Negro League Baseball Discussion Forum: Former Players – Information Exchange: Joe baumann
By becky conant (Beck77) on Tuesday, June 15, 1999 – 07:43 pm:
i am looking for information on joe baumann. all that i have found so far is that he played for the roswell rockets/longhorn league/class c. if you can help please email me at [email protected].
By Forum Administrator (Admin) on Tuesday, June 15, 1999 – 08:22 pm:
Exactly what type of information are you looking for relating to Joe Baumann?
By becky conant (Beck77) on Wednesday, June 16, 1999 – 12:45 pm:
i read in the general discussion/x-files section that baumann was white. is this true? also, were there many white players in the negro leagues? is baumann still alive? any suggestions on where to find more info about him? thanks for that article you emailed!
By Forum Administrator (Admin) on Wednesday, June 16, 1999 – 01:07 pm:
Joe Baumann was white. He played for a predominantly white minor league team, the Roswell Rockets, in the Longhorn League (as well as for several other minor league clubs during the late 1940s and 1950s). It was with the Rockets that he established the professional baseball single-season homerun record.
This X-Files thing seems to have served to do little more than confuse a whole lot of people. There was never a Negro League baseball team based in Roswell, New Mexico. In point of fact, there were VERY few black people in Roswell, New Mexico during the 1930s and 1940s. I know this because my family originally came from Roswell.The minority population of Roswell was composed almost entirely of Mexican Americans.
The X-Files used Roswell as the site of its story in order to have the benefit of Roswell's wide notoriety for supposed alien visits during the 1950s. The team, Roswell Grays, was entirely fictional. The central character seems to have been VERY, VERY loosely based on Josh Gibson (a noted homerun hitter), but there are few other parallels that can be drawn between the story and any real events in the history of the Negro Leagues.
By Forum Administrator (Admin) on Wednesday, June 16, 1999 – 01:46 pm:
One part of the question I forgot to address related to whether or not there were white players on Negro League teams. There were no white players on Negro League teams until the mid-1950s. By that time, however, these teams (though predominantly black) were not really "Negro League" teams in the true sense of the term. They were the remnants of what once had been Negro League teams, but by that time were of lower minor league caliber.
The team owners began signing any player they could find that appeared to have any promise. The owners, who were financially crippled by the integration of baseball, were hoping to develop any talent they could (black, white or otherwise) and sell the player contracts to major league organizations.
*Note: The Negro American League continued through the 1950s. The league as it existed during that period bore little resemblence to the NAL prior to the 1949 season. Certainly by the mid-1950s all of black baseball's best talent had migrated to the major leagues or integrated minor leagues.
By Gaylon White (Mofojenkins) on Wednesday, December 8, 1999 – 10:55 pm:
Joe Willis Bauman still holds the record for most home runs hit in a single season –72 in 1954 with Roswell of the Class C Longhorn League. I interviewed Joe, who is white, in July 1973. Joe played first base and was a left-handed hitter. During his playing days, he stood 6-foot-5 and weighed about 235 pounds. In slightly more than 1019 minor-league games, he slammed 337 home runs. He never played above Class A. There is no telling how many home runs Joe would've hit if he had not missed three seasons because of military service (1943-45) and three more seasons (1949-51) because of a salary dispute. He played semipro ball in Elk City, Oklahoma from 1949 until his return to Organized Baseball in 1952 when he hit 50 home runs for Artesia of the Longhorn League. He hit 53 homers in 1953 and 72 in only 138 games in 1954. He blasted 46 in 1955 and 17 in 1956 when he retired at the age of 34. Bauman was a distributor for Schlitz Beer when we met in 1973. "I can pee up there higher on the wall than some of them," Bauman told me. "It's no big league record or anything but it's something nobody else has ever done." Bauman is still living in Roswell, New Mexico. I intend to visit him again soon. I would like to know more about the X Files story referred to in previous messages. I am assuming that this appeared on TV. Please fill me in on the details. Was Bauman's name mentioned in the episode referenced? I welcome any help you can provide. Thanks.
By Brent Kelley (Tomturner) on Tuesday, December 14, 1999 – 07:35 am:
Don't bother to visit Joe. I believe I read he died last year, which may not be true, of coures, but I would call first.