In the wide-eyed summer of 1954, that time of Willie Mays and Rocky Marciano and Brown v. Board of Education and the miracle of color television—there was a larger-than-life ballplayer in the Pecos River Valley of New Mexico named Joe Bauman. Nobody called him that. It was an era of nicknames, and they called him Boomin’ Bauman and Sluggin’ Joe, Jarring Joe and Joltin’ Joe and Jumbo Joe, the Man Mountain, the Mammoth Man, the Southpaw Swatter, the Roswell Rocketeer, and the Economy-Sized First Sacker.
The nickname that stuck was Ponderous Joe Bauman.
Ponderous? Well, that hardly seems complimentary. Joe didn’t seem to mind. He was a laid-back sort. By day he worked at the Texaco Station he owned along Route 55, and by night he hit long home runs in the Longhorn League. They played wild baseball in the Longhorn, teams like the Sweetwater Spudders and Carlsbad Potashers and Roswell Rockets. The altitude was high, the air was light, and games routinely ended in scores like 21–17 or 18–10. It was a league for sluggers, for big men who hit long home runs while cowboys and farmers whooped and hollered and stuffed dollar bills through the chicken wire for those who hit the longest ones.
Ponderous Joe Bauman usually hit the longest home runs.
Joe Bauman grew up in Welch, Oklahoma, about 13 miles northeast of Mickey Mantle’s hometown of Commerce, Oklahoma. Joe grew up with Dale Mitchell, who would play in two World Series for Cleveland. Baseball was in the Oklahoma marrow.
Bauman was a 6-foot-4, 250-pound man by the time he was in high school. He was a natural righty, but his father, Joe Sr., taught him to hit and throw left-handed. Joe signed a baseball contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers at 19, went to play for their affiliate in Newport, Arkansas, and then in 1941, he went to war.
After being discharged from the Navy, Bauman married his high school sweetheart, Dorothy, and went to Amarillo to play baseball. He was not dreamy-eyed about the game. It was a way to make a living. He hit 48 home runs. He used the fans’ tip money to buy himself a used Buick.
In 1949, the Braves offered him a contract so embarrassingly low that Bauman told them: “I can make more money selling 27-inch shoelaces in Oklahoma City.” He quit professional baseball, bought a gas station back home, and picked up a few extra bucks hitting long home runs in semipro leagues around town.
Then in 1952, a doctor—Bauman never even remembered his name—showed up at Joe’s filling station and said he’d heard about Bauman’s hitting power. He offered Joe a chance to play for a baseball team called the Drillers in Artesia, New Mexico. Bauman declined until the doctor offered the princely sum of $600 a month with the promise that he could get a lot more from people shoving money through the chain-link fence. Bauman decided to go.
And it’s fair to say that Artesia, New Mexico—heck, all of New Mexico—had never seen anyone quite like Ponderous Joe Bauman. He was a seasoned baseball veteran in a league filled with local kids just hoping to get noticed. That first year, Bauman hit .375 with a league-record 50 home runs.
He liked it so much—and made so much fence money—that he stuck around Artesia and hit 53 more home runs the next year. He made enough to buy himself a new car.
Then Bauman bought out his contract and moved forty miles west to Roswell to play for the Roswell Rockets. He was 32 years old. Bauman bought a Texaco station in Roswell and prepared to take dead aim at Roswell’s inviting right-field fence, painted white, which stood a mere 324 feet from home plate.
Ponderous Joe Bauman began hitting home runs right away. On April 22, he crushed two homers against Carlsbad. Three days later, he mashed two more against Odessa. In all, he hit 10 home runs in Roswell’s first 11 games.
Teams used extreme measures to stop him. The Big Springs’ manager, Pepper Martin,* put all eight defenders he had on the right side of the field, five of them in the outfield. For one day, that seemed to put Bauman on pause.
* This is not the Pepper Martin who was an All-Star for the Gas House Gang Cardinals in the 1930s.
The next day, though, Bauman hit two more home runs.
He had twenty home runs barely a month into the season, a ridiculous pace. And each of the home runs had an epic quality. On May 23,in Odessa, Texas, there was a rodeo in progress on the grounds outside the stadium. Bauman hit the ball 500 feet into that rodeo. His teammate Tom Brookshier—who was a pro football star and would later become the announcing voice of pro football for CBS—would later say that the rodeo was halted, and all the cowboys took off their hats and waved them around and hollered for Joe.
He cracked seven homers in eight games in early June. On Independence Day he hit his 36th homer, and people began talking about the impossible: Joe Bauman might hit 70 home runs in a single season! As far as anybody knew, that had never happened before, not in the major leagues and not in the minors, either.† The minor league record of 69 was set by a guy named Joe Hauser in 1933 and tied by Bob Crues inAmarillo in ’48.
† In truth, it surely had happened before—in the Negro Leagues. It is believed that Josh Gibson hit 84 home runs in a single season.
Bauman did not want to talk about hitting 70 home runs.
“Good God!” he yelped when a reporter asked him about it. But then he hit four more in a series against Big Spring, another one against Sweetwater, a couple more against Carlsbad, and he was up to 45 home runs with almost half the season left.
“I’m not hitting for the fences any more than usual,” Bauman insisted. “In fact, I’m playing just about as I usually do. No changes in swing. No changes in stance. Just no change.”
“So why are you hitting so many homers?” he was asked.
“I’ve been pretty lucky,” he said.
Teams tried everything. Bauman did not like hitting against left-handed pitchers, so teams tried to pitch left-handers. Unfortunately, there was not that much left-handed pitching in the Longhorn, so managers would bring in lefty outfielders and lefty first basemen to pitch. In Sweetwater, the story goes, the manager Albert McCarty called out to the crowd to ask if anyone in the stands threw left-handed.
Also, Ponderous Joe almost never saw a fastball. Instead, he saw curveballs and changeups and knuckleballs and spitballs and mud balls and slop balls and a wide variety of unidentifiable pitches. Those pitches were rarely over the plate. Bauman walked 110 times in his first 110 games.
“I haven’t seen anything but junk,” he complained in early August after four straight games without a homer.
As the season went on, it did seem that the anti-Bauman strategies were beginning to wear him down. He did hit his 54th homer on August 10th—breaking the league home run record for the third year in a row—but now there were only twenty-seven games left. And the pressure, the attention, the constant cameras pointing at him, the unrealistic expectations from fans that he would hit a home run every time up—all of it was weighing on him.
What could he do? He kept swinging. By the end of August, he had 64 home runs.
He needed to hit six home runs in seven games to break the record. Joe Bauman told his friends that the chase was over.
Now we come to the day, August 31, 1954. Roswell was playing Sweetwater, far and away the worst team in the Longhorn. In front of a huge Roswell crowd, he led off the second inning with a home run. That was No. 65. He hit another one in the fifth. Two home runs! People were shoving dollars bills through the fence so fast he could hardly grab them all.
In the sixth inning, he came up with two runners on. He homered again.
And in the seventh inning, one more time, he came up with two runners on. And yes, he homered for the fourth time. By best estimates, he collected more than $500 in fence money that game. And he had 68 home runs with six games left to play. The record suddenly seemed assured.
Bauman wasn’t so sure. For the first time since he was young, he felt nervous playing baseball. The next day, he hit a ferocious line drive off the top of the fence; it missed being a home run by inches. He uncharacteristically cursed his bad fortune even as the crowd pushed more than $600 through the fence.
The next night, the last home game of the season, he hit his 69th home run, tying the minor league record. “It felt good,” he told the swarm of reporters that closed in on him after the game. When they asked him if he might try, once again, to climb his way up to the big leagues, he said: “Nah. I’ve got my filling station here. I’ll probably play the rest of my ball right here in Roswell.”
Roswell traveled to Big Spring, Texas, where Bauman’s old nemesis Pepper Martin ordered his pitchers to not throw any strikes. They obliged, and the Big Spring crowd—“a mess of pants and big arms,” Tom Brookshier would call them—cheered lustily as Bauman swung at terrible pitches in the hopes of connecting with just one of them. He left Big Spring stuck on 69 homers.
That left two games for Bauman—a doubleheader in Artesia. Bauman was sick with worry, but before the game, he got the best news he could imagine. Artesia’s manager Jimmy Adair walked over and put an arm on Bauman’s shoulder.
“Joe,” he said, “we’re going to try to get you out today. We’re not going to walk you.”
That was all Joe ever wanted. The Artesia starter was a 22-year-old kid named José Gallardo—barely 5-foot-9, skinny as a rail. Best anyone can tell, that was the only year Gallardo played professional baseball.
Joe Bauman was the first batter of the game. Gallardo—as promised—did not walk him. Instead, he threw a fastball right down the middle of the plate. It was the sort of pitch Joe Bauman saw in his happiest dreams.
Some papers called it a 365-foot home run. Others insisted it went more than 400 feet. Either way, it went far enough. That was home run No. 70, the all-time minor league record. Ponderous Joe Bauman ran happily around the bases, feeling light and alive.
In the second game of the doubleheader, with all the pressure gone, Joe Bauman hit two more home runs—one of them off José Gallardo’s uncle Frank. That gave him 72 for the season. A fan chased down the last baseball and proudly displayed it on his mantel. Years later, the fan would donate the ball to the Roswell Museum, which built a Joe Bauman exhibition. When someone asked Bauman if he ever went to the museum to see the ball he hit, he shrugged and said, “Naw, what wouldI do that for?”
Ponderous Joe Bauman was mildly famous for a time. His feat was recorded across the country in hundreds of papers. Some offers came in for him to change teams. But he was true to his word: He and Dorothy stayed in Roswell for the rest of his life. He played ball fora couple more years—hitting 63 more home runs—then sold his Texaco station and worked for a Budweiser beer distributorship.
In 2001, Barry Bonds broke Mark McGwire’s single-season home run record when he hit his 71st home run. Two days later, he hit his 73rd home run to break Bauman’s overall record. A few people calledJoe Bauman to ask what he thought.
“It didn’t bother me or anything,” Bauman said. “I just thought, There goes my record.”
From Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments by Joe Posnanski, published by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2023 by Joseph Posnanski.
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Joe Posnanski has been named the best sportswriter in America by five different organizations, including the Sports Media Hall of Fame and the Associated Press Sports Editors. He has also won two Sports Emmy Awards. He is the No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of six books, and he co-hosts the PosCast with television writer and creator Michael Schur.
