Buzzie and the Bull by Ken LaZebnik

Author:Ken LaZebnik [LaZebnik, Ken]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SPO003030 Sports & Recreation / Baseball / History
Publisher: Nebraska

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In 1965 there were no black GMs in baseball. The first African American to serve as a GM was Bill Lucas of the Atlanta Braves. A veteran of Atlanta’s organization, he was promoted to handle the responsibilities of a GM on September, 17, 1976—with an asterisk. His official title was vice-president of player personnel, but his duties were those of a GM. It was a difficult situation—tempestuous owner Ted Turner was prone to actions such as naming himself field manager of the team. (After one day of this experiment the National League president ruled that an owner could not manage his own team. Tragically in May 1979 Lucas suffered a cardiac arrest and died at the age of forty-three. The next African American GM was Bob Watson, hired by the Houston Astros after the 1993 season. Forty-six years after Jackie Robinson had integrated the Major Leagues, there was finally a black GM who officially carried the title.)

If players in the Major Leagues constitute a very small club—fewer than twenty thousand men have ever played in a Major League baseball game throughout the league’s history—then the club of GMs is infinitesimally small. A team carries a twenty-five-man roster up until September, at which point it expands to forty players (thereby fundamentally changing the nature of a team and the game during the crucial final month of the regular season; it is another anomaly of baseball rules, like the DH; it makes baseball the only professional sport to change its rules from league to league and within the time frame of a season). But if there are twenty-five men on a team during a season, there is only one GM. In 1965 just twenty men in all the world held the job of GM of a Major League team. Several of those men were from baseball families, passing along the family business: Lee MacPhail, GM of Baltimore in 1965, was the son of Larry MacPhail, executive with the Reds, Dodgers, and Yankees (and now Lee’s son Andy is president of the Philadelphia Phillies); Chub Feeney was the nephew of Giants’ owner Horace Stoneham; Branch Rickey’s son followed his father into the upper levels of baseball management.

Indeed the skill set required for a baseball GM of the era before free agency was probably best passed down from father to son or mentor to protégé. Today baseball executives subdivide their duties in line with a corporate structure; before the free-agency era the GM relied on a personal feel for the organization and the people within it. Branch Rickey built his system at the Dodgers with his “out of quantity comes quality” philosophy: he trusted that the sheer number of players in the system would result in excellence rising to the top. One could say his effort to integrate Major League baseball was based at heart in this same philosophy: there was a vast pool of immensely talented players that he sought to join his system. In Vero Beach in the late 1940s there would be up to 650 players in spring training.

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