Before the amateur draft was introduced in the 1960s, leveling the playing field a bit in terms of acquiring the best talent, it wasn’t unusual for really good players to be trapped in the Yankees’ minor league system for years. New York was always good, and always had a great pipeline of talent waiting, and there was little recourse for players that were simply never promoted to the big leagues.
The same could not be said for the Reds’ minor league system in the 1940s. Cincinnati typically had fewer than half as many farm teams as the Yankees, and the major league roster wasn’t stacked with talent annually. After winning the 1940 World Series, the Reds’ average season for the rest of that decade saw them win just 74 games and finish fifth. It wasn’t a team loaded with stars, particularly after World War II, so it would be unusual to see a minor league star languishing in the bus leagues when the big league club needed all the talent they could get.
And yet Hank Sauer found himself trapped in the minors for both the Yankees and the Reds until he was thirty-one years old.
Sauer lied about his age when he signed with the Yankees in 1937. He had graduated high school in 1935, at the height of the Great Depression, and went to work for the Civilian Conservation Corps while playing amateur ball on the weekends. When a scout for the Yankees found him in 1937, he thought his actual age might scare them off, so he told them he was eighteen. It was lie he kept up until after he retired.
He spent his first two seasons as a pro in Butler, Pennsylvania, and he hit pretty well both years. That earned him a promotion to Akron of the Middle Atlantic League in 1939, where he batted .301 and hit 13 homers. The problem was that the Yankees had sixteen minor league affiliates at the time, and Akron was one of three Class C teams in their system. Three Class B teams, one Class A team, and two Class AA teams were stacked with players ahead of him, not to mention the Yankees themselves. Sauer was buried behind literally dozens of more advanced outfielders.
Then he got lucky. The Reds selected him in the minor league draft and assigned him to their A-1 affiliate in Birmingham, Alabama. Only the Double A Indianapolis Indians were a higher affiliate in the Reds’ system, so Sauer went, overnight, from being somewhere near the twenty-fifth outfielder in the Yankees’ system to being a top-10 outfielder in the system of the defending National League champs.
He quickly proved himself to be a good selection. Sauer batted .292 for Birmingham, and was second on the team in homers and third in triples. After improving to .330 and 19 homers the next year, he was promoted to the Reds and played his first major league game on September 9, 1941. He hit an RBI double off the Braves’ Al Javery in his first major league at-bat, and hit another one later in the game. In nine games he batted .303 with an OPS+ of 110, setting himself up for a shot at the Reds’ Opening Day roster in 1942.
Then two things happened that sidetracked Sauer’s plans.
The first, of course, was the attack on Pearl Harbor, as Japanese naval and air forces attacked the U.S. Pacific Fleet and pulled the United States into World War II. Like most ballplayers during the war years, this would eventually interrupt Sauer’s career.
Three months later, in his first major league Spring Training camp, Sauer lost a fly ball in the sun, prompting Reds’ manager Bill McKechnie to demote him to Double A Syracuse instead of keeping him on the roster.
It was a silly, self-defeating move by McKechnie, as the Reds didn’t have anyone on the roster who would manage to play even 100 games at any outfield position that year. Max Marshall, Gee Walker, and Eric Tipton played more than anyone else, but they collectively batted just .240 with 15 combined homers. It was obvious they could have used Sauer’s bat in the lineup, as they finished sixth in the eight-team National League in runs, but he remained in Syracuse for almost the entire season. He was briefly on the Reds’ roster in May and early June, and posted an OPS+ of 152 in 22 plate appearances, but that wasn’t enough to convince McKechnie to keep him.
The situation was even worse in 1943. The same trio of outfielders started in Cincinnati, and Sauer continued to hit well in Syracuse, but McKechnie remained the Reds’ manager and never called him up. After the season, Sauer entered the Coast Guard and missed all of the 1944 season and most of 1945.
Upon returning, he got regular playing time for the Reds in September, and, as usual, hit well in the opportunities he was given. He batted .293 with 5 homers in 31 games, good for a 112 OPS+, but those numbers weren’t good enough to convince McKechnie to give him a big league job in 1946. Sauer spent the entire season in Syracuse again, belting 21 homers and driving in 90 runs while the Reds floundered to a sixth-place finish and McKechnie found himself forced to resign before the season ended, his preferred defense-first style no longer getting results.
That opened the door for Sauer to win a job in Cincinnati’s outfield in 1947, but new manager Johnny Neun wasn’t a fan of his style. Sauer was an extreme pull hitter, and Neun preferred hitters who could spray the ball to all fields. Even a remarkable season at Syracuse, in which was named the league’s MVP for hitting 50 homers and driving in 141 runs, couldn’t earn him a promotion.
Finally, in 1948, Neun relented and gave Sauer the starting left field job for the Reds. He was now thirty-one years old and the team thought he was twenty-nine, but he responded by blasting 35 home runs and driving in 97 runs. The team still finished dead last in runs, and Neun was fired in August, but Sauer was finally in the big leagues to stay.
He would not, however, stay in Cincinnati. After a slow start in 1949, the Reds traded Sauer and Frank Baumholtz to the Cubs in an exchange of outfielders. Chicago sent Peanuts Lowery and Harry Walker back to the Reds, and installed Sauer as their everyday left fielder. He responded by blasting 20 homers in Wrigley Field that year, finishing with 31 overall to go along with 99 RBI.
The Cubs weren’t very good in those years, but Sauer was. Despite being thirty-three in 1950, he made his first All-Star game and drove in 100 runs for the first time. He blasted 30 more homers in 1951. He had his best season in 1952, leading the league with 37 homers and 121 RBI, and winning the MVP. Two years later, at thirty-seven years old, he set a career-high with 41 homers.
All told, once he finally got a permanent major league job at the age of thirty-one, Sauer averaged 32 homers and 96 RBI for the next seven years, and became a beloved figure in Chicago. Articles were written labeling him The Mayor of Wrigley Field, and a “Sauer’s Section” of fans in left field would throw him pouches of his favorite chewing tobacco.
He finished his career with the Cardinals and then the Giants, including a 26-homer year in the Giants’ final season in New York when he was forty years old. Of his 288 career home runs, 281 were hit after he turned thirty-one. Only five non-Hall of Famers (excluding Albert Pujols, who isn’t eligible yet) have ever hit more after that age. Of them, only Andrés Galarraga wasn’t implicated by PED usage.
That doesn’t mean Hank Sauer belongs in Cooperstown. He doesn’t.
But it does mean he had a remarkable career for a guy who couldn’t get out of two different farm systems until he was thirty-one years old.
Bill McKechnie was a Hall of Fame manager, but he favored defense to an extreme degree. It usually improved his teams at first, but over time they tended to flounder because they didn't have enough punch in the lineup. Hank Sauer got caught in that trap, because he was not a good defensive outfielder, but obviously a good enough hitter to make up for that, to most. The Reds would still not have been a good team in 1946 and 1947 with Sauer in the lineup, but they would have been better.
Great article thanks!