Dodgers Bring Back Collins

Terry Collins is back with the Dodgers--and back working with Bill Bavasi.

The former Angel manager was hired Thursday as the Dodgers’ minor league field coordinator. He will work for Bavasi, his old Anaheim boss, who two days earlier was hired as the club’s director of player development.

“I owe being in baseball today to the Dodgers, and it’s great to be back with them,” Collins said in a conference call with reporters from Dodger Stadium. “I have felt for many, many years it was the best organization in baseball and because I wasn’t around for the past few years, I don’t know what went wrong. But it’s our goal to come up with five rookies of the year in a row again.”

Collins, 52, was a minor league infielder for the Dodgers from 1975-80. He managed in the Dodger and Pittsburgh Pirate minor league organizations for 11 seasons, before taking over as Houston’s manager in 1994. Collins led the Astros to three second-place finishes in the National League Central.

Bavasi and the Angels hired him before the 1997 season. In his first two years, Collins guided injury-riddled teams to the brink of American League West championships. Then came a spectacular collapse in 1999--and his resignation.

Collins left the Angels in September, and Bavasi followed him out less than a month later.

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Collins said his new job duties are “very simple.... You hire the right people, you give them direction and then you let them do their job.”