It was November 17, 1966 and, arguably, the most marquee name in baseball — who'd skipped his club's exhibition tour of Japan, saying his arm needed a rest — was about to call it a career. His general manager, Buzzie Bavasi, wanted one small favor.
"Wait until O'Malley comes back from Japan," Bavasi pleaded. "Wait until the winter meetings."
The marquee name replied words (they are long since lost, apparently) to the effect that it was time to stop the pretense. Ask Bavasi four decades later what made that name so different, and he would reply without hesitation, "I don't think Sandy ever told a lie in his life."
All Buzzie Bavasi wanted from Sandy Koufax was a little time to let the Dodgers swing a deal for another pitcher before Koufax, who'd made the decision before pitching his final season, called it quits. All Sandy Koufax could do was go ahead with the press conference he called for the following day and say goodbye, quit the stall.
It left Bavasi steamed for only a short while. It wasn't in Bavasi to hold any kind of grudge, and he had a few reasons to hold a few grudges.
Walter O'Malley wasn't the villain who simply absconded with the Dodgers out of Brooklyn for no better reason than a California gold rush, but neither was he the genuinely benevolent type, either, when it came to a dollar in his drawer. Bavasi, who died May 1 at 93, was a victim more than once, even when he was the occasional player after O'Malley's heart.
Koufax and Don Drysdale inadvertently caused one such occasion. The two pitchers held out famously enough before the 1966 season for a fat three-year split of a million dollars between the pair of them. The holdout made headlines and almost made movie stars out of the two pitchers — they'd signed a deal to act with David Janssen (then still running high in television's The Fugitive) in Warning Shot, Drysdale playing a reporter and Koufax a police detective. It also showed the embryonic Major League Baseball Players' Association what could be done when you negotiated together.
Bavasi's first offer was $100,000 for Koufax and $90,000 for Drysdale. In time, he agitated both pitchers by telling them, separately, that each was a little bit off by asking for so much when the other guy was asking for so little, something neither other guy had actually done.
This was standard procedure for years in the reserve era, and Bavasi wasn't even close to the worst of the lot when it came to exercising such tricks. (If anything, Bavasi was capable of using tricks like that to give a player he liked more than he wanted — he once hoodwinked Gil Hodges into taking $5,000 more than Hodges himself sought, shuffling contracts on the desk until Hodges picked one ... unaware that all those shuffling contracts had the $25,000 Bavasi planned to offer him from the outset.)
As the holdout ate into both pitchers' spring training, the two finally dropped their demand for a million-dollar split and a five-year deal, but insisted on the same pay. Bavasi finally upped the offers to $120,000 for Koufax and $100,000 for Drysdale. When Koufax reminded Bavasi the pair were going for the same nut, Bavasi immediately hiked Drysdale ten thousand more.
With their spring trainings cut down to one exhibition appearance each before the season was to begin, Koufax went out and went 27-9, hung up a 1.73 ERA, and struck out 312 batters. Drysdale went out and went 13-16, hung up a 3.42 ERA, and struck out 177. Bavasi still couldn't complain: Koufax was half the last pennant a Bavasi-operated Dodger team would win ... and Bavasi was counting that $10,000 he'd been promised as a bonus if the Dodgers won that pennant.
"So I got a nice note from Walter at the end of the season after we won the pennant," Bavasi would remember, "Dear Buzzie, too bad you gave your bonus to Drysdale. I had to pay for Drysdale's 10 thousand."
Bavasi's generosity toward players he liked sometimes went to curious extremes. When Willie Davis, once a graceful center fielder, but just about finished by the mid-1970s, was swapped to the San Diego Padres after a so-so turn in St. Louis, Bavasi kept him around at a decent salary ... because Davis was said to be into Bavasi for barrels of money Bavasi had forwarded him during his Dodger years.
"Whenever a player needed a loan," the New York Times' George Vecsey once noted, "Bavasi made it, no questions asked. He could be a thoughtful, decent boss."
He was also decent enough to be unafraid to do what needed to be done, when baseball's color line needed to be broken at last, and the Dodgers were the club to do it. Bavasi was running the Dodger farm at Nashua, New Hampshire, when Jackie Robinson was girding himself for the big step on the Dodgers' Montreal farm. Two on the Nashua club were genial Roy Campanella and bristling Don Newcombe.
"I didn't always do the right thing as a player," Newcombe told reporters upon Bavasi's death, "but Buzzie always gave me a chance to straighten myself out and get back on track." Buzzie would also challenge an entire club, as he once did to a Red Sox farm whose players couldn't resist letting Campanella and Newcombe have it, often obscenely.
Bavasi in retirement never surrendered the game he loved. He bragged about the three or more games a day he would watch from a spacious enough home in La Jolla, California, giving him a postcard view of the Pacific Ocean and a lifetime of memories to keep fresh with each game.
"The Red Sox beat the Yankees, the White Sox beat the Orioles, and now the Braves are playing the Mets," Bavasi wrote in a note to another New York Times columnist, Dave Anderson, who'd made his original journalistic bones covering the Dodgers for the ancient Brooklyn Eagle. "See what you can do when you have a 12-foot satellite dish, DirecTV and cable. Tell me a better way to retire."
You couldn't tell any him such thing.
Bavasi could also be gently witty in owning up to his own mistakes. He'd been foolish enough to let Nolan Ryan walk away from the California Angels (Bavasi ran that club from 1977 through 1984, building its first serious contenders) after the 1979 season, demurring on paying Ryan anything more than the originally proposed $500,000 a year for the five years to come, after Ryan had struggled through a walk year that produced a 16-14 record.
"All I have to do," Bavasi would say infamously enough, "is find a pair of 8-7 pitchers."
He was the first to admit he'd made the biggest mistake of his career as a baseball executive. And he'd admit it over a decade after the fact, when Ryan — now with the Texas Rangers — unhooked the sixth of his seven no-hitters. "Nolan," Bavasi wired Ryan, "some time ago I made it public that I made a mistake. You don't have to rub it in."
Bavasi had ways of atoning for such mistakes. When the Yankees decided Reggie Jackson wasn't Reggie Jackson any longer, Bavasi knew better. He couldn't wait to snap Jackson up for the Angels. "I am a Reggie Jackson fan,” he wrote in a letter disclosed recently, “because he meant a lot to my Angels club and consider him a good friend who belongs in the Hall even though the candy bar named after him should have been Buttterfingers."
Okay, so Bavasi wasn't averse to stealing a punch line from Graig Nettles.
Leave a Comment