Buzzie Bavasi's reputation as a tricky-dicky kind of general manager was equal only to his not-so-often-discussed parallel reputation as one of baseball's most paternalistically generous executives in the pre-free agency era.
Bavasi was just as likely as his boss Walter O'Malley to slip a player an extra hundred to five hundred after a particularly outstanding game or for stepping up in a swift enough emergency. Dick Tracewski was a small-time supporting player when he was pressed into full-time service for the 1963 World Series. He barely hit his weight, but he played a credible enough second base, and Bavasi rewarded him with the roundtrip tickets to take his wife on a Hawaiian vacation.
But Bavasi learned the hard way that fleet center fielders who generally know the lay of the field and the play of the ball don't always turn out to be fleet off the field. When a washed-up Willie Davis was traded to the San Diego Padres from the St. Louis Cardinals after the 1975 season, the Padres' most compelling reason to keep the former Gold Glove center fielder was so Bavasi (who'd become the team president when the Padres came into the National League in 1969) could get some of his money back.
Bavasi had, according to John Helyar in The Lords of the Realm, loaned or advanced Davis "so much money at Los Angeles that he had to sign him at San Diego after becoming president there just so he could get repaid. The Padres paid Davis $70,000 in his last year, of which Bavasi garnished $35,000."
Davis's life seems not to have gotten too much simpler after he left baseball, which he did following a 43-game 1979 comeback with the California Angels, though his troubles hardly outweighed the fondness with which he has been remembered since his March 9th death in his Burbank apartment. "Everybody liked Willie," said former Dodger owner Peter O'Malley. "I can't imagine someone not liking him. He was memorable. I was fortunate to know him. Just a very likable guy."
Likable guys do unlikable and even shocking things, or so they are accused, as was Davis in 1996, when he stood charged with threatening his parents with a ninja sword and throwing stars unless they fronted him $5,000. Those charges were dropped, but Davis and money seem to have been a mix volatile at best, a mix O'Malley did his best to neutralize when he authorized the Dodgers, whom he still owned at the time, to do whatever they could to help their former center fielder.
Former Dodger pitcher Don Newcombe told reporters at the time that the team wasn't going to front him money unless the reason he needed it was sound, but pondered whether Davis needed medical or even psychological help.
It was too far removed from the Willie Davis whose defense — he might have won more than three Gold Gloves but for the presence of a still-peak Willie Mays and a successor Curt Flood — and batting (unfairly tagged as an underachiever, Davis may well have been a more productive hitter than his statistics suggest but for the hitting conditions of Dodger Stadium in those years, as Bill James has limned in a sterling analysis in The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract) helped his Dodgers to three pennants and two World Series rings.
Some believed Davis, who succeeded Duke Snider in center field, had a streak of laziness. "One time I was asked to help with his bunting," catcher John Roseboro wrote in his memoir, Glory Days with the Dodgers, "and he told me he didn't need any help. 'How many bleeping bunts did you beat out this year?' he asked me. I never tried to help him after that. Willie wasn't willing to work."
Perhaps Davis believed too deeply in the ability he had already. Felipe Alou will tell you of a game in which Davis swatted a single over first and into right, where Alou ran it down and thought he'd finally accomplished what he believed the impossible, bagging Davis trying to stretch a hit.
"I saw the umpire call him out," Alou told the Los Angeles Times, "and I said, 'I finally got that guy trying to stretch a single into a double.' The next day I saw the newspaper and it said Willie Davis had a double. I said, 'I threw him out.' My teammate said: 'We tagged him out. He had passed second.' He was that fast."
And perhaps even a cool, swift center fielder has an occasional streak of over-anxiety to overcorrect. Davis flashed that streak even more fatefully in the fifth inning of Game 2 in the 1966 World Series, against the Baltimore Orioles. With an exhausted, probably ailing Sandy Koufax working more on mind than matter, his fastball tapering off and his curve ball imitating itself, but still matching shutout innings with a rookie named Jim Palmer.
One on (Boog Powell, a single), one out (Davey Johnson, a foul pop), and Paul Blair lofting a fly toward center field and right in the Dodger Stadium sun. Davis lost the ball in that sun and Blair helped himself to second on the miscue. Up stepped Andy Etchebarren, who'd been Koufax's only punch-out to this point (looking at a third strike fastball that made up in movement what it lacked in power), and he, too, lofted one to center field, a little more shallow than Blair's loft. This time, Davis had a bead on the ball ... and dropped it, shockingly, allowing Powell home, before his bid to hold Blair on third went sailing into the dugout, allowing Blair home and Etchebarren to third, from where Luis Aparicio would double him home a strikeout later.
Koufax retired the side on a fly to right from Curt Blefary and Willie Davis — who had driven home the winning run to help Koufax secure a stupefying World Series sweep of the Yankees — wanted to crawl into the nearest available mousehole. Except that Koufax wouldn't let him. The Hall of Famer scurried to the far end of the dugout where Davis planted himself and had to break the grips of a few miscomprehending teammates before slamming himself down next to Davis and throwing an arm around him protectively.
"Willie, forget it," urged the pitcher whose streak of 22 consecutive World Series shutout innings had just been vaporized. "Don't press. Don't let it get you down."
Taking that counsel in life as well as in the Dodger dugout might have made the rest of Davis' life just that much gentler.
Leave a Comment