Reese Turned Away From the Top Spot Twice

He might have been Captain Courageous, but he was never courageous enough--or insane enough--to become a major league manager. Longtime baseball executive Buzzie Bavasi twice offered Pee Wee Reese the opportunity--once with the Dodgers and once with the San Diego Padres--and was rejected.

“I think Pee Wee would have been a fine manager because he knew the game and related to people so well, but I couldn’t argue with his thinking [in rejecting the offers],” Bavasi said.

The first offer was made after the 1953 season, when the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn and Charlie Dressen, demanding a three-year contract to continue as manager, had turned down a two-year extension.

“Pee Wee was still playing regularly and didn’t feel he could suddenly step up and become the manager over guys he had been playing with for 10 years or so,” Bavasi said.

In a recent article written for The Times, Roger Kahn reported that Reese, who died Aug. 14, had only been semi-offered the job, writing that Reese had told him the offer was presented in a negative form. “You don’t want to manage the team, do you, Pee Wee?” Khan wrote of how the Dodgers presented it to Reese. Bavasi, retired in La Jolla, disputed that.

“I flew to Louisville, met Pee Wee at the airport and made the offer,” Bavasi said. “It wasn’t done in a backhanded way at all.”

Dressen’s obstinacy and Reese’s rejection prompted Bavasi and owner Walter O’Malley to hire the anonymous Walter Alston, who had been managing the club’s triple-A farm team in Montreal and would spend 23 years at the Dodger helm, a Hall of Fame tenure that Reese factored into again in 1958. It was the Dodgers’ first season in Los Angeles and the shortstop’s last in uniform--a dismal season in which the Dodgers finished next to last.

“I called Pee Wee and Charlie Dressen [who had returned to the club as a coach] to my hotel suite and told them that O’Malley was upset at the way the club was playing and was thinking of getting rid of Alston,” Bavasi said. “I remember Pee Wee standing up and saying, ‘If you get rid of Alston, you can get rid of me.’ He stood up for Walter the same way he had stood up for Jackie [Robinson]. He was that kind of man.”

That was part of the reason in 1973 that Bavasi, then president and general manager of the Padres, offered Reese the managerial reins in San Diego.

Reese was working for the Hillerich and Bradley bat manufacturers and, Bavasi said, “Pee Wee felt he had been away too long and wasn’t interested in changing his lifestyle or getting back in uniform. I think there were times earlier in his career he would have liked to coach, but he wasn’t interested in the aggravations that come with managing--as much as I think he could have handled it.”

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A.J. Burnett, the 22-year-old right-hander who beat the Dodgers, 6-1, in his big league debut Tuesday, clearly offers more than pierced nipples, tattoos and bats he names after Marilyn Manson songs.

“He’s just a young thoroughbred who needs to polish up some things,” Florida Marlin Manager John Boles said. “He’s going to be a big-time, top-of-the-rotation guy.”

Burnett returned to triple-A Portland after his Tuesday start to continue the polishing. He was a disappointing 6-11 with a 5.78 earned-run average before his call-up, but Boles suspects Burnett suffered a letdown after almost making the Marlin rotation in the spring.

“You can equate it with a kid going to kindergarten who can already read, write and do arithmetic,” Boles said. “You can see the stuff is there, so obviously it was all psychological.”