It Was in the Stars for Him

The team bus left without him, not that anyone would have known who he was. So there he stood, an intern in an empty clubhouse, wondering how he would explain how he had failed at the simple task of bringing the box score back from a spring training game.

From the vantage point of the top of the baseball world, Tim Purpura can tell the story today and laugh. But at the time, in the first weeks of his internship with the Angels, he wondered whether his budding sports career was over.

“I felt I screwed up completely,” he said.

No worries, kid. He put two stable careers on hold to pursue his dream, and today is a role model for anyone who wants to work in sports but isn’t good enough to play.

Fifteen years after that internship with the Angels, and in his first year as a general manager, his Houston Astros are in the World Series. In the sports industry, his determination isn’t rare, but his success is.

His first boss in the business -- Bill Bavasi, then the Angels’ minor league director, now the Seattle Mariners’ general manager -- said he immediately noticed how Purpura kept his eyes and ears open and his mouth shut, except to say yes to every task thrown his way.

“He was highly intelligent, but he had a good way about him and wasn’t pushy,” Bavasi said. “He took every opportunity given to him and made something of it. He’s blessed with brains, personality and common sense. That’s a heck of a package.”

He was far from the typical college intern, which makes his story all the more impressive. He was 31, with a good job and the prospect of a better one. During the day, he worked as dean of students at UC San Diego, handling residence halls and student activities.

At night, he attended law school, partly on the advice of a baseball guy -- Roland Hemond, the longtime general manager of the Chicago White Sox.

“Someday,” Hemond had told Purpura, “lawyers are going to run this game.”

Purpura got Bavasi’s name from a friend of a friend and wrote him about a summer internship. Bavasi told him to come to spring training, in a facility so cramped the Angels set up trailers for office space.

Bavasi sent him to rent a crib for his daughter. Mike Port, then the Angel general manager, sent him for sandwiches and coffee. Tim Mead, the publicist, sent him from Phoenix to Tucson to bring back that box score.

But he sat in on every meeting he could, listening to the evaluations that determined which players the Angels promoted and which ones they released. He was intrigued and enchanted, so he finished his law degree and applied for baseball jobs that included paychecks.

By that time, the Angels had fired Port, and major league officials asked him to launch the Arizona Fall League, a no-glamour developmental league with crowds in the dozens. Port hired Purpura as an assistant.

“He handed me a folder an inch and a half thick,” Port said. “He said those were his rejection letters. There were 92 of them.”

In 1994, after two years with the AFL, Purpura joined the Astros, as an assistant in their minor league department. He worked his way up, hoping for the chance to run a team.

The Angels called in 1999, looking for a general manager after Bavasi resigned. Purpura got an interview, but he suspects his ties to Bavasi doomed him at a time then-president Tony Tavares vowed to purge the organization of the coaches and scouts he believed Bavasi had kept around way too long.

“Coming in, I was really excited,” he said, “but I realized they were going to go in a different direction and I wasn’t going to be a good fit. So many of the people who were there when I started weren’t there anymore. I saw they were going to remake the direction of the franchise.”

All’s well that ends well. Tavares hired Bill Stoneman, and three years later the Angels made their first appearance in the World Series. And, when Gerry Hunsicker resigned as Houston’s general manager last year, Purpura was promoted to replace him, and the Astros are in their first World Series. Sometimes, dreams do come true.