CINCY'S SWEET ON SAUER
A Ten-Year Struggle Rewarded
"The Hank Sauer story is a sweet one. About a sweetheart of a hitter who may be the unintentional home run hitting champion of the major leagues this year.
It is also about a fellow that baseball caused to grow a few inches in stature. And affected his brother in the same way.
Likewise, it's about a fellow who is a throwback to the old school of ball players who practiced, practiced and practiced at the fielding end of the job until he first made himself into a capable first baseman and then did the same thing over again until he was a competent outfielder.
It's also about a fellow who had to toil ten years before he got a real major league chance- then made good on it with a bang.
But's let get on with the story of Henry John Sauer, the Cincinnati Reds' new star who has been rechristened 'Hammerin' Hank' by the National League's baseball writers. If his younger brother, Edward, creeps into the story here and there, that's because their diamond careers were linked together up to a certain point.
Also because to this day Hank thinks Eddie would be rated the better player of the two if things had broken properly for him. Hank believes Eddie will make the majors as a regular yet. But Eddie first must recover from a broken kneecap which has been keeping him out of the Los Angeles Pacific Coast League team's lineup for quite a spell.
The Sauer boys were born less than a year apart and grew up together in Bellevue, a north side suburb of Pittsburgh, Pa. They still like to refer to themselves as natives of Bellevue rather than of Pittsburgh. They may be big city lads, but they are just small town boys at heart.
Hammering Hank is St. Patrick's Day German, born on March 17, 1919. Brother Eddie came along Jan. 3, 1920. As boys they played with an amateur team known as the Quaill Fire Station team, sponsored by the firemen of the Quaill city fire department station in Ross Township of Allegheny, Pa., to keep the kids out of mischief. Hank played third base on the team and Eddie played second base, positions neither ever has played professionally.
Hank was the larger and better hitter of the two in their amateur days, but even then he wasn't the six-foot, three and one-half inch 200-pounder he is today. Far from it. He stood only five feet, ten inches and weighed about 165 pounds when word that he was a prospect for professional baseball reached the head men of the New York Yankee organization.
So Gene McCann, 'Iron Hat, White Tie' McCann who had been a left-handed pitcher in his day and later became one of the shrewdest scouts in the business and also a slick executive for various Yankee farm clubs, went out to Pittsburgh to look Hank over.
McCann thought Hank had the makings, so gave him a letter to Lefty Ernest Jenkins, then manager of the Yankee farm team at Butler, Pa., in the Class D Pennsylvania State Association. Butler is about thirty miles from Hank's Bellevue homestead.
Hank reported to Jenkins in 1937 equipped with a fielder's glove and a first baseman's mitt. 'I never had played first base or performed on a grass diamond in my life, but I told Jenkins I could play anywhere on the team except pitch or catch,' Hank relates. 'Butler needed a first baseman, so Jenkins assigned me to first base. It didn't take him long to learn I knew absolutely nothing about playing the bag, especially on a grass infield. He also decided I could hit enough to be worth keeping, but he needed a first sacker and so decreed that I should stick to that position and learn how to handle it.
'Learning to play first base for Butler was no cinch for me. While doing so I took a terrible beating. Thrown balls hit me on all parts of the body as I made futile grabs for them. I was black and blue almost from head to foot. Reaching out for thrown balls caused me to grow taller, too.
'Neither Jenkins nor myself was satisfied with the progress I was making and, at Lefty's suggestion, we had private morning practice in the Butler ball park day after day when the team was at home.
'I would take up my position at first base and Jenkins would hit and throw grounders and all sorts of pegs to me until, in time, it got so it was safe for me to play the bag in games- safe physically for me and safe for the team.'
The Penn State records for 1937 show that Hank wasn't the poorest fielding first sacker in the circuit that season. He was charged with fourteen errors in sixty-four games and had a fielding average of .978 while hitting .268, with thirteen of his sixty-three hits being for extra bases.
He made twenty-six errors in 100 games for Butler in 1938 and his fielding average dropped to .271, but his hitting picked up to .350. He drove in seventy-four runs, so was deemed ready for advancement and the next year, 1939, found him playing first base for Akron of the Class C Middle-Atlantic League where he really struck his stride as a first baseman and timely hitter.
Although he hit Mid-Atlantic pitching for an average of only .301 in 1939 Hammerin' Hank drove in ninety-two runs in 127 games and his 142 hits included thirty-one doubles, eight triples and thirteen homers. He made only sixteen errors and was the circuit's leading defensive first baseman with a fielding average of .988.
Erie, Pa., in that league as a farm of the Cincinnati Reds, was managed by Jocko Munch, who early decided that Sauer was a fellow who would look good in a Cincinnati uniform some day and so advised the head men of the parent club.
On Munch's say-so Warren Giles, then general manager of the Reds and now the club's president, had the Red-owned Birmingham team of the Southern Association draft Sauer in the fall of 1939.
Hank gave Birmingham two good years at bat in 1940 and 1941 and the Reds, desperate for hitters, brought him up at the end of the Southern Association season in 1941 and gave him a brief trial at first base in which he hit .303 and drove in five runs in nine games.
The Reds then had a pretty good first baseman named Frank McCormick who seemed likely to take care of that job for quite a few years to come, but they were desperate for slugging outfielders. They decided to convert Hank into a fly chaser.
Hank didn't like this a bit. 'I thought I was a capable first baseman and that I was being given the works when Manager Bill McKechnie told me early in the 1942 season he couldn't use me unless I learned to play the outfield,' Hank says. 'So I was shipped off to Syracuse and my schooling as an outfielder started there in 1942.
'Manager Jewel Ens of the Syracuse Chiefs gave me some help on getting wise to outfield play but I helped myself more by going into the outfield and practicing on making the plays outfield duty calls for.
'After taking my turn at bat in batting practice I'd run to the outfield and stay there until it again came my turn to bat.'
Hank's progress at mastering outfield play, however, was slow and it preyed on his mind to the extent that his hitting average for his eighty-two games with the Chiefs that year was a mere .213 and he drove in only forty-four runs. He fielded for a .958 average.
First baseman Eddie Shokes of the Chiefs, a master fielder, went off to the Navy before the 1943 season opened and it was back to first base for Hank most of the season. In 111 games at the initial sack he fielded .991 while, after Leslie Goldstein came up to take over the bag, he got into thirty-five contests in the outfield where he performed at a .972 gait. His batting eye returned, and in 154 games in the International League, he hit .272 and drove in seventy-five runs.
Hank wore one of Uncle Sam's Coast Guard uniforms during the 1944 baseball and also most of the 1945 campaign, playing with the Curtis Bay team. After his discharge he joined the Reds and appeared in thirty-one National League games, three at first base and twenty-eight in the outfield, hitting .293 with five homers among his thirty-four safeties. He drove in twenty runs and the Redleg bosses decided that, if he could learn to play the outfield, he could become a useful member of the team.
Whereupon Hank was shipped back to Syracuse for the 1946 season, played the outfield in 131 of the 140 championship season games in which he appeared and fielded at .979 while hitting .282 and driving in ninety runs.
Yet the powers that be decided that Hank wasn't ready for the National League so he remained at Syracuse through 1947 when he really went to town, hitting fifty homers and driving in 141 runs in 146 games in the championship season after Skipper Ens had ordered him a batch of Chick Hafey model bats and asked Hank to try them.
'I got the idea early in the season,' Ens says, 'that Hank wasn't realizing his potential at bat because he wasn't using a club to fit his size. So I hold him: 'There used to be a fellow in the National League about your size who swung a big bat and made a lot of big hits. If I order some bats made over his model will you use them?'
'Hank said he would be glad to try them. He never even asked the name of the player of whom I spoke and I never told him it was Hafey. But from the time he started swinging those forty-ounce Hafey bats he was a terror to the International League's pitchers.'
Hank's average with Syracuse last year was .336, he did okay in the outfield, and Ens recommended that the Cincinnati club take him and treat him as a regular from the start of spring training.
'He won't let you down if you tell him he has a steady job with you,' Ens told Manager Johnny Neun and Prexy Warren Giles at the winter meetings and repeated it again at the Reds' Tampa training camp in 1948.
As the final third of the National League season started Hank hadn't let his club down. He had occasional slumps during the first two-thirds of the race, but for most of it was the major league leader in home runs, turning into Aug. 18 with twenty-seven and he also was high up in runs batted in on that date with seventy-five.
As a defensive outfielder he's been an asset instead of a liability, so much so that Neun early gave up the idea of using Hank in left field only against left-handed pitching and kept him there every game as long as he was manager and Hank was physically able to play.
He hit sixteen of his first twenty-seven homers off right-handed hurlers and eleven off southpaw chuckers, his lone grand slam among the twenty-seven coming off the pitching of Vernon Bickford of the Boston Braves.
Twenty-five different hurlers pitched home run balls to Hank while he was slamming out those twenty-seven round trippers. He hit his first two off the left-handed slants of Little Vic Lombardi of the Pittsburgh Pirates. The southpaw offerings of Clyde Shoun of the Boston Braves were good for his tenth and nineteenth homers. All his others came off different pitchers, including some of the best in the league, as he became the first right-handed batter ever to hit more than twenty homers for Cincinnati in one season.
Among those whose pitching Hank hit for the circuit- and most of his round-trippers were hit with such finality that all present knew the ball was lost as soon as his wood connected with the leather- were Fritz Ostermuller, Red Munger, Ray Poat, Ted Wilks, Curt Simmons, Ken Heintzelman, Ken Trinkle, Alpha Brazle, Harry Brecheen, Larry Jansen and the sensational young Robin Roberts.
Hank has made a habit this season of breaking his hitting slumps with extra-base blows.
When he hit Brazle for a three-run homer in the first inning of the first game at Cincinnati July 4, driving over the distant center field fence, he ended a slump of fifteen straight hitless swings. That drive, coming off the first ball Brazle pitched to Hank, wiped out a three-run lead the Cardinals had taken in their half of the first inning and also knocked Brazle from the mound. He prevented Brecheen from shutting out the Reds in that day's nightcap by opening the ninth with a long homer over left, his twenty-fourth of the season, as Brecheen and the Cards won, 8-1.
But homers are unintentional with Hank, even though he hit at least one in each park except Brooklyn and St. Louis while collecting his first twenty-seven.
'My goal is to drive in as many runs as possible and thus help my team,' Hank says. 'It makes no difference to me whether I drive them in with homers or singles. I'm not swinging for the fences any more the way I did early in the season, but know that if I hit the ball squarely I'll get my share of home runs.
'Early in the season most of my hits and all of my homers came off curve balls. I guess the men on the other clubs thought they could curve me all the way back to Syracuse.
'Now I seldom see a curve unless the pitcher is wasting it. After I hit one curve out of the park I heard that pitcher's manager read the riot act to him for giving me a curve in the strike zone and threaten any other pitcher fifty dollars if he threw me a curve I could reach.
'They now try to get me out with fast ones and change of pace balls- and they often succeed. But I believe that if I keep on swinging I'll get my share of useful hits, including some homers, as well as strikeouts.'
Hank admits that he started the '48 season as a 'guess' hitter, trying to guess what sort of a pitch would be served him and timing his swing accordingly.
'I found out that didn't work in the major leagues so I then made every attempt to avoid trying to 'guess' the pitch and concentrate on following the ball with my eyes and swinging where I thought it was going to be,' he says. 'I haven't yet perfected myself at this style of batting, but believe it is the only way to be a successful hitter in the majors, so I will work as hard on it to attain perfection as I did to become a first baseman and then an outfielder.'
Hank isn't the first fellow to land in the majors with both feet after knocking around professional baseball for ten years. Among others who did it were Arthur C. (Dazzy) Vance, the old strikeout pitcher who played pro ball ten years, and had five major league trials before settling down with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1921 and proceeding to become a terror to batters for many years.
Sauer had only three brief major league trials in his ten seasons of pro ball before becoming something of a sensation with the Reds.
Talk to Hank for a while and he's sure to switch over to Brother Eddie, so let's follow Hank's lead and talk about Eddie for a while.
After Hank had played at Butler in 1937 he took Eddie along with him the following year, but the Yankee farm bosses decided Eddie was too small for professional ball and offered to send him to college while he was growing up.
'So Eddie accepted that offer, went to Elon (N.C.) College for two years and while there grew at least six inches, so much that when I next laid eyes on him I hardly knew him,' Hank says.
After Hank started playing pro ball he and Eddie went their separate ways in the national pastime; in fact they haven't played on the same team since their days with the Quaill Fire Station club except last winter when they appeared together in an All-Star game in Los Angeles.
Eddie had three shots with the Chicago Cubs as an outfielder in 1943, 1944 and 1945, his longest being one of forty-nine games in 1945 in which he was at bat ninety-three times.
He started coming great with the stick for Los Angeles this year and was leading the Pacific Coast League at driving in runs until Tommy Fine struck him on the knee with a pitched ball and broke the kneecap. If that accident doesn't ruin Eddie's confidence, Hank believes his younger brother will be back in the majors next year.
Hank married Esther Tavel of Birmingham in that city Dec. 29, 1940, and for a while they made their winter home there. In recent years they have migrated to Los Angeles and now look upon that as home.
But 'home' to Hank is left field, up there at the plate and Bellevue in Ross Township of Allegheny County, Pa. He likes Cincinnati real well, too. And, naturally, Cincinnati likes him."
-Tom Swope (Baseball Digest, October 1948)
SAUER'S TURN TO THE RIGHT
When Own Mates Ganged Up On Him In Left, Big Cub Switched, Now Eyes Triple Crown
"The final straw that turned Hank Sauer in the 'right' direction was threshed out in spring training last year.
When his own teammates almost tilted the diamond by overshifting so decidedly to the left every time he came to bat in the first intrasquad game, the heavy-handed Chicago slugger was convinced.
With one little Sauer to feed and another on the way, he had to set up a counter-pull to straighten out the defense if he ever was to swing on a star in the major leagues.
Of course, Sauer had tried to hit to right field before to confound the bunched-up defense blocking the hit gangway to left field. That was at Syracuse in 1947.
A fugitive from the New York Yankee farm chain, where he began his professional career as a first baseman with Butler in the Class D Pennsylvania State Association in 1937, Hammering Henry sought to punch the ball into the abandoned field behind the lonely first baseman guarding the ninety-foot line between first and second. He popped up feebly.
His skipper at Syracuse that 1947 season, the late Jewel Ens, flared an angry red stop sign on that practice immediately. 'Don't ever try that again!' warned Ens.
'It was a big park,' noted Sauer, recalling his greatest single and home run season in his sixteen years in the game. 'However, everything I hit was a line drive.'
Sauer was belting almost everything the pitchers could get near the plate, too. That 1947 season he was acclaimed the Minor League Player of the Year after swatting a mighty .336 average based on 182 hits in 542 turns at bat, including fifty homers, twenty-eight doubles and one triple.
In addition to scoring 130 runs, he paced the International League with 141 runs driven in.
That spectacular record earned him a fourth trial with the Cincinnati Reds, who had drafted him from Birmingham, Ala., after a 1941 season in which he turned in a .330 batting average that included nineteen homers, twenty doubles and 114 runs driven home.
There was a big harvest of rookies that season [1948]. The Philadelphia Phillies introduced outfielder Richie Ashburn to the big time, it was Granny Hamner's first complete season with the Phils and Whitey Lockman had his first full year with the New York Giants. But Sauer was the brightest bloom of the spring. The big slugger started off the 1948 season with a succession of bangs as if he was asking with his mighty bat:
'Why don't they have this kind of pitching in the minors?'
The husky right-handed slugger exploded like an uncapped oil gusher, clouting ten hits including four homers and driving in eight runs in his first twenty-four turns at bat for the Reds.
Then the pitchers decided they'd seen enough and Sauer, blocked by the shift to left field which became more pronounced with each season, slumped to a final mark of .260 with ninety-seven runs batted in at the end of the year, although he set a 'club' mark by bashing thirty-five homers.
By the next June he was being booed as a 'never-was' by all Cincinnati.
'He went up as a pinch hitter and struck out miserably,' recalled Dave Grote, National League Service Bureau manager who then was on the front-office staff of the Reds. 'And when he trudged slowly back to the dugout, a pathetic figure of dejection with the fans booing as only they can hoot in baseball-conscious Cincinnati, everybody knew he was through as a Red.'
The next day Sauer and Frankie Baumholtz were traded to the Cubs in an even swap for Harry 'Peanuts' Lowrey and Harry (The Hat) Walker.
Sauer believes that day, June 15, 1949, was his greatest in baseball, ranking his arrival in Chicago even ahead of the afternoons he belted three successive home runs off Philadelphia's Curt Simmons, Aug. 28, 1950, and June 11, 1952.
Sauer didn't have much to recommend him to Chicago fans upon his arrival, dragging an anemic .237 batting mark for forty-two games with the Reds. However, the change from the Cincinnati Rhineland to the Cubs' vineland set him off on another spree during which he blasted ten homers, driving in twenty-four runs and building up a .395 batting mark in the next seventeen tilts with the Bruins.
That didn't last either as Sauer slipped back to end the 1949 campaign with a .275 batting average, although he clouted thirty-one homers and drove in ninety-nine runs for seventh and eighth place clubs.
The next year he was on the bench again after a torrid start. Then in late August he cut loose to slug seven home runs and drive seventeen runs home in five days and finally topped the century mark with 103 runs batted across for the full season which he closed with thirty-two homers and a .274 average.
It was the same old Sauer story in 1951. Going into the August heat, 'Hammerless' Henry was hitting a meager .238 and had collected only two hits in thirty-nine successive times at bat, fanning eleven times in that ten-game period.
Once more he bounced up to finish at .263 with thirty homers and eighty-nine runs driven in.
Obviously something had to be done if Sauer was to realize the most from his hitting talents.
Even as his own teammates were pulling the switch to left field against him, his manager, Phil Cavarretta, was advising Sauer constantly to try a few chip shots to right.
'I told him that all spring,' recounted Cavarretta. 'It will make a great ball player out of him. It'll make them respect him. The way they play him it's silly for him not to hit to right field.
'Of course,' continued 'Philibuck,' qualifying his directions, 'there's a time and place for it. When you're going for the downs, when a run means a ball game, then he has to swing for the fence.'
This spring, Sauer, who turned the leaf on his thirty-third birthday March 17, found the answer to his periodic slumps.
'Sure, I've tried to hit to right field in past seasons. But I found I was hitting down on the ball. You see what I mean? I'd hit pop-ups. But I watched Bob Ramazzotti and others hit to right field and studied their form. Bob's the best right-handed right field hitter on our club. He just takes a natural swing and times it late. That's what I'm doing now.'
The results have been spectacular. He's the Hammering Henry the Reds hoped they had in 1947. What is more, he maintained an improving pace for almost a full third of the season to take over the league lead in three departments. For the first forty-nine Cub games, Sauer hit safely sixty-six times for a .347 batting mark. In addition he was far ahead of the pack in the majors with fifty-four runs batted in and fourteen homers.
How important his turn to the right has been is attested by the figures. Of those first sixty-six hits exactly one-sixth were on the right side of second.
Subtract those eleven hits, including all three of his triples and five of his doubles, and Sauer would have been just an unimpressive .289 hitter.
Determined to claim the penalty from the opposition which has been robbing him of base hits for four seasons, Sauer called his long shots this spring.
'I'm a slow starter,' he observed during training. 'But if I ever really get going early, I ought to have a great year. And if they shift to left on me as they have been, I'll hit to right, too.
'Ordinarily, that ball looks like a little green pea coming into the plate. But this spring it looked as big as a grapefruit like it did when I had that good season with Syracuse in 1947.'
Slamming Sauer has worked too long and too hard to let a brilliant start be wasted away by another slump. The six-foot-four, 199-pound Pennsylvanian (who now resides in California) believes he'll stay up in the class of champions all season.
'The biggest thing is that I'm able to hit to right field now. Eventually, of course, I'll make them scatter the defense around and I'll be able to get more through the holes in left, too. Another important factor is that we have some hitters on the team. That makes a fellow bear down, but in addition, the pitchers can't let up on somebody else just to concentrate on me.
'Gee,' he appended. 'I wish I were twenty-five now.'
The fact is, according to Wid Matthews, Cubs' talent director, 'That Sauer has become a finished ball player. He's the star everybody thought he'd be.'
But actually it's taken Hank sixteen seasons to acquire the patina of a polished player.
The first big turning point came in the spring of 1947 after he had registered a .282 mark for Syracuse with twenty-one home runs in 1946. Before that, he had spent the final month of the 1945 campaign with the Reds hitting .293, after serving almost two years in the Coast Guard playing part of the time with the Curtis Bay Base team.
'I think now that the first turning point in my advance to the majors was in spring training of 1947,' Sauer observed. 'I had been swinging a 35-35 (35 inches long, 35 ounces) bat. Ens figured the reason I wasn't hitting well was that I was swinging around too fast ahead of the ball.
' 'I tell you what,' he told me,' Sauer reminisced, ' 'I'll order six bats for you and you order six of your own bats and you try mine until you're convinced I'm wrong.' '
Ens upped the weight five ounces to forty and the difference was noticeable immediately, especially to the opposition. 'I never used the six I ordered,' laughs Sauer, reflectively. 'They may still be lying in a bin in the Syracuse clubhouse.'
In 986 games, Sauer had hit only 107 home runs before the switch. Since then, that heavier standard has- conversely enough- carried him to the top of the pole in the big top. As noted before, he belted fifty homers in 1947 and never hit less than thirty in his first four campaigns in the majors.
Hank is still swinging that forty-ounce sledge that produced 135 round trip blows in 569 National League tilts prior to this year. 'I'll keep swinging it as long as I can,' he promised. 'But if the heat gets me, I'll cut down to thirty-seven when I have to.'
In addition to his .611 slugging average, which is 125 points over his distance mark for 1951, there's another statistic that makes the Sauer figure seem sweet to the Cubs.
In the past he's been a notoriously poor hitter on the road. But as in every other phase, this is a different year for Hank.
True, he's maintaining his record as a player who produces his best work at home. In his first thirty games in the broad and 'beautiful' Wrigley Field acres, he hit at a .391 clip. ('I don't know why I hit better at Wrigley Field,' he allowed.)
But on foreign fields Sauer turned in a respectable .280 mark for nineteen games. During that period abroad he belted six homers, including the third grand slam of his major league career Opening Day in the 'dead air' of Cincinnati's left field, and drove home twenty-one runs.
That's a long way from the days when he was playing semipro ball around his native Pittsburgh. 'We didn't have baseball in Bellevue High School and I was playing sandlot ball when Paul Krichell suggested I take a tryout with the Yankees,' Sauer recalled.
One of four sons, Henry John, who is of German extraction, had only played baseball in pick-up games during high school. As a prep he had starred in football as an end and back and in basketball as a forward, his interest in sports whetted by his father, who had some experience as a wrestler.
'I started as a shortstop,' relates Sauer. 'And I was a good leather man, too! But when I reported to Butler I told them I could play any position except pitch or catch.
'They needed a first baseman and I was their man. Bonus? I did not know what a bonus was. They started me at $100 a month.'
When he reported to Birmingham in 1940, after two years with Butler and a third with Arkon, they handed Hank a fielder's glove and told him, 'You're our left fielder.' The raw-boned flyhawk with the deceptive ground-eating stride of a giraffe has developed his fielding to the point where he ranks with the best in the business in left. This year he committed only one bobble in the first forty-nine games.
One of the few players who sit around for an hour after a game discussing the finer points of play, Sauer hasn't found his baseball life all beer and skittles.
Yet 'Abe'- as he is familiarly tagged by his teammates- finally has discovered the way to keep the opposing defense honest by hitting to right occasionally.
' 'I've often said that 'As Sauer, so go the Cubs,' ' observed Jim Gallagher, Cubs' business manager who swung the deal for Hank.
The inspiration for the entire club, Sauer could lead the league in hitting, home runs and runs batted in this year. That's pretty fair stickwork for a guy the Giants and Pirates turned down at 'bargain' prices two seasons ago.
Even Stan Musial never combined those three laurels into one season.
And Hank, who modestly asserts: 'I have no goals, I just want to help the Cubs,' will do even better if the opposition continues to shift its defense to the left and pitch him outside.
That's the 'inside' story of his long climb up among the stars."
-Neil R. Gazel, Baseball Digest, August 1952
"Since Hank has been in the big leagues, he's averaged one homer in every 16.8 times at bat. He ranked sixth in the National League in home runs in 1951 and smacked 35 in 1948, 31 in 1949 and 32 in 1950. After three trials with the Reds, he made the grade in 1948 and was traded to the Cubs the next year.
In 1947, playing for Syracuse, Hank was named the Minor League Player of the Year, hitting 50 homers and batting .336."
-1952 Topps No. 35
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