In case you missed it. The anecdote at the end is priceless.


May 2, 2008

By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
Buzzie Bavasi, the general manager of the Dodgers during their glory
years in Brooklyn and their first decade in Los Angeles, and a
baseball executive for nearly a half-century, died Thursday in San
Diego, where he lived. He was 93.

His death was announced by the Seattle Mariners. Bavasi's son Bill
is executive vice president and general manager of the team.

In his years with the Dodgers, San Diego Padres and California
Angels, Bavasi was enmeshed in enormous change. He championed the
acceptance of black players in organized baseball, helped take major
league baseball to California, put together an expansion team in San
Diego and saw power shift from management to the players with the
arrival of free agency.

In his 18 years with the Dodgers, from 1951 to 1968, Bavasi's clubs
won eight National League pennants and four World Series
championships, including the team's only one in Brooklyn, in 1955,
against the Yankees, building teams with the likes of Sandy Koufax,
Don Drysdale, Jackie Robinson, Don Newcombe, Gil Hodges, Duke
Snider, Pee Wee Reese, Roy Campanella and Maury Wills.

He was born Emil Joseph Bavasi in Manhattan, though he was not Emil
for long. His sister Iola nicknamed him Buzzie because, he said, he
was "always buzzing around."

He started out in baseball in 1939 when the National League
president, Ford Frick, whose son had roomed with Bavasi at DePauw
University, recommended him for an office boy's job with the
Dodgers, then being run by Larry MacPhail. Soon, Bavasi was involved
in his first deal — or non-deal, as it turned out.

Bavasi, who had been a catcher of no great distinction for DePauw,
was in a scouting meeting in which a right-handed pitcher for
Purdue, whom he once played against, had been mentioned as a good
prospect.

"That night I got out my scrapbook," Bavasi recalled in "Off the
Record" (Contemporary Books, 1987), written with John Strege. "I
looked up the box score of that Purdue game. DePauw had won and I
had gotten three hits. So I took the box score into the office the
next day. Larry MacPhail was prepared to pay this pitcher a bonus of
$1,500. When he read the box score, he tore the contract up. Larry
turned to me and said, `If you can get three hits off him, we don't
want him.' "

Bavasi was named business manager of the Dodgers' Americus, Ga.,
farm team in 1940, then spent three seasons as an executive in the
low minors before entering the Army, where he was a machine-gunner
in the Italian campaign, winning a bronze star.

When he took over management of the Dodgers' Nashua, N.H., farm club
in 1946, Bavasi marked himself as the kind of man destined for
bigger things.

Branch Rickey had broken baseball's color barrier with the signing
of Jackie Robinson the previous October to a contract with the
Montreal Royals, Brooklyn's top farm team. Rickey had also signed
four other black players. Two of them, John Wright and Roy Partlow,
would also play in Canada, where they might expect little
opposition. But the others, Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe, were
earmarked for a farm club in the United States.

Rickey sought to place them with the Dodger club in Danville, Ill.,
but the management there said no. Then he tried Nashua. Bavasi said
yes.

In a 1997 interview with The Boston Globe, Bavasi remembered
challenging the manager of the Lynn Red Sox to a fight, with all the
opposing players sitting nearby on the team bus, after a game in
which, according to Bavasi, the manager had hurled racial slurs at
Campanella and Newcombe. It was the "first time in my life I had
ever challenged anybody," Bavasi said, "and here I was challenging
an entire baseball team."

Campanella and Newcombe become stars with the Dodgers, and after
running the Montreal farm team, Bavasi rejoined them when he was
named Brooklyn's general manager in November 1950. Three years
later, Bavasi hired Walter Alston as the manager, and Bavasi
remained his staunch backer, claiming to have saved his job when the
owner, Walter O'Malley, now with the team in Los Angeles, wanted to
fire Alston after a 1962 playoff-series loss to the Giants.

After 18 years as general manager, he left the Dodgers in 1968 to
become a part-owner and president of the expansion Padres. In 1977,
when his son Peter took over operations of the expansion Toronto
Blue Jays, the Bavasis became the first father and son to run
different major league teams at the same time. Bavasi moved to the
Angels in October 1977 as executive vice president, remaining with
them through 1984.

In addition to his sons Bill and Peter, he is survived by his wife,
Evit; two other sons, Chris and Bob; nine grandchildren and five
great-grandchildren.

In Bavasi's first 25 years as an executive — before free agency
arrived — club owners held the upper hand. Nevertheless, Bavasi was
challenged in 1966 by Koufax and Drysdale, star pitchers who tried
to negotiate together while enlisting an agent. Bavasi insisted on
dealing with them directly and eventually gave them hefty raises but
much less than they had sought.

There were also pressures that could hardly be anticipated.

"Money was scarce many times during my career, particularly during
our early years in San Diego," Bavasi recalled in his
autobiography. "Every time we got a player with any value we would
sell him. In one short span in the early '70s, I sold Al Santorini
to St. Louis, Al Ferrara to Cincinnati and Ed Spiezio to the Chicago
White Sox. Then my phone rang.

" `Am I next?' the voice on the other end asked before hanging up.

"It was my mother calling from Florida. She was 81 at the time.

"I immediately phoned her back. `What's the matter?' I said.

" `Well, you sold three Italians in a row. I figured I was next.' "