For Buzzie, It Was the Best of Times

Baseball is a general manager’s game. Just as movies are a director’s medium and wars belong to the generals.

The mighty Yankees of old were as much the product of a couple of canny old customers in wing collars named Ed Barrow and George Weiss as they were of anybody in pinstripes, including Babe Ruth or Lou Gehrig.

The famous Gashouse Gang of the Cardinals was put together by Branch Rickey, as were the famous Robinson Dodgers of the late ‘40s and ‘50s.

The public seldom gets to know them, but the general managers own the game in fee simple.

In fact, the formula for baseball success is simple: If the GM is good, the team is, too. If he’s not, fourth place here we come.

It’s not easy. A baseball general manager has to be shrewd, manipulative, sensitive and thick-skinned at the same time--has to be, in a word, a schemer, plotter, conspirator, trader. Machiavelli was a general manager.

So was Buzzie Bavasi. One of the best.

No one enjoyed being a baseball general manager any more than Emil J. Bavasi. He loved the give-and-take of the job. He loved the ballplayers--the flakier, the better. He loved the challenge. But, most of all, he loved the game.

He tells his story in a new book, “Off The Record” (Contemporary Books, Inc.) with John Strege collaborating.

Buzzie is the GM who ran the Dodger fortunes for Walter O’Malley after the departure of Branch Rickey. Buzzie was at the controls in the truly turbulent years of the racial revolution and the equally traumatic flight from Flatbush.

Buzzie came into the grand old game at a time when the owners held all the cards. It was a time when the home team wore--and was--white, there was no such thing as a free agent, all the revenue you got was from seats sold, the game had not yet become a happy hunting ground for the advertising dollar and the trick was to get and field a team as good as the Yankees on half the money.

Branch Rickey solved that problem spectacularly and achieved instant parity with the Yankees by reaching into an untapped pool of player resource, the Negro leagues.

Bavasi played his role in that revolutionary development when he was Rickey’s general manager of the farm team in Nashua, N. H. Rickey sent an emissary one night in 1946 with an urgent but secret agenda that called for a midnight motel conference. He had two ballplayers he wanted to send to Buzzie, he revealed.

“So send them,” Buzzie replied, mystified.

There were problems, he was told. These players had been turned down by another farm team in Illinois.

“Why?” Bavasi wanted to know.

“They happen to be black,” it was explained.

“Can they play?” shot back Buzzie.

Oh, my, yes, he was told. They were the best in the business.

“Then, send them up,” snorted Bavasi. “I got lots of white people. But I don’t have too many who can play the game.”

And that’s how Cy Young winner Don Newcombe and Hall of Famer Roy Campanella got into organized baseball.

When Buzzie took over the Dodgers, he had the best and worst of all possible worlds. He had an owner who didn’t interfere with the baseball part of the operation. There is no known instance of Walter O’Malley ever appearing in a team locker room. But, if he didn’t take any of the bows, he also didn’t take any of the blame.

And it was O’Malley who put the team through the most traumatic upheaval in the annals of modern baseball. He whisked them out not only out of their ancestral home but several time zones away and into another culture.

Among other things, this meant that Bavasi had to take a team geared to take advantage of the bandbox proportions of Ebbets Field and tailor it to play, first, in a made-over football and track stadium as spectacularly unsuited to baseball as the deck of an aircraft carrier.

The team got so rattled it slipped all the way to seventh place and Buzzie had to spend his first year keeping his pitchers from high buildings or rooms with sharp instruments.

It was the most turbulent era in the team’s history. Buzzie loved every minute of it.

He particularly remembers the watershed year when Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax held out in tandem for a big raise--modest to infinitesimal, by today’s standards. Buzzie let the impasse deliberately drag out. It was making Page 1 every day.

“We can settle this in five minutes,” he told owner O’Malley. “But we’d lose all those headlines.”

Buzzie liked to play head games with the help. When he signed Koufax for $125,000 and Drysdale for $110,000, Koufax protested. “I thought we were both to get the same!”

OK, said Buzzie, and ordered his secretary to make out two contracts for $117,500 each.

“Never mind,” said Koufax.

On another occasion, when pitcher Danny McDevitt returned a contract torn into little pieces, Buzzie ordered the torn contract and a new one for $500 less sent back to the player with the note that he could sign the new one or paste the pieces of the old one back together and sign that. McDevitt signed for $500 less.

You could do things like that in the days of the reserve clause. But its day was setting. Buzzie likes to recall it may have been he, of all people, who opened the door to the demise of that covenant when, in the course of negotiations with Koufax and Drysdale, he permitted contact with Koufax’s Hollywood agent, Bill Hayes.

Buzzie was rueful about that. Also, prescient. He wrote, later that year: ‘If I did that, I opened a door to more trouble than baseball can ever dream of. . . . I set precedent that’s going to bring awful pain to general managers for years to come because every salary negotiation with every humpty-dumpty fourth-string catcher is going to run into months of dickering.”

Buzzie did not confine his sharp dealer’s mind to defenseless ballplayers. Once when Ralph Branca called with the news that his in-laws, the Mulveys, who owned one-third of the Dodgers, wanted to be bought out, and Walter O’Malley had offered them $3 million, Buzzie had a suggestion.

“Why don’t you offer him $6 million for his two-thirds instead?” Buzzie suggested.

Branca did--and came away with a considerably higher sum for his end.

Bavasi had every good GM’s stock in trade, solid sources of information in every baseball town in America. It used to be said of Bavasi by O’Malley that he never made a bad trade or a good drink in his life.

The game left Buzzie, he didn’t leave the game. Free agentry took the fun out of it. It may yet have taken the game out of it.

To Buzzie, free agentry brought the long-term contract which has the seed of the destruction of baseball in it. It has bred complacency, the enemy of performance.

Explains Buzzie: “In the era of one-year contracts, a player always had someone looking over his shoulder. If he played poorly, or didn’t play at all, he was released. Today, they can’t release a player without eating an enormous guaranteed contract.

“Where’s the player’s motivation to play when he isn’t feeling 100%? Where is his motivation to play well when he knows he’ll be paid well next year and the year after and the year after, regardless?”

Certain players would not be affected, says Buzzie. Pete Rose would play with the same determination, Reggie Jackson, Steve Sax, he says. “Eighty percent probably would. It used to be 100%.”

It is those 20% who have driven Buzzie Bavasi to “retirement” in his La Jolla hillside home.

But Buzzie doesn’t miss the game at all. How could he? He has three television sets in his den, all tuned to different games at once. And, in case he misses something, he has the sound turned down--so he can listen to a fourth game on the radio.