Buzzie Bavasi, 92; fabled executive of baseball's Dodgers
Buzzie Bavasi, a forceful general manager who shepherded the Dodgers through their World Series-studded transition from Brooklyn to Los Angeles and helped integrate the minor leagues as general manager of the Dodgers farm club in Nashua, died yesterday at his home in the La Jolla area of San Diego. He was 93.
"Buzzie was one of the game's greatest front office executives during a period that spanned parts of six different decades," Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig said. "He loved the game, and he loved talking about it."
Emil Joseph Bavasi - nicknamed Buzzie by his family for the way he buzzed around as a boy - helped put together Dodgers teams that included future Hall of Famers Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Harold "Pee Wee" Reese, Roy Campanella, Sandy Koufax, Don Newcombe, and Don Drysdale.
One of the last of a midcentury generation of wisecracking wheeler-dealers of ballplayers, Mr. Bavasi joined the Dodgers in 1938 as traveling secretary and publicity director. After spending most of three decades with the Dodgers, he became part owner and president of the San Diego Padres, then became executive vice president of the California Angels.
In all, he spent 44 years working in baseball.
While at Nashua, Mr. Bavasi had a pivotal role in what Dodgers owner Branch Rickey called "The Experiment:" his integration of Major League Baseball.
"If it weren't for Buzzie Bavasi, I'd have had nothing in baseball," Newcombe told The Boston Globe in 1997.
Newcombe and his catching mate, Campanella, were signed in 1945 and joined the Dodgers' minor league team in Nashua the following season, becoming the first black players in more than 60 years playing for a team based in the United States. Jackie Robinson was at the Dodgers farm club in Montreal.
Just as he had chosen players with the right temperament, ability, and intelligence for "The Experiment," Rickey searched long and hard for the right man to be his general manager in Nashua.
"I was just back from the war, three years of infantry, and I was down in Sea Island, Ga., with my wife for four or five months of rest," Mr. Bavasi told the Globe. "Then Mr. Rickey called me and asked me to come up to Nashua. I knew something was up."
With Mr. Bavasi as general manager, Rickey chose Walter Alston, then a teacher in Ohio, to be player-manager of the team. Like Mr. Bavasi, Alston would become an institution with the Dodgers.
"One of the first things we did," Mr. Bavasi said, "was to make sure that the city of Nashua would be behind us. What we did was hire the [managing] editor of the Nashua Telegraph, Fred Dobens, to be president of the team. That way we knew the city's newspaper would back us."
Newcombe said that despite little racial diversity in southern New Hampshire, he and Campanella were treated graciously in Nashua. It was quite a different story in ballparks of teams they faced during that summer.
One game became legend in Dodger lore.
The manager and a few of the players of the Lynn Red Sox were extremely offensive. Back then, minor league managers also coached from the third base box. From that prominent place, the Lynn manager hurled a stream of racial epithets at the black ballplayers and Alston.
Branch Rickey had been adamant in his rules for the players integrating the game: Newcombe and Campanella could not say or do anything to retaliate. And during that game, no words or actions came from either player.
But, said Newcombe, "that didn't mean Mr. Bavasi had to take it."
"I was mad and I had them come to get their share of the gate receipts," Mr. Bavasi told the Globe.
"What I remember was the whole [Lynn] Red Sox team was there behind [the manager], the bus was right there with all of them. And I said to him, 'Why don't you say to me right now what you said to them . . . Go ahead and say that to me.'
"You know," he said, "first time in my life I had ever challenged anybody and here I was challenging an entire baseball team."
Said Newcombe: "Without Mr. Bavasi, Mr. Rickey, and Walter Alston, Roy and I would never have gotten to where we were. I owe everything to them."
During Mr. Bavasi's tenure as general manager of the Dodgers from 1951 to 1968, first in Brooklyn and then Los Angeles, the team won eight National League pennants. They won their only World Series in Brooklyn in 1955. After the move West, the Dodgers won the World Series in 1959, 1963, and 1965.
Don Zimmer, former Red Sox manager and a Dodgers player, said Mr. Bavasi "was like a father to me, from the time I was 19 years old. All my life, really. I can't describe how much he meant to me."
Mr. Bavasi was selected major league executive of the year in 1959.
In the years before baseball free agency, Mr. Bavasi was under a directive from parsimonious owner Walter O'Malley to keep players' salaries low. He used a variety of inventive maneuvers.
"We operated by the Golden Rule," Mr. Bavasi reportedly once said. "He who has the gold rules."
He was less successful, however, in his two most-publicized battles - the dual holdout of star Dodgers pitchers Koufax and Drysdale in the spring of 1966 and the failed attempt to re-sign standout pitcher Nolan Ryan with the Angels after the 1979 season.
Mr. Bavasi didn't want to set a precedent by paying Koufax or Drysdale $100,000 salaries, but Koufax ultimately signed for a then-unheard-of $125,000 and Drysdale got $110,000. The $1 million threshold was crossed 13 years later, when Ryan signed with the Houston Astros after the Angels and Mr. Bavasi refused to meet his price.
Ryan, a Hall of Fame member, pitched 14 more seasons and is baseball's all-time strikeout leader with 5,714.
"I've had to take the abuse for that over the years, but that's fine," Mr. Bavasi told the Los Angeles Times in 2005. "Stay around long enough and there's going to be abuse."
Mr. Bavasi enjoyed retirement, rarely leaving the comfortable hilltop home in La Jolla, Calif., he shared with his wife, Evit, whom he married in 1941. He also leaves four sons, nine grandchildren, and several great-grandchildren.
He had plenty of time to reflect on his accomplishments and eventful life in baseball.
"Who else played golf with Babe Ruth, had dinner with Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, and worked for people of the stature of Larry MacPhail, Walter O'Malley, Gene Autry and Ray Kroc?" he said. "There are 20 guys on every team now who make more in a year than I did in 30 or 40, but no one had more fun."
Material from the Associated Press and Los Angeles Times was used in this obituary. 