Emil J. “Buzzie” Bavasi, the forceful general manager who shepherded the Dodgers through their World Series-studded transition from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, has died. He was 93.
Bavasi, who also was an executive with the Angels and San Diego Padres, died Thursday, it was announced by the Seattle Mariners. Bavasi’s son Bill is general manager of the Mariners. Another son, Bob, is a former owner of the Everett AquaSox.
One of the last of a mid-century generation of wisecracking wheeler-dealers of ballplayers, Bavasi joined the Dodgers in 1938 with a minor league job and stepped down with the Angels in 1984, lamenting that the game had changed irreversibly when agents began representing players in contract negotiations.
Along the way he built Dodgers rosters that reached eight World Series and won four championships, beginning with the team’s only title in Brooklyn, in 1955, through the 1960s glory years in Los Angeles. He also led the Angels to their first two division titles, in 1979 and 1982.
In the years before baseball free agency, Bavasi kept players’ salaries low through a variety of inventive maneuvers. But he was less successful in his two most-publicized battles — the dual holdout of star Dodgers pitchers Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale in the spring of 1966 and the failed attempt to re-sign standout pitcher Nolan Ryan with the Angels after the 1979 season.
Bavasi didn’t want to set a precedent by paying Koufax or Drysdale $100,000 salaries, but Koufax ultimately signed for a then-unheard-of $125,000 and Drysdale got $110,000. The $1-million threshold was crossed 13 years later, when Ryan signed with the Houston Astros after the Angels and Bavasi refused to meet his price.
Ryan, a Hall of Fame member, pitched 14 more seasons and is baseball’s all-time strikeout leader with 5,714.
“I’ve had to take the abuse for that over the years, but that’s fine,” Bavasi told the LA Times in 2005. “Stay around long enough and there’s going to be abuse.”
Although his reputation as a dynamic baseball executive became somewhat tarnished during his time with the Padres and Angels, Bavasi will be remembered best for building championship Dodgers teams while staying within the budget of parsimonious owner Walter O’Malley.
A contact Bavasi made in high school at Fordham Prep became as valuable as his degree from DePauw University in Indiana. The friend was Fred Frick, son of then-National League President Ford Frick. Bavasi intended to go to law school, but Ford Frick introduced him to Dodgers President Larry MacPhail, who gave Bavasi an entry-level job in the team’s minor league department for $35 a week in 1938.
Within two years, Bavasi was made general manager of the Dodgers’ Class-D farm team in Americus, Ga. By 1943, Bavasi had worked his way up to the front office of the Dodgers’ Class B team in Durham, N.C., when he was drafted by the Army and sent to Italy.
He served 18 months in World War II combat as a staff sergeant in a machine gun unit and was awarded a Bronze Star.
Discharged in 1946, he became general manager of the Class B team in Nashua, N.H. Walter Alston, the future Dodgers skipper, was the manager of the team and — in the season before infielder Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier — two of the players were African American, catcher Roy Campanella and pitcher Don Newcombe.
“I’ll never forget one night in Lynn, Mass.,” Campanella said in 1983. “Newcombe had pitched and I hit a home run and we won the game. We were all dressed and sitting in the bus. Buzzie said he was going inside to pick up the check. All of a sudden, we heard Buzzie and their manager fighting. We went in and broke it up. We found out later that their manager” had used a racial slur when he told Bavasi, ‘Without those two (black players), you wouldn’t have won.’ Buzzie went after him.”
Bavasi spent 1947 as an assistant in the Dodgers front office and the next three years as general manager of the Class AAA team in Montreal. His big break came in 1951 when O’Malley took the reins of the Dodgers from Branch Rickey and made Bavasi vice president and general manager.
It took Koufax and Drysdale, then the best pitching tandem in baseball, to join forces to coax significant raises out of Bavasi before the 1966 season. The players realized during a dinner together that Bavasi and O’Malley had lied to them for years, telling one that the other was asking for less money than he really had been.
They each demanded a three-year, $500,000 deal, and did not report to spring training after the Dodgers denied their requests. The holdout dragged on for more than a month before they signed, and although Koufax and Drysdale became the first players to break the $100,000 barrier, they didn’t get multiyear contracts.
After eighth-place finishes in 1967 and 1968, Bavasi left the Dodgers to become president of the expansion San Diego Padres, a tenure that lasted until 1977, then going to the Angels.
As salaries escalated and agents began representing players, Bavasi struggled to adjust. The glow of the Angels’ first division championship in 1979 dimmed quickly when pitching mainstay Ryan signed with the Astros and had harsh words for Bavasi on the way out.
For his part, Bavasi retorted that Ryan could be replaced by “two 8-7 pitchers,” a reference to the right-hander’s 16-14 record in 1979. Later, though, Bavasi admitted that failing to re-sign Ryan was a mistake.
Changes in baseball’s economic structure seemed to perplex Bavasi, and he often became nostalgic.
“Paternalism has gone out of the game,” he said in the 1980s. “You can’t help players anymore. They help you. When I left San Diego, one of my players, George Hendrick, called me and wanted to know if I needed any money. Geez, I used to lend them money.”
Bavasi enjoyed retirement, rarely leaving the comfortable hilltop home in La Jolla, Calif., he shared with his wife, Evit, whom he married in 1941. He is survived by his wife, sons Peter, a former GM for the Padres and Toronto Blue Jays; Chris, Bob and Bill; nine grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
He had plenty of time to reflect on his accomplishments and eventful life in baseball.
“Who else played golf with Babe Ruth, had dinner with Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, and worked for people of the stature of Larry MacPhail, Walter O’Malley, Gene Autry and Ray Kroc?” he said. “There are 20 guys on every team now who make more in a year than I did in 30 or 40, but no one had more fun.”
Funeral arrangements will be private. The family asked that, in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the Baseball Assistance Team or Professional Baseball Scouts Foundation.
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