While Buzz Bissinger continues to be raked over the coals, the baseball world lost one of its titans on Thursday, as longtime executive Buzzie Bavasi died at age 92. The old-school Bavasi is best remembered as the architect of four World Champion Dodgers teams and eight pennant winners (1952, '53, '55, '56, '59, '63, '65, '66, champions in bold), serving as the team's general manager from late 1950 (when he took over from Branch Rickey) to mid-1968, a period encompassing the franchise's transcontinental shift from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, their longest run of success and their days as the National League's predominant powerhouse.
Bavasi's accomplishments weren't limited to that span, however. He joined the Dodger organization in 1938, and worked in their farm system until 1943, stepping aside to serve in the Army during World War II. When he returned he played a key role in the game's integration: in 1946, as Jackie Robinson was smashing through organized baseball's color barrier in Montreal, Bavasi took the fight to American soil, running the Dodgers' Class B Nashua affiliate, which featured Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe and was skippered by Walter Alston. As the Los Angeles Times' obituary recounts:
"I'll never forget one night in Lynn, Mass.," Campanella said in 1983. "Newcombe had pitched, and I hit a home run, and we won the game. We were all dressed and sitting in the bus. Buzzie said he was going inside to pick up the check. All of a sudden, we heard Buzzie and their manager fighting. We went in and broke it up. We found out later that their manager" had used a racial slur when he told Bavasi, " 'Without those two [black players], you wouldn't have won.' Buzzie went after him."
In 1947, he was summoned to work for the Dodgers, and one of his duties was to scout the Vero Beach Army base that became Dodgertown and hammer out an agreement with the city. Bavasi then spent three years as the Montreal Royals' GM before being named to the Dodger post in late 1950. As the club's GM, he was well known for both his tight purse strings and his paternal attitude towards players:
I always had a warm feeling of gratitude toward Buzzie because he took a chance on bringing me up from the minors after eight years. He stuck by me," former Dodgers shortstop Maury Wills said Thursday. "He had a way of getting me to play hard without paying me a lot of money."
One of Bavasi's favorite ploys was to draw up a phony contract in the name of a player coming off an excellent season and type in an artificially low salary. When another player who wasn't as good came into his office to negotiate, Bavasi would leave the phony contract on his desk, then excuse himself from the room. The player inevitably would take a peek at the contract, read the low-ball salary and back down in his own negotiations when Bavasi would return to the room.
Bavasi took pride in his ability to operate on a budget, but as the Dodgers' success took its toll on their payroll, he met something of a personal Waterloo when he presided over the dual holdout of Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale in the spring of 1966, a year which wound up being the final season of Koufax's career and the Dodgers' last pennant until 1974. As Bavasi recounted in Sports Illustrated in 1967:
To tell the truth, I wasn't too successful in the famous Koufax-Drysdale double holdout in 1966. I mean, when the smoke had cleared they stood together on the battlefield with $235,000 between them, and I stood there With a blood-stained cashbox. Well, they had a gimmick and it worked; I'm not denying it. They said that one wouldn't sign unless the other signed. Since one of the two was the greatest pitcher I've ever seen (and possibly the greatest anybody has ever seen), the gimmick worked. But be sure to stick around for the fun the next time somebody tries that gimmick. I don't care if the whole infield comes in as a package; the next year the whole infield will be wondering what it is doing playing for the Nankai Hawks.
...The double holdout started on February 26, 1966, when spring training opened and Sandy and Donald didn't show. It looked in the papers as though they had made a big salary demand on the club and the club had turned them down. But it wasn't that simple. Being three good friends, as I hope we still are, Donald and Sandy and I had met and talked things over. In the first meeting, right after the 1965 season, we got no place. We sat down in my office at Dodger stadium and they said they had an agent—Sandy's lawyer, Bill Hayes—and that they wanted a three-year no-cut contract totaling $1 million and that neither one would sign unless both were satisfied. I told them I would negotiate only with them, that any discussions they had with their agent were their own business but please keep him away from me, that the amount of money they were asking was ridiculous, and that nobody on the ball club, including me and Walter Alston, was ever going to get more than a one-year contract. As I recall, I said something like, "You're both athletes, and what you're selling is your physical ability, and how can you guarantee your physical ability three years in advance? If you guarantee me that you will both be healthy and strong and still winning 20 games each in 1968, I'll give you a three-year contract." Since not even Cassius Clay could make a guarantee like that, the meeting broke up. But there was plenty of time; this was only October, the World Series was barely over and I was in no rush to get them signed, especially at their asking price of $166,000 per year apiece. From the beginning I was willing to give them raises on their 1965 salary, which were $80,000 for Don and $85,000 for Sandy. I had it penciled into my budget: $100,000, more or less, for Sandy, and $90,000, more or less, for Donald.
...The double holdout was over, but I can't say that I felt good about it. We wound up giving the boys much more money than we had intended, and if you had to pick a winner in the whole argument, you'd have to say it was Drysdale and Koufax. Donald got a $30,000 raise and Sandy got a $40,000 raise, and neither would have commanded that much money negotiating alone. After all, they got the biggest raises in baseball history. To that extent, the double holdout worked, although they gave in on the three-year contract for $1 million, which I don't think they ever meant, anyway. But, as I said before, the plan only worked because the greatest pitcher in baseball was in on it, and also they caught us by surprise. Believe me, Walter O'Malley and I have talked the problem over many times, and no double holdout will ever work again on the Los Angeles Dodgers. We're firm on that. The next time two of them come walking in together, they'll go walking out together. Koufax and Drysdale took advantage of a good thing, that's one way to look at it, and another way to look at it is, why shouldn't they? All's fair in negotiating, as I have also said before. This was a unique situation, and it will never happen again.
Anyway, the double holdout didn't cost the ball club quite as much as the figures would seem to indicate. In the first place, I had anticipated the possibility of having to come up with high figures for Don and Sandy, especially after the season they had had, and therefore I had not been quite as generous with some of the other players as I might have been. I don't mean I cut anybody just to get money to pay the two pitchers. It worked more like this: let's say a kid comes into my office and I've got him penciled in for $27,000, and he sits down and says that he wants $23,000. This happens all the time, believe me, and my natural inclination is to say, "I've got you down for $27,000, and that's what you are going to get." But not this time. This time if the kid said he'd sign for $23,000 I'd let it go at that, or maybe I'd sign him for a thousand more. The net result was that our 1966 budget for ballplayers went up exactly the $100,000 I had planned on, with Koufax and Drysdale getting $70,000 of the increase and the other 24 guys getting the rest. I'd have liked to give the other players more, but a budget is a budget and I stuck to it.
Full of more than a little bravado, the four-part series offers a revealing window into the tactics of a Reserve Clause-era executive so smug about holding the best cards in the negotiation game that he could afford to lay them on the table for the world to see. These fascinating articles -- first brought to my attention by Alex Belth, who dug them out of the SI clip library for me a couple years back -- are now fully available online via the recently debuted SI Vault :
After 1968, Bavasi left the Dodgers for the expansion San Diego Padres, where he served as team president and part-owner, but he couldn't replicate his success, as the team finished in the NL West cellar for its first six years. The Padres' fate improved in 1975, as they escaped the basement for the first time, but Bavasi clashed with new owner Ray Kroc and left following the 1977 season.
Angels owner Gene Autry soon hired him to be his team's executive vice president, and Bavasi oversaw their first division championship in 1979, an accomplishment that was dimmed by the acrimonious departure of Nolan Ryan following the season. The Angels won the AL West again on Bavasi's watch in 1982, but although he signed big-name free agents such as Don Baylor, Rod Carew, Bobby Grich, Reggie Jackson and Fred Lynn, he struggled to adjust to the GM's loss of leverage in the post-Reserve Clause era, traded far too much of the Angels' young talent (Willie Mays Aikens, Tom Brunansky, Brian Harper, Carney Lansford, Rance Mulliniks, Dickie Thon...) and retired in 1984. Two of his sons, Peter and Bill, became GMs at the major league level, though neither has come close to filling their father's shoes; the latter is currently the Seattle Mariners' GM.
Bavasi remained lucid and communicative well into his later years; both Biz of Baseball domo Maury Brown and New York Times columnist Dave Anderson recount their correspondences with him in recent articles. The Times also carries the inevitable obit, and there's another worthwhile one over at MLB.com.
Update: The San Diego Union-Tribuneobit is worth a read as well, particularly for the sidebar of short, colorful stories: "Don Zimmer said 'Play me or trade me.' We played him, and now we can't trade him."
Buzzie Bavasi claimed that along with Jackie Robinson, Podres was one of the two greatest competitors of the GM's 18-year career with the Dodgers. It's fitting that those two players were responsible for the signature moments in Brooklyn sports history, Robinson with his breaking of baseball's color barrier on April 15, 1947 and Podres for bringing Next Year to Dem Bums. But that was hardly the only thing Podres accomplished in baseball. Over the course of a 15-year career, he went 148-116 with a 3.68 ERA (105 ERA+), including a league-leading 2.66 in 1957. He pitched for the Dodgers from 1953 to 1966, mostly slotting into the middle of the rotation behind Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale. Along with Koufax and Jim Gilliam, Podres holds the distinction of being one of the three players who were part of all four of the Dodgers' championships under Walter Alston. Gilliam was the only one to play in each of those World Series (1955, 1959, 1963, and 1965); Podres was on the roster for the latter but didn't pitch, while Koufax wasn't on the 1955 roster (he made up for it later). Podres had such a big-game reputation that Pee Wee Reese nicknamed him "Mr. Clutch." True to that, he came up big in postseason play, going 4-1 with a 2.11 ERA in six World Series starts.
Podres' best pitch was his change-up:
Podres' biggest weapon was a straight change-up that was taught to him and [Carl] Erskine by former Dodgers executive Branch Rickey. [Don] Newcombe and Maury Wills, another Dodgers teammate, said the change-up was the best they'd ever seen.
"No Dodger pitcher has ever used that particular kind of grip since," Erskine said. "You let the ball recess back so that you use your middle knuckles like the ends of your fingers. The wrist had to collapse behind the ball. It had the same rotation as a four-seam fastball, so it was difficult to pick up. But it was also difficult to get over the plate."
Podres was traded to Detroit early in the 1966 season, and wound up his career -- wait for it -- as a member of the expansion San Diego Padres. Later he worked as a pitching coach for the Red Sox, Twins and Phillies, most notably with the 1993 NL pennant winners. No less than Curt Schilling credits him with instilling the mentality he needed for big games.
As former teammate Tommy Lasorda might say, Podres has gone to the Big Dodger in the Sky. Rest in peace.
As a Johnny-Come-Lately to New York City and the Yankees, I never really got what dyed-in-the-pinstriped-wool fans found so special about Phil Rizzuto, who passed away yesterday at the age of 89. While he certainly held a link to the Yankees' glory years as part of seven world champion teams, objectively he wasn't as great or popular a player as Yankee legends like Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, or even Yogi Berra. He wasn't an imposing hitter; his lifetime numbers don't even compare to crosstown contemporary Pee Wee Reese. Beyond his playing career, the descriptions of his lapses and malapropisms as an announcer suggest something less than one of history's great baseball minds. A relic, more sacred cow than "Holy Cow," was my conclusion.
Fortunately, Cliff Corcoran sets me straight with a touching tribute to the Scooter at SI.com:
Perhaps it's inappropriate to lead off this tribute to the memory of Rizzuto with such an insult, but Rizzuto lived his life in defiance of such insults, and lived a life that any of us would be fortunate to relive. Rizzuto was famously insulted by Casey Stengel when he tried out for Stengel's Brooklyn Dodgers in the mid-'30s ("go get a shoeshine box," said Casey). A decade and a half later Rizzuto would be the starting shortstop on Stengel's five consecutive World Series-winning Yankee teams, earning the 1950 AL MVP award along the way.
Rizzuto was famously insulted by the Yankees organization in 1956 when George Weiss forced him into retirement by making Rizzuto select himself as the player to be removed from the roster to make room for Enos Slaughter. Weiss was slaughtered in the press for the move and the team's broadcast sponsor insisted that Rizzuto be hired to broadcast the team's games the following season. Rizzuto was still in the same job 39 years later when the team forced him to call a game rather than attend Mickey Mantle's funeral. Rizzuto, enraged and embarrassed, quit mid-game, but public outcry brought him back for a 40th and final season.
My voice was one of those calling Rizzuto back. The Scooter may have had more to do with my becoming a baseball fan than anyone else. Though my family is filled with Yankees fans dating back to the days of Babe Ruth, I had no older sibling to turn me on to baseball and neither of my parents was particularly interested in professional sports when I was growing up. Instead it was Rizzuto, with his enthusiasm, good humor and wildly entertaining and unpredictable asides (which were a good match for the often tragicomic play of the mid-'80s Yankees), who sold me on the joys of the game and its history despite the poor quality of the team I was watching.
Can't argue with that at all, nor with the various tales of how the 5-foot-6 scrapper clawed his way into the major leagues and the hearts of fans. Thanks to Cliff, the Bronx Banter community, Steven Goldman (and his not-so-evil twin), Joe Sheehan, Mark Lamster, Buster Olney and others for sharing their memories and their points of view. RIP, Scooter.
Less than two weeks after the passing of Kurt Vonnegut, the world of letters lost another giant on Monday when David Halberstam was killed in a car accident near San Francisco. Halberstam was 73 years old but had shown no sign of slowing down; the crash occurred as he was on his way to interview the great Y.A. Tittle for a book about the 1958 NFL Championship game. Tellingly, the New York Times did not have an obituary at the ready as it did for Mr. Vonnegut or most other accomplished men his age. With a book on the Korean War in the pipeline, and the football one on the front burner, the man was far from writing his final chapter. Damn.
Halberstam made his mark as a war reporter for the Times, sharing a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his unflinching coverage of the Vietnam War, coverage that called his patriotism into question. From the obit:
His reporting, along with that of several colleagues, left little doubt that a corrupt South Vietnamese government supported by the United States was no match for Communist guerrillas and their North Vietnamese allies. His dispatches infuriated American military commanders and policy makers in Washington, but they accurately reflected the realities on the ground.
For that work, Mr. Halberstam shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1964. Eight years later, after leaving The Times, he chronicled what went wrong in Vietnam — how able and dedicated men propelled the United States into a war later deemed unwinnable — in a book whose title entered the language: “The Best and the Brightest.”
...President John F. Kennedy was so incensed by Mr. Halberstam’s war coverage that he strongly suggested to The Times’s publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, that the reporter be replaced. Mr. Sulzberger replied that Mr. Halberstam would stay where he was. He even had the reporter cancel a scheduled vacation so that no one would get the wrong idea.
Obviously, Halberstam's story resonates in these times, though it's clear the forces who question the patriotism of the messenger bearing the bad news now have the upper hand. Such bold reportage as Halberstam's is all too lacking today, enabling a submoronic president and his utterly corrupt administration to fight a war on false pretenses while blanketing a complicit and deferential press with lies that go largely unchallenged in the mainstream media. As Salon's Glenn Greenwald put it:
David Halberstam's death yesterday is certain to prompt all sorts of homage from our media stars describing Halberstam as a superior journalist, someone who embodied what journalism ought to be. And it is true that he was exactly that.
But modern American journalists -- as Halberstam himself repeatedly emphasized -- have become the precise antithesis of those values. The functions Halberstam and the best journalists of his generation fulfilled are exactly those that have been so fundamentally abandoned, repudiated and scorned by our nation's most prominent and influential media stars. And most legitimate media criticisms today are grounded in exactly that gaping discrepancy.
Halberstam generally alternated his books on heavy topics like wars, politics and industry with books on sports. While the latter were anything but puff pieces, Halberstam understood the limits of sport's power in the current age.
I read his Breaks of the Game, a book about the Bill Walton-era Portland Trailblazers of the '70s, back when I was in high school; it's been hailed as basketball's answer to The Boys of Summer, and while I wouldn't go that far, I can't list too many basketball books I'd read again if given the chance. Several years later, I devoured both Summer of '49 and October 1964, two of Halberstam's books on baseball. I've since learned that both have their share of minor errors, but the latter, which covers the rise of the Gibson-Brock-Flood Cardinals and the fall of the Yankee dynasty, remains a touchstone for its illuminating narrative of the impact of integration on the two teams and their respective leagues. I touched on a bit of the Red Sox shameful history of racism here last week. The Yankees, who finally integrated in 1955 with Elston Howard, were no saints in that department either; their reward for GM George Weiss' myopic racism and failure to pursue talented black players was a decade of irrelevance. Another of Halberstam's baseball books, The Teammates remains on my shelf, unread, awaiting its turn at bat.
But the first Halberstam book I pulled off my shelf when I heard the sad news was one he edited, The Best American Sports Writing of the Century. Back in 1999, when it came out, I went to the Union Square Barnes and Noble for a signing featuring him and four of writers represented in the book, Ira Berkow, George Plimpton, Dick Schaap, and Gay Talese. Schaap died in 2001, Plimpton in 2003, and now Halberstam -- perhaps they're all somewhere in the afterlife, talking about ballgames past, telling stories as only they could. So it goes.
Moving right along, the first Hit List of the regular season is up over at Baseball Prospectus. It's a new time slot, chosen to maintain some domestic harmony (my wife puts up with a lot of writing-induced tunnel vision over the winter, and clearing my schedule for her days off was overdue) and to prevent me having to punt so many of these puppies due to summer weekend travels. Hopefully, it's not quite so counterintuitive as it appears at first glance. Thursday is often an off day for many teams, which helps with turnaround times as far as keeping the list's stats fresh, and Friday marks the end of the work week for most readers, plus it's traditionally a day when BP has been somewhat light in the content department.
The Mets top the list this week, followed by the Indians, Padres, Angels and Brewers -- a nice mix of teams thanks to the early date. The Yanks are eighth, the Dodgers are 14th, and the 30th-ranked Nationals look like they may give the '62 Mets a run for their money. No Simpsons reference in this week's list (d'oh!), but I did get to call upon Sesame Street, Samuel Beckett, Sam Horn, the Sausage Race, and Slaughterhouse-Five.
The last was intentionally topical, since Kurt Vonnegut passed away on Wednesday, and discussions of his demise dotted my conversations and my web reading as I prepared this week's list. The first Vonnegut novel I ever read was as an assignment, but it wasn't for an English class; Galapagos' take on the future of human evolution was required reading for my introductory biology class at Brown (and I note with pride that my professor for that class, Dr. Kenneth Miller, has become a high-profile opponent of creationism who maintains that evolution doesn't contradict religious faith). That Vonnegut would wind up on the Bio 20 syllabus wasn't all that surprising; the brother of a prominent scientist, Vonnegut's commitment to science was a key tenet of his worldview. Such were his politics that he noted just prior to the 2004 election, "No matter which one wins, we will have a Skull and Bones President at a time when entire vertebrate species, because of how we have poisoned the topsoil, the waters and the atmosphere, are becoming, hey presto, nothing but skulls and bones."
I didn't really get hip to Vonnegut until a friend slid me a musty, dog-eared copy of Breakfast of Champions about a decade ago. How I missed Slaughterhouse when I was such a fan of Catch-22 I'll never know. Vonnegut quickly became one of my favorite novelists and cultural presences. His anti-authoritarian stance, economical style, black humor and ultimately his humanity made for an unmistakable voice that elevated even his most minor works, while placing his major ones among the greatest novels ever written, period. I don't recall him ever writing about baseball, but I've appropriated the title of alter ego Kilgore Trout's novel, Now It Can Be Told, morethana fewtimes here and in the Hit List.
If you're ever stuck in an airport bookstore without reading material for a flight ahead, grab a Vonnegut novel; it's the surest bet there is for a few laughs and some deep thought at 30,000 feet. His is a voice that will be truly missed. As the man liked to say, "So it goes."
