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.
Lost in the Mists of Time in One Lifetime?
Was that mistake mine or a Pittsburgh press error? I may not remember it correctly. We’re told memories are all memories, after the first recall, of other memories themselves and, therefore, are mush. But there is some real fog surrounding Bob Bailey’s signing bonus, called “the largest signing bonus ever at the time, a reported $135,000” by Baseball Reference currently.
However, the figure for Bailey’s bonus may have been $175K, the figure used by Baseball Almanac in a historical list of such bonuses. Maybe the Pittsburgh press sources were wrong at the time, leading to my errant cartoon.
The Society for American Baseball Research hedges its bet, essentially indicating the bonus may have been $175K, $150K, or $125K. You would think that somebody could be definitive about a “largest” six-figure bonus, however fleeting that designation. Even though it came in the days that pre-dated the amateur draft, the day Bailey signed was only a bit over 60 years ago.
More, or worse, than that, Bailey’s bonus at the time may have only tied the largest bonus ever because the literal next line in that BA list of bonuses indicates that Denis Menke was given a bonus of $175K in 1958. (This, in turn, is challenged as actually having been $125K.)
It seems that history, circumstance, and poor record-keeping render all such figures meaningless. There are, though, definitely people still alive who recall what a huge sum $175,000 was in 1961, as was a mere $100,000.
After all, when Ted Williams signed for $100,00 in 1957 for his age-38 season, it was breathlessly covered by the New York Times.
Seven years after Bob Bailey signed for at least $100K in June, 1961, my father was feeding a family of seven on about an $18,000 annual salary. His earnings that year, however, were bolstered by a shrewd stock purchase that netted him the princely capital gain of $6000.
Bob Bailey, the Player
However, let’s return to the moment of the signing of Bob Bailey, can’t-miss prospect. About that, SABR is quite definitive. Since the player had to have been a high school graduate, the earliest he could have been signed was 12:01 a.m., June 16, 1961, the day after his graduation.
This, it is asserted, was exactly when Bailey was signed by Pirate scouts Bob Hughes and Jerry Gardiner.
This we’re sure about. Just not the money.
In any event, the player’s history would be written out in definitive figures after that, many of which likely led to that grim look on Bob Bailey’s face as he squinted at a Topps photographer in early 1975 from under his Montreal Expos cap.
The Expos were Bailey’s third of five MLB teams. The ride had been a bit rough for a player rated by Pirates staff as “excellent” in terms of “speed, power and arm” – scout Rosy Gilhousen’s evaluation, according to SABR.
In 1961, the recent high school grad batted only .220 for the Asheville Tourists at the Single-A level, but his nine home runs and 36 RBI in 75 games were good enough to launch him to the Triple-A Columbus Jets for his age-19 season in 1962 and onto the Pirates roster for 14 games at the end of the season.
He hit .167, but he did have two doubles and a triple among his seven hits.
What was going on there? Later, Bailey would recall the pressure that never seemed to let up from his signing bonus. In his last years, he allowed that his bonus was “a great deal,” but his precise description of the stress it afforded him, as recorded by SABR, said something else: “Every ground ball became kind of like a litmus test and every at-bat had that same feel. I always seemed to have something to prove.”
Bailey never matched the 108 RBI he booked in Columbus at the MLB-level, but he was good enough to stay at baseball’s highest level for parts of 17 seasons. Statistically, his best year was his ninth, when he drove in 84 runs for the Expos and posted an OPS of 1.004.
Next. Pirates match 19th century mark. dark
One hopes he enjoyed at least that campaign. Bob Bailey passed away in 2018 at the age of 75.