MLB History: Bob Bailey, the Forgotten “First Bonus Baby”

The term isn’t used much anymore, but the earliest impressive signings of MLB players earned large bonus winners the designation “bonus baby.” It was a term both honorific and slightly mocking – the young player was instantly challenged by the press to produce, to earn his bonus. And though it’s arguable the first real bonus baby was not, in fact, Bob Bailey, Bailey’s life seems to say something about pressure on such fortunate athletes.

This is a trip down memory lane for only the oldest among you, but recalling Bailey was a defining moment for this old person. You know you’re finally old when your memory not only doesn’t agree with your internet sources, but those sources also do not agree among themselves.

I ran across an old Bailey baseball card in a box halfway discarded in a closet recently. It features a photo of the third baseman-outfielder late in his career, in the middle 1970s, after the player had been in The Show for 13 years.

The story of Bob Bailey is a story of baseball’s business and unrelenting pressure

The grim look on his face in the photo – a posed batting stance – suggested those had not all been joyous years.

Bob Bailey had played for three different teams by then, a bit unusual in that era for a player with at least ten years MLB experience, and even more unusual for players who had gotten big initial bonuses. Most of this player’s time in the big leagues pre-dated the death of the reserve clause.

However, his career had started on a very high note. Bailey had been signed out of Wilson High School in Long Beach, California in 1961 by the World Champion Pittsburgh Pirates for a lot of money.

He was only six or seven years older than I was, during a period when I followed the Pirates religiously, clipping newspaper articles and gluing them into a scrapbook. Sometimes, when something really struck me about some bit of information, I decorated a page with a cartoon although I couldn’t draw much then.

But I clearly recall Bob Bailey’s signing and drawing a cartoon of a barrel labeled $100,000 with dollar bills flying into it. There’s no way to check that since the scrapbook was consigned to a dust bin – not of history, but aluminum – long ago.

And that’s where this old person thing comes in. Because that $100K figure was inaccurate. Apparently.