The ones who just play the game
January 16, 2024
Before I start in on describing Tom Hausman, I want to draw attention to the cap he is wearing in the photo above. Since he had played for the Milwaukee Brewers in 1975, their cap did not have to be airbrushed on him, as it was for the Billy Champion card I described a few days ago. The legs on the M are skinnier and more elongated than the Michigan-style block M that was grafted onto Champion’s Phillies cap. And as an aside, I was glad to see Michigan win the National Championship the other night, not because I have any love for them, but because as the product of a Big Ten school and a resident of the Midwest, their success lifts up the conference and the region as a whole.
As I’m typing out this post on a Sunday night, the Emmy awards are on in the background. The nominees and the winners, and the people who are able to be present when the awards are handed out, get all the attention, as they should. But their industry, like any other endeavor, is filled with people who don’t necessarily win accolades for what they do. They show up, do the best they can, and have to watch with the rest of us while those who Fortune has smiled upon grab all the attention. And Tom Hausman was certainly one of those everyday guys, in a professional baseball sense.
Hausman was drafted in the 10th round of the 1971 amateur draft. I previously wrote about Mike Miley, who was unsuccessfully drafted by the Cincinnati Reds in the first round that year, to the exclusion of both George Brett and Mike Schmidt, who were taken in the second round that year. Guys drafted in the tenth round are still miles ahead of the average baseball player, but they’re less likely to be one of the superstar players that Schmidt and Brett both turned out to be.
Tom Hausman did make it to the major leagues, as this card attests, but he spent more time, and played in more games, in the minors than he did in the majors. He never was an All-Star player, or played on a team that won any championships, or achieved any notoriety, other than being the first free agent ever signed by the New York Mets. He played 14 seasons in professional baseball, and left the game in 1985, at age 32. He passed away five years ago, on January 16, 2019 at age 65.
Fourteen seasons as a professional ballplayer means that Hausman had baseball skills that somebody like me cannot imagine. And as I proceed with chronicling players from the 1970s, there will be plenty more guys like him. I think about Crash Davis in a scene from Bull Durham where, well, if you know you know.
If I want to see this this little whim of a project through to its conclusion, there will many more days like this one. And these are the stories that I like to tell, too. Somebody should do it, after all.
Until tomorrow…