The captain’s diamond days
It was a phone call I never expected to be returned. The call was to George H.W. Bush’s Washington campaign headquarters in June of 1988 when he was vice president under Ronald Reagan and running for president.
Bush was scheduled to make a brief stop at headquarters before resuming his campaigning out West, and I was told by an aide he most likely wouldn’t have time to return the call. I told the aide I was a sportswriter for The New York Times and wanted to talk to Bush about his days as a baseball player at Yale. The odds of a callback seemed slim.
But surprisingly, about an hour later Bush called me back. When I told him why I called and had already interviewed his former Yale teammates, he told me he was glad to talk as long as necessary. And he was delighted when I told him I had talked to third baseman Red Matthews and shortstop Artie Maher.
“How are they?” he asked enthusiastically. “I have to get in touch with both of them.”
Bush, who grew up in Greenwich, died Friday at age 94.
“I wince when some people call George a wimp,” Matthews told me. “That’s not the George Bush we remember. He was a great leader and a fun guy to be around in the clubhouse and dugout.”
Yale baseball was big time when Bush, after his heroic service as a Navy pilot during World War II, entered the university in 1945 while married and with his first son on the way (George W. Bush was born the following year). His team, which he captained during his senior year in 1948, reached the NCAA national championship during both seasons he played, in 1947 and 1948. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa after attending Yale for only three years and also played soccer there.
“We had a very good team with great pitching,” Bush told me. “Frank Quinn was a real star who signed a big bonus with the Boston Red Sox after the 1948 season and four other of our players played in the minor leagues. I had some good days at bat, but was a better fielder than I was as a hitter. I think if I batted left I would have done much better at bat since my left eye is my controlling eye.”
Like future big leaguer Rickey Henderson, Bush was a baseball oddity since he threw left-handed but batted right-handed. After batting .239 in 1947, he hit a respectable but hardly gaudy .264 in 1948. Still, he was good enough to play on one of the best college teams in the country in 1947 when Yale was swept by California in the best two-outof-three NCAA final.
The Eli did much better the following year in the final against Southern California. Forty years later, Bush vividly recalled the first game of that series.
With USC ahead 3-1 in the ninth, Yale loaded the bases with no outs.
“I was on deck as the next batter with Jerry Breen at bat and looking forward to getting up, but Breen hit into a triple play to end the game,” Bush recalled.
Yale came back to win the second game, 8-7 as Bush drove in two of Yale’s runs with a single. Had Yale rallied back in the first game, the Eli
“I wince when some people call George a wimp. That’s not the George Bush we remember. He was a great leader and a fun guy to be around in the clubhouse and dugout.” Red Matthews, Yale third baseman
would have been the national champion. However, Yale lost the third game and the series.
It was the last Yale baseball game Bush played. Bush batted only .167 in the 1948 championship series but handled 32 chances in the field flawlessly.
There was one memorable fielding miscue when he fumbled a pick-off throw from pitcher Tony Good, who later served as a longtime athletic director at Wright Tech in Stamford.
“I had a man picked off once but George dropped my throw,” Good told me some time ago with a smile. “But he was a very good fielder and a very good teammate.”
Legendary Southern Cal coach Rod Dedeaux, who coached the Trojans for 45 years, remembered Bush as “an excellent fielder and a tough out.”
“Our scouting reports indicated he could have trouble with breaking stuff so that’s what we gave him,” Dedeaux told me in June of 1988. “I would definitely put him on my all-opponents team which means he was pretty good. I met George at a game at Dodger Stadium and we reminisced about that triple play in the first game of the 1948 series.”
A highlight of Bush’s glorious 1948 season was meeting Babe Ruth at Yale Field where Ruth presented the Eli captain with the manuscript of his autobiography.
Though I previously interviewed former presidents Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, I found George H.W. Bush special. He was gracious, friendly and a delight in an interview which turned out to be more like a conversation.