Lyman Bostock by Powell K. Adam;

Author:Powell, K. Adam;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Unlimited Model
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Emil Joseph Bavasi had seen it all in a lifetime of baseball. A boyhood friend of former National League president Ford Frick’s son, Fred, Bavasi had gotten his start in his early twenties with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Leaving the Dodgers to serve his country in World War II, Bavasi served with distinction in the Italian Campaign, earning a Bronze Star as an infantry machine gunner. Returning to the United States after the war, Bavasi, who had gotten the nickname of “Buzzie” during his youth, was directly involved in Branch Rickey’s effort to integrate the major leagues.

Bavasi had witnessed firsthand the years-long battle that Walter O’Malley fought with New York City’s powerful urban visionary, Robert Moses, in an effort to bring a downtown stadium to the people of Brooklyn. Buzzie was heavily involved as O’Malley made plans to move the Dodgers to Southern California—around the same time that Annie Bostock was making plans to raise her young son in Los Angeles.

Bavasi was there the day a wrecking ball, painted like a baseball, started tearing down Ebbets Field in the winter of 1960. He was there alongside Roy Campanella, who he’d helped find a home in the minor leagues, after he was paralyzed in a devastating car accident on an icy strip of New Jersey highway the winter after the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles. He had been smack in the middle of the contentious negotiations between Dodger pitching sensations Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale in the mid-1960s—the first prominent multiplayer unified holdout in big league history.

Buzzie had helped start an expansion franchise just down the road in San Diego, getting the Padres off the ground in the late 1960s under eccentric owner C. Arnholt Smith. He was in the house the night in June 1970 that Pittsburgh Pirates ace Dock Ellis no-hit the Padres while, according to his own claims, high on LSD.

Bavasi was exactly the type of man Gene Autry wanted running his club: seasoned, savvy, knowledgeable, compassionate. As time went on, Buzzie didn’t resent the new salary escalation, as many owners and executives did. Like Autry, he saw it as the price of doing business. Now, Buzzie was being asked to get the California Angels over the hump in the American League West. While the Angels had developed a passionate group of fans throughout Southern California, they could always be counted on to let down their supporters. The franchise had failed to make a playoff appearance through its first seventeen seasons of existence heading into 1978.

And then there were the tragedies. The Angels knew something about tragedy. No other club in baseball had been beset with so many strange and horrific events. It began just a few years after the Angels had been founded and began playing games down the street from Lyman’s house. Dick Wantz, a talented young rookie pitcher, began struggling with chronic headaches in the spring of 1965. Diagnosed with a brain tumor, the twenty-five-year-old died in May after slipping into a coma. Five years later, in the spring of 1970, standout relief pitcher Minnie Rojas was driving on U.

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