OF A CHAMPION
Yankees life again
the Astros against the Giants. Scoring on a three-run homer by Milt May at Candlestick Park.
Perhaps Watson’s biggest legacy in baseball and in life however, was his compassion and kindness to others.
It took former executive Joe Grippo a while to convince Watson to join the Baseball Assistance Team.
“He was so humble that he didn’t really see how his presence could help,” Grippo said. “He didn’t realize his stature.”
But once he joined B.A.T., which has given more than $42 million to members of the baseball community in need over the last 34 years, he was a hard-charging champion for the charity. Grippo said they spent hours together going from one spring training camp to another and he learned little about Watson’s time as a player or GM, but so much about his heart.
“He was just a kind and humble man,” Grippo said. “He was compassionate and passionate about helping others.”
MLB commissioner Rob cent grad of Emerson College know what he got going. A few years earlier, Mark Sackler, who worked at WMMM in Westport, Conn., had used the Baseball Encyclopedia to
Manfred remembered that side of Watson on Friday.
“I think of all of his accomplishments, the one that sticks out with me was his involvement with the Baseball Assistance Team,” Manfred said in a statement released by the league Friday. “He was crucial to the organization really growing to a level that it was sustaining itself. Hundreds of people who’ve benefited from that charity owe a debt of gratitude to Bob for the good work he did in that area.”
And that compassion and heart showed in the final battle of his life. Telling the News’ Bill Madden he was fighting the fatal kidney disease, Watson said he would not think of taking a life-saving kidney from one of his children.
“Both my kids offered to donate kidneys to me,” Watson told Madden in February 2018, “and I told them both the same thing: ‘I’ve had a good life and I don’t want to take a kidney from young people who really need them and still have their whole lives ahead of them.’ That would be very selfish on my part.” tally how many runs had been scored in big-league history, just for nerdy fun. When he bought his first calculator in 1974 — “I just had to have it,” Sackler recalls now — he revisited the project because he knew the game must be nearing one million runs.
One of his father’s work colleagues knew someone in the promotions business, so a few connections later, Ted Worner Associates was involved and Sackler was part of a growing event. “It took a year to get it going,” he says.
At one point, Sackler, who eventually left broadcasting to work in the pharmaceutical industry, was asked to project the day it would happen. “I came up with May 4,” he said.
Watson, who would go on to hit .324 and make his second All-Star team in 1975, might not have had a chance at the milestone if not for a May 3 rainout that forced a Sunday doubleheader and an early start. Or if May hadn’t seen the counter drop to 1 and decided, “I’m swinging.”
“I was not a power hitter,” says May, now the hitting coach for the Orioles’ Gulf Coast League team who hit 77 homers in his 15-year career. “Maybe I should’ve had that approach more often.”
The Baseball Hall of Fame collected the Candlestick plate and the spikes Watson scored with. Neither artifact is currently on display, a Hall spokesman said. One drawback, Watson recalls: he had just gotten his Kangaroo brand spikes properly broken in, something he says wasn’t as easy to do then as it is now.
Watson did not accept the Tootsie Rolls, instead directing them to the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. He did not want his 4-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter to have that much candy. But the watch, solid platinum, is still a prized souvenir of his terrific 19-year career.
“It’s still in my safety deposit box,” Watson says. “I’ve never worn it. It came in a nice wooden box with a plaque on it. I would never sell it — it’s one of a kind. As far as I’m concerned, when I leave the planet, my son or daughter, whichever wants it, I hope they keep it.”
Watson, now 69, went on to a long career in the game, including a stint as Yankees’ GM when he became the first African-American GM to win a World Series title in 1996. He’s now the vice president of the Baseball Assistance Team, the charity that helps former players.
Those involved in the millionth run can’t help but be curious about the next million — MLB estimates it is approaching the 1.9 million mark and could reach 2 million in 2020.
But plenty of people still bring up the millionth run, Watson says.
“I’ll hear, ‘Hey, you won me a pitcher of beer’ because someone stumped their friends,” he says.
“It wasn’t one of my goals as a player. It’s just something along the way that is a unique happening. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”