Last night I was chatting with Satish, one of our Senior Editors here at MMN, and he mentioned to me about a minor league player that hit 72 home runs and drove in 224 RBI’s in one season. We were very intrigued by the idea that one player could do in only 138 games or even do it at all.

Joe Bauman is that minor leaguer, a lefty hitting slugger that at 6’5″ 235 lbs, could have been an amazing hitter if he played in this era. He would have eclipsed all the records that we have to this day.  But Bauman never played major league baseball, only Class C in the Longhorn League with the Roswell Rockets. He held the single-season home run record as the most by a professional athlete for 47 years until Barry Bonds hit 73 in 2001.  But no one has ever drove in any where near 224 RBI’s and that record most likely will never be broken, but you never know.

In a USA Today post in 2005, AP writer Tom Korte shared how Bauman felt after Bonds broke his record:

“I never thought it’d last this long, to be honest,” he said at the time. “I was watching on TV when Barry Bonds hit that last one. It didn’t bother me or anything. I just thought, ‘There goes my record.'”

Bauman lived to the age of 83 and died in 2005.