It is always more difficult to pry open the doors to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown for executives than it is for players, and that’s the way it should be. This makes it particularly challenging to recommend inclusion of former Dodgers’ general manager Buzzie Bavasi in the Hall this year when the Golden Era Veterans Committee votes Dec. 5.
There are 10 candidates on the ballot and most of them are players with good cases for their candidacy. In such a head-to-head matchup the executive will generally lose out, so much depends this year on how comfortable committee voters are in selecting several people with 75 percent of the necessary vote. Bavasi has the credentials.
A one-time small-college catcher at DePauw University in Indiana, Bavasi got his start in professional baseball as an office boy for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1939. During his career Bavasi rose to general manager of the Dodgers, both in Brooklyn and Los Angeles. During his 18 seasons leading the Dodgers’ front office between 1951 and 1968 the team won eight National League pennants and four World Series. Even before Bavasi rose to the top of the administrative rung, however, he was a significant figure in the Dodgers’ hierarchy under Branch Rickey and he helped pioneer the breaking of the color barrier for the team when Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe and others were on the front lines.
Bavasi’s given name was Emil, but according to family lore he was nicknamed Buzzie as a youngster because he was always “buzzing around” the house with non-stop energy and he kept up the pace as an adult, too.
Far more national attention was paid to Robinson’s milestone integration of the majors than what the Dodgers were trying to do elsewhere. It was part of Rickey’s master plan to integregate several minor leagues as his young black players worked their way up the ladder. But Rickey could not be everywhere and he needed trusted aides to help advance the efforts. Robinson broke in with Montreal, but Rickey wanted Campanella and Newcombe to play in the United States.
It was Bavasi, then general manager of the Nashua, New Hampshire team, to whom he turned and with whom he worked in a location where race relations were much more benign than in the South. Bavasi was a strong supporter of the social justice ideal of doing the right thing in opening up baseball to African-Americans and he labored ceaselessly to make sure the continuing “experiment” worked in New Hampshire. At one point, when members of an opposing team hurled racial slurs at Campanella and Newcombe, to defend their honor Bavasi challenged the entire team to a fight.
Bavasi was the general manager of those “Boys of Summer” teams reported on by Roger Kahn in his best-selling book and that featured not only Robinson, Campanella and Newcombe, but Duke Snider and Pee Wee Reese and later Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale and record-setting base-stealer Maury Wills.
Over the years, in newspaper interviews and in his 1987 autobiography, Bavasi told some hilarious baseball stories about life in the front office at the bottom of the employment scale and at the top. At the bottom he once influenced Dodgers team president Larry MacPhail not to sign a prospect by showing MacPhail a copy of a box score when Bavasi reached the thrower for three hits. Another time he reported his mother telephoing him and hanging up on him after he sold three straight Italian players to raise money. Her comment: “I figured I was next.”
That fire sale occurred when Bavasi became the first general manager of the San Diego Padres. Later he became a vice-president of the Angels. Bavasi was 93 when he passed away in 2008, living long enough to see his sons Peter and Bill also rise to become Major League general managers. Peter held that position with the Toronto Blue Jays and Bill with the Seattle Mariners.
In fact, when Bavasi died it was son Bill announcing the news to the world through his team.