despite their crisp winning percentage, draw an average of 600 fans per game.
After the 1953 season (.372 BA), Bauman purchases his own release from Artesia for $250 and moves up Route 285 to Roswell. Limited business options in Artesia prompted change. “I was ready to move on,” Bauman said. “I always did like Roswell. Liked this part of the country after I got acquainted.” Bauman stated to sportswriters that Roswell, with “its western skies and tumbleweed-racing rabbits,” appealed to his senses.
According to Bob Rives, author of Baseball in Wichita (2004), “Although Joe was a self-professed slow starter, the home runs soon were pouring in 1954. And he wasn’t simply hitting baseballs. He was punishing them. No one ever measured the distance, but folklore soon began describing 500-foot arcs. In September even the Associated Press was moved to report, ‘Joe Bauman drove in five runs, three on a tremendous home run that sailed into the adjacent rodeo grounds and disrupted proceedings there.’”
But no one had ever hit 70 home runs, and with 14 games remaining in the season, Bauman needs ten simply to tie Joe Hauser of the 1933 Minneapolis Millers (AA), as well as his former Amarillo teammate, Bob Crues. The outlook is cloudy until August 31, 1954, when Bauman hits four in one game.
“The pressure really mounted then. There were four or five photographers shooting every time I went to the plate. They’d be snapping while I was hitting. It’s bound to affect you and it did me,” Bauman told Bart Ripp of the Albuquerque Journal. Life Magazine and Sports Illustrated as well as countless local outlets are on hand to memorialize every swing.
Ironically, Bauman blasts his record 70th homer in Artesia in the opening game of a twin-bill. According to Rives, “Jose Gallardo, a 19-year-old Cuban rookie, tried an 86 mph fastball with the count 2-2 on Joe’s first trip to the plate. Bauman drove it over the 349-foot mark. Joe said fans gave him $500 through the backstop. Floyd Economindes, the Artesia catcher, remembers it as $800.”
Bauman slams two more home runs in the nightcap, one off John Goodell and No. 72 off Frank Galardo, uncle of Jose.
“I just look at that year as what it was. Nothing earthshattering,” Bauman recalled some years later. “I didn’t get any real money out of it. Just a wonderful feeling. I sit around some nights, have a beer and get to thinking about the funny little things that happened. The home runs. The people. It seems like a long time ago. It reminds me how slow the world runs.”
For 49 years, his record stood at the top of the heap, until Barry Bonds eclipsed it with 73 during MLB’s Steroid Era.
“One night he made $254 from a home run, which was twice what most ballplayers made in a month,” said Jim Waldrip, a former teammate and close friend. “And for every home run Joe hit, a packing plant in Roswell would give him a cured ham. That always kept some of the other players in food. He was such a modest person. He didn't toot his own horn.”