THE NEWS OF THE DAY : Frenchy Bordagaray, an 82-Year-Old Great-Grandfather Living in Ventura, Shocked the Baseball Establishment in the 1930’s With Such Gimmicks as Racing a Horse on Foot and Growning a Mustache, but His Flair Made Him a Media Darling

Frenchy Bordagaray caused a sensation when he reported to the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Clearwater, Fla., training facility in the spring of 1936. He was wearing a mustache. Not just any mustache, but the first grown by a baseball player since the 1912 season.

The press reacted as if he had just discovered nuclear fusion. Space was appropriated in newspapers across America with photographs of Bordagaray and his new mustache. Editorial cartoonists drew an assortment of mustaches on prominent baseball stars of the day. Pundits went wild. Dan Parker, resident wit of the New York Sun, celebrated Bordagaray’s achievement with a poem:

Skating’s revival and cycling’s survival bring fads of a far-distant day.

Now if drooping mustaches break out like rashes, please blame Frenchy Bordagaray.

This jolly young codger, this fly-chasing Dodger, just climbed aboard C. Stengel’s ship, and when he reported, ‘twas noticed he sported, an eyebrow where once was a lip.

A .283 lifetime hitter with five major league clubs, Stanley George (Frenchy) Bordagaray had a knack for generating a tremendous amount of press during his 11-year major league career, but he was decades ahead of his time. Today, athletes can cash in on the free media publicity with lucrative endorsement deals. Bordagaray’s only pay-back for an inordinate amount of coverage was personal satisfaction. He liked seeing his name in the news.

“That’s what I played for,” said Bordagaray, now an 82-year-old great-grandfather living in Ventura.

Bordagaray is currently putting his scrapbook back in order, a tall task considering its condition. Two feet wide and 15 pounds of glued-on newspaper clippings, game programs, photos and cartoons, it contains dozens of faded tan pages crumbling at the edges, leaving paper crumbs everywhere. With binding that no longer binds, the pages have become rearranged, causing chronological disorder.

“I’m going to get them straightened out one of these days,” Bordagaray promised.

The scrapbook reveals Bordagaray’s unabashed ability to make news. He was his own best publicist, never reluctant to be outrageous--he once raced a horse in the 100-yard dash and lost by a few feet--if it could get him the kind of monster headline usually reserved for the outbreak of war:

“Bordagaray Quits After Salary Dispute,” trumpeted the Sacramento Bee on March 15, 1933.

“Bordagaray Is Daffy With One Eye on Paying Customers,” bannered the New York Post on May 18, 1936. The accompanying article compared him to the eccentric Babe Herman and got him to explain why he always dived back to first when an easy stride would have beaten the pitcher’s throw.

“The fans like that kind of stuff,” he told the Post. “They like to see a guy dig his face into the ground and then get up and shake the dirt out of his pants. They think it’s funny.”

Bordagaray didn’t really need a mustache to get himself into the news. His exploits on the field often spoke for themselves. A line-drive hitter with speed, Bordagaray batted better than .300 three times, including a personal-best .315 in 1936. He could play outfield and infield and was even ahead of his time in fielding: He caught fly balls against his stomach, two decades before Willie Mays made the basket catch famous.

“Bordy was a handy guy to have around because he could do so many things,” said Bob Broeg, sports editor emeritus of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and a member of the Hall of Fame Veterans Committee.

With his Basque ancestry, beautiful wives and flamboyant antics, Bordagaray brought color and irreverence to the game. It was only fitting that he played with both the Gashouse Gang in St. Louis and the Daffy Dodgers in Brooklyn, teams that knew how to have a good time.

“Baseball was a lot of fun for me, especially with the Cards,” said Bordagaray, who also played for the powerhouse 1941 New York Yankees “but couldn’t have fun with them. They were too serious. Snooty guys. Except Joe (DiMaggio). He’s the only one I got along with.”

Bordagaray kept writers busy thinking up new nicknames. Since first breaking into the headlines as a star halfback at Fresno State in 1929, he has been referred to in print as: The Fresno Flash . . . Fresno’s Flying Frenchman . . . The Inimitable Bouncing Basque . . . General Bordagaray . . . Monsieur Bordagaray . . . Frenchy the Showman . . . The Dizzy Dean of the Dodgers.

Bordagaray used the press for publicity and was not ashamed to admit it. He once told a New York writer: “(The press) is doing just what I would be willing to pay you for.”

To the 11 writers covering the Dodgers, Bordagaray was an easy touch for a good quote. “I always gave them a story,” he said. “I told the sportswriters, ‘As long as you spell my name right, you can say anything you want about me.’ ”

The press didn’t get that same latitude from Bordagaray’s first wife, however. During Bordagaray’s first season with the Dodgers, Dorothy Ann Bordagaray reportedly threatened “to break a milk bottle over the head” of a sportswriter who had criticized her husband’s fielding, according to a New York newspaper.

Bordagaray arrived at Fresno State unheralded--his principal in Coalinga, Calif., had outlawed football at the high school--but he went from scrub on the freshman team to varsity star in a matter of weeks. He wasn’t big at 5-foot-7, 165 pounds, but he ran 9.8 seconds in the 100-yard dash, he said.

A triple threat, Bordagaray scored on an 82-yard run in his first varsity start and went on to become “the greatest ballcarrier Fresno State has ever had,” wrote the Fresno Bee. Local papers were enraptured by his running ability, especially a rare goal-line to goal-line gallop that the Bee called “a thing of beauty.”

Writing in the Bee, Joe Custer described what happened after a punt sailed over Bordagaray’s head and rolled to the goal line: “He picked up the ball and headed straight down the sideline for 35 yards, cut out to his right to evade a swarm of (defenders), and broke into an open field with three men for interference. . . . Brilliant and sure of foot on a sloppy, slippery gridiron, Bordagaray staged his field-length dash at a time when Fresno needed it most.”

Although Bordagaray considered himself a better football player than baseball player, he had no plans to play pro football, which was struggling for survival and recognition in the early ‘30s. Baseball was where the glamour and money was. After his sophomore football season, when Knute Rockne, Pop Warner and other coaches had selected him as an honorable mention All-American, Bordagaray came to a crossroads.

In the spring of 1931, the Sacramento Senators of the Pacific Coast League agreed to give him a three-week baseball tryout, during which time he would not be paid so he could retain his amateur standing. Against the wishes of his father, a sheepherder who had emigrated to the San Joaquin Valley from the French Basque province in the 1890s, Bordagaray dropped out of college for the semester, promising, “I’ll be back (for football).”

It didn’t happen. Bordagaray was an instant hit with the Senators, who offered him a contract. Only 20, Bordagaray was still a minor and his father refused to sign for him, vowing to take the team to court. But after visiting his son in Sacramento, the elder Bordagaray relented. Later, Fresno football Coach Stan Borleske met with Senators owner Lewis Moreing, hoping to get him to release his star runner, but Bordagaray got two hits that day and Moreing refused.

It was with the Senators that Bordagaray learned how ravenous the press was for a juicy tidbit. After leading the PCL with a .373 average in 1931, Bordagaray pulled his first holdout, which became a rite of spring for him almost every year he played. Back then, players did not play hardball with owners, but Bordagaray openly feuded with Moreing in the press, called owners of teams “moguls” and threatened to go back to college. He was so far ahead of his time that he once even tried to declare himself a free agent.

Bordagaray has admitted that his holdouts were usually put-ons to enliven the hot-stove league. After his holdout in March, 1932, he told a Sacramento columnist, “I thought I might get you fellows to fall for my publicity stunt--and how you fell! The contract I got from Moreing was all right. But all I had to do was tell the sportswriters in Fresno I wouldn’t report and they splashed the story.”

Giving the rationale behind his ruse, he said, “Baseball has too many serious men and not enough comics.”

In the spring of 1934, Moreing sold Bordagaray to the Chicago White Sox for three players and $10,000. He played 29 games for the White Sox, batting .322, and was bought in 1935 by the Dodgers for $50,000. During that first season with the Dodgers--or “the Flock,” as the press called them--Bordagaray was involved in an incident that seems too mythical to believe but was duly reported by the New York Sun.

Mired in a batting slump, Bordagaray faced Dizzy Dean, the star pitcher for the Cardinals, who held a big lead late in the game. “What are you hitting, Kid?” Dean reportedly yelled from the mound. Bordagaray said “.250.” According to the Sun, Dean “threw a soft one down the middle and Frenchy singled to right. Dizzy turned to first base with a grin and said, ‘OK, Kid?’ ”

Bordagaray often wore a monocle for laughs and played the washboard in Pepper Martin’s Mudcat Band, but he was an astute player with a natural instinct for baseball. In 1946, Branch Rickey, Brooklyn president and general manager, recognized his managerial ability, making him manager of the Dodgers’ Class C farm team in Three Rivers, Quebec. Bordagaray, however, was suspended for spitting tobacco juice--accidentally, he said--on an umpire.

Despite a successful baseball career and a storehouse of memories, Bordagaray has a regret: “I never reached my peak,” he says ruefully, blaming hypoglycemia, a blood-sugar disorder that causes weakness. During his career, he says, doctors failed to diagnose the ailment.

After retiring from the cemetery business in 1961, Bordagaray and his wife moved to Ventura, which he calls “Shangri-La,” and he worked as sports supervisor for the Ventura Department of Parks and Recreation until 1988. Spry and lively, he walks five miles a day in the foothills and still looks as if he could leg a single into a double.

“His handshake is something else,” said Victoria, his wife of 52 years. “The priest at our church says he won’t shake hands with that gorilla.”

Like most old-time ballplayers, Bordagaray recalls the past fondly and has a cynical attitude toward the modern game. The strike zone is too low. Players can’t bunt or slide. And they’re “way, way overpaid.”

“I think $200,000 would be enough,” said Bordagaray, whose highest salary was $10,500. “At first it was the owners who were bad. Now it’s the players. There should be a happy medium.”

Bordagaray also believes that today’s players are too thin-skinned. “I don’t think they should charge the mound--getting hit is part of the game,” he said. “If they can’t take it, they should get out.”

Bordagaray was beaned six times in the majors. When he was knocked unconscious once, Rickey “sent out a priest to give me the last rites,” Bordagaray said. “They took me to the hospital. The doctor examined me and said, ‘They can’t hurt you by hitting you in the head. They should throw at your feet.’ ”