Buzz Words

From his hilltop hacienda, with the shimmering Pacific Ocean stretching to the horizon, it is easier to accept that on some days you really can see forever -- easier to believe that forever is his reasonable destination.

After all, at 90, Buzzie Bavasi is a long way on the journey, still active in mind and body, a cane needed only occasionally, the driver’s license still valid.

It has been 20 years since he retired after almost half a century in major league front offices from Brooklyn to Anaheim, a colorful and successful career overdue for inclusion in the Hall of Fame, though forever beckons and Cooperstown can wait.

In his 91st year, both he and his wife, Evit, who is 87 and his bride of 65 years, look 30 years younger, thriving on a secret.

“No exercise,” Bavasi said, then takes it back. “I used to exercise, but not in the last 15 or 20 years.

“Now we have breakfast in bed every morning, I do three crossword puzzles before getting up, I read three books last weekend alone and I have a cocktail before dinner every night. People say that retirement is like sitting around waiting to die, but you make your own activity. The last 20 years have been the best of my life.”

Which, of course, is saying something. Few baseball men have enjoyed a better life.

“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?” Bavasi 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.”

The memories are framed on the walls of his den, where a computer enables Bavasi to shed old school for new school and stay in closer and more immediate contact with such former players as Carl Erskine, Clem Labine and Al “the Bull” Ferrara, to dispatch messages tweaking reporters and industry executives and to continue his campaign to have the veterans committee elect former Dodger first baseman Gil Hodges to the Hall of Fame.

“Gil spent almost five years of his career in the service, and he’s been made to pay a price for it,” Bavasi said, meaning the electorate hasn’t looked beyond statistical totals that don’t reach the level of Hall of Fame first basemen or considered his defensive skills.

Bavasi, of course, was never shy about expressing an opinion, playing negotiating games in an era largely before the introduction of agents and giving reporters opposing spins on a story before sitting back and watching the fallout.

Beyond the style, there is the record.

The Dodgers won eight pennants in his 17 years as general manager, losing two others in playoffs with the dreaded Giants -- both in Brooklyn and Los Angeles.

The Angels won their first two division titles, in 1979 and 1982, after Bavasi agreed to help Autry put his franchise in order financially, although the division titles, Bavasi said in reflection, gave him little satisfaction because the club failed to survive the playoffs’ first round and the “feeling was more like washing your feet with socks on.”

In between Los Angeles and Anaheim, Bavasi helped bring major league baseball to San Diego as president and minority owner of the Padres before the club’s principal owner, C. Arnholt Smith, encountered legal and financial problems, forcing Bavasi to give his 32% to the government to help pay Smith’s back taxes.

“I didn’t think that was fair, but I really had no choice,” he said. “I mean, 30% of nothing is nothing, and that’s what I ended up with.”

No matter where he worked, the door to Bavasi’s office was seldom closed, and he still spins out the stories, the pictures on the wall providing fodder.

Much of the fun occurred across the bargaining table.

Like in the mid-1960s when a Dodger outfielder Bavasi wouldn’t name wanted a $20,000 contract, $8,000 more than Bavasi was willing to pay.

“I told him that I had to leave the office for a few minutes but to sit there and I’d be right back,” Bavasi said. “Tommy Davis was coming off a batting title for us and had just signed for $24,000, and I made sure I left his contract on my desk where the player could see it.

“I knew he’d look at it and figure that if the batting champion was willing to sign for $24,000, his $12,000 offer wasn’t too bad. I walked back in and we made a deal almost immediately.”

Or when Koufax and Drysdale staged their dual holdout before the 1966 season, with Koufax -- “he was the best I ever saw and at today’s salaries you’d have to make him a partner in the club,” Bavasi said -- ultimately receiving $125,000 and Drysdale $110,000.

“I gave Don $10,000 more than I intended at the last minute, and when we won the pennant in ‘66,” Bavasi said, “Walter O’Malley walked in and said, ‘Congratulations on the pennant, but I hope you know that you gave Drysdale your raise.’ ”

Or again in the ‘60s when Bavasi made Maury Wills the highest-salaried Dodger at $80,000 only to have Wills ask for a $5,000 bonus if he made the All-Star team.

“I told him that for $80,000 he should make the All-Star team but I was willing to make a deal with him,” Bavasi said.

“I told him that I’d give him $5,000 if he made the team but that he’d have to give me $5,000 if he didn’t. It didn’t take him long to say the $80,000 was just fine.

“I mean, the one thing I don’t understand today is all the incentives when you’re already paying the guy millions of dollars, and it doesn’t make sense for me to have to buy someone out when he can’t perform any more.

“The total payroll for our ’55 world championship team in Brooklyn was about $500,000, and that team had Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese, Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella, who are all in the Hall of Fame. I can’t figure out where the money is coming from now.

“We used to release guys hitting .250. Now they get $5 million and a multiyear contract. Walter O’Malley would have a heart attack considering he was a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. If there was no money involved he was Jekyll. If there was 15 cents he was Hyde.”

Of course, it was Emil J. Bavasi who was referred to as Economy J. Bavasi at times in his career and who laughed when asked about the $109 million his son, Bill, has guaranteed to Adrian Beltre and Richie Sexson as general manager of the Seattle Mariners this off-season.

“I told Evit that we must have brought the wrong baby home from the hospital,” Bavasi said.

Times change, and with it the economy and structure.

Bavasi said he takes pride in the fact that in no year did a club for which he worked as a general manager lose money.

There were two major regrets, however.

One involved the inability of the Angels to retain Nolan Ryan after the 1979 season. Ryan left as a free agent in what has always been portrayed as a contract impasse resulting from a personality dispute between Bavasi and agent Dick Moss.

Ryan would sign baseball’s first $1-million-a-year deal with the Houston Astros, but Bavasi now claims that Ryan and the club had agreed on a salary figure at slightly less than $1 million and that the breakdown involved Autry’s refusal to provide a $135,000 insurance policy, a spin that Moss said was untrue because there was never an agreement on salary.

“Gene didn’t want to set precedent,” Bavasi said, referring to the insurance policy. “I could have argued, but I also understood his business position. I made the silly statement that we could replace Ryan with two 8-7 pitchers, but I knew it would be difficult replacing him and that Gene loved him.

“I’ve had to take the abuse for that over the years, but that’s fine. Stay around long enough and there’s going to be abuse.”

Bavasi said he had similar regret over his inability to protect Roberto Clemente on the Dodgers’ major league roster in the Rule 5 draft of 1954, and that it was basically a racial decision by a club that had broken baseball’s color barrier with the signing of Robinson. Bavasi said two O’Malley partners, Jim Mulvey, then president of United Artists Studio, and John Smith, chairman of Pfizer, were reluctant to put more minorities on the club. Clemente would have brought the club’s minority representation to 40%.

“Mulvey and Smith operated companies that had a lower minority ratio,” Bavasi said. “They felt that if the Dodgers went to 40% it would have reflected badly on their own companies.”

Clemente, who had played only one season in the Dodger minor-league system, was selected by the Pittsburgh Pirates, whose general manager was former Dodger general manager Branch Rickey. He might have upheld a private arrangement with Bavasi to allow Clemente to slide through, according to Bavasi, if Rickey and O’Malley had not engaged in a heated argument during a National League meeting before the draft.

Clemente, of course, went on to produce a Hall of Fame career, and the Dodgers could only grieve.

“We would have won four more pennants,” said Bavasi, still pained by the would-haves, the regrets, but insistent that his passion for the game and love of talking about it remain stronger than ever.

He was asked about the steroid issue and said players of his era couldn’t afford anything more than a beer, that he still doesn’t understand how a drug that’s a health risk can improve ability to hit a fastball -- “they could have taken the whole prescription and still not hit Koufax,” he said -- and he can’t understand as well why Barry Bonds isn’t pitched inside more.

“I’m not taking anything away from Bonds, but he stands up there with impunity,” Bavasi said. “Guys like Drysdale and Sal Maglie owned the inside half of the plate. It wasn’t until Koufax came to that realization that he became a great pitcher.”

He was asked about the decision by owner Arte Moreno to call his club the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim

“I think there’ll be some backlash from the fans in Orange County, but Arte seems to know what he’s doing,” Bavasi said. “We sold Autry the naming rights [to the Los Angeles Angels] for $300,000 when he first got the franchise in 1961, so I don’t know what the legal problem is.

“I’ll tell you this, if Walter O’Malley had known he could make some money by renaming the club we would have been the New York Dodgers of Brooklyn.

“Of course, we would have been killed long before we left.”

At 90, Bavasi still holds the key to the tape recorder of his mind.

Nine grandchildren and four great-grandchildren help keep him active beyond the pages of a Sidney Sheldon or John Grisham or Ken Follett mystery.

Dr. Robert Kerlan, Walter Matthau, David Janssen and Lee J. Cobb, among his former poker cronies, have passed away, but Bavasi has a new group that plays on Thursdays during Del Mar’s summer racing season, for which Bavasi saves his social security checks.

Of his four sons, Peter and Bob are retired and also live in La Jolla, Bill calls from Seattle for insight occasionally and Chris is director of Indian affairs in Flagstaff, Ariz., where he was mayor for 12 years.

“I’ve been blessed,” Bavasi said, somewhere between 90 and forever.

*

(Begin text of infobox)

A Life in Sports

A look at Buzzie Bavasi’s career:

* 1939 -- Hired as a minor league business manager by the Brooklyn Dodgers.

* 1940 -- Named business manager of Brooklyn’s Class D Georgia Pioneers of the Georgia-Florida League.

* 1941-42 -- Named business manager of Brooklyn’s Class D Valdosta team of the Georgia-Florida League.

* 1943 -- Named business manager of Brooklyn’s Class B Durham team of the Piedmont League.

* 1946 -- Named business manager of Brooklyn’s Class B Nashua team of the New England League.

* 1948 -- Named general manager of the triple-A Montreal Royals of the International League.

* 1948 -- Hired as a scout for the Brooklyn Football Dodgers.

* 1951-68 -- Executive vice president/general manager of the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers.

* 1969-77 -- President of the San Diego Padres.

* 1978-84 -- General manager of the California Angels.

* 1978-99 -- Member of the Veterans’ Committee for the baseball Hall of Fame.

AWARDS

* Minor league executive of the year, 1948

* The Sporting News major league executive of the year, 1959

* San Diego Padres Hall of Fame, 2001

Sources: www.sabr.org,

www.bavasisports.com