One Season in the Sun. Joe Schuster

      ONE

       Three Innings and Gone

      In 1964, when Dave Bakenhaster was nineteen years old, his life seemed like a story from a movie.

      When he was eight, he became an orphan. Both his mother and father died within six months of each other. Bakenhaster went to live with one of his older brothers. He dealt with his grief by devoting himself to baseball. The boy promised his family that he would one day be good enough at the sport people called “America’s pastime” to play in the major leagues. By high school, he was one of the best teenage pitchers in the country. Over four years, he won forty games and lost only four. In his last two seasons, he struck out 461 batters in just 214 innings, a phenomenal number in itself. He threw nine no-hit games, and in one, struck out every batter he faced.

      With such success, it is not surprising that when he graduated, almost every major league team joined a bidding war to convince him to pitch for them. The highest bidder was St. Louis. The Cardinals paid him roughly $40,000 just to sign a contract.

      Although the amount seems small compared with the million-dollar-plus bonuses that talented ballplayers can earn now on signing, $40,000 was a large sum in the early 1960s. It was almost eight times what an average American worker earned for an entire year. You could buy a new two-bedroom home in a St. Louis suburb for $8,500 or a luxury three-bedroom home on a golf course for $20,000. A new Dodge sedan carried a price sticker of $1,800. Gasoline cost less than thirty cents a gallon.

      Bakenhaster’s signing was so big that newspapers across the county published stories about the deal.

      The next year, not even legally old enough to vote or drink, he reached the goal he’d set not long after his parents died: Dave Bakenhaster was in the major leagues. On a hot and muggy late June afternoon in St. Louis, with more than 20,000 fans watching, he made his debut against the San Francisco Giants.

      The Giants’ team was powerful. Five of its members—Willie Mays, Orlando Cepeda, Duke Snider, Gaylord Perry and Juan Marichal—would one day end up in baseball’s Hall of Fame, the museum that honors the best baseball players in the game’s history. By the time Bakenhaster took the mound in the eighth inning, the Giants were already leading 10–1.

      The first batter he faced hit a double, but Bakenhaster got the next two men to ground out. The fourth hitter was Willie Mays, one of the greatest baseball players in the history of the game. Bakenhaster threw a pitch that Mays hit on the ground to the shortstop. That should have been the last out of the inning, but the shortstop made an error and Mays was safe. The other runner scored. The Giants followed with two more singles, tallying two more runs, before Bakenaster finally retired them. He allowed one more run in the ninth inning.

      A month later against the Pittsburgh Pirates, Bakenhaster appeared in his second game. He pitched an inning in another lop-sided loss and allowed two runs and three hits.

      The next day, the Hollywood story ended.

      The Cardinals sent him back to the minor leagues. Perhaps because he was disappointed that he had little chance in the major leagues, he pitched poorly for the rest of the year. He won only one game, lost six, and allowed more than five runs every time he was on the mound.

      He did not play well in the next minor league season, but 1966, when he was a twenty-year-old in the class A Florida State League, he pitched as the professional scouts had expected he would. He finished the year with more victories than all but one other pitcher in the league and was among the league leaders in most other pitching categories.

      It was not enough to help him get back to the major leagues. The Cardinals had other pitchers they were more interested in bringing along, like future Hall of Fame member Steve Carlton and future All Star Jerry Reuss.

      Bakenhaster spent three more years in the minor leagues and then decided to retire as a player. The Cardinals offered him a job as a coach for the next year and he accepted. Less than a week after he agreed, however, he told the team he had changed his mind, citing “personal reasons.”

      Dave Bakenhaster walked away from the game, at the young age of twenty-five, and went to work in a warehouse near the Ohio home where he’d grown up.