A baseball love story
To this day, ex-Astros great Bob Watson enjoys beautiful connection with sport
At the age of 73, Astros great Bob Watson still enjoys a connection to America’s pastime.
Baseball lifers are not born out of their love for the sport. They are fashioned from the sport’s love for them.
Baseball loves Bob Watson. Always has, always will.
Theirs has been a beautiful connection.
Maya Angelou said, “Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.”
’Tis an apt descriptor of the bond between Watson and baseball. He broke barriers, leaped hurdles, vaulted fences, crashed through walls — literally and figuratively — to become a symbol of hope for many.
As much as Watson benefited from the sport, America’s pastime realized a significant, inimitable bonus from the relationship.
Watson, whose 1997 autobiography is titled “Survive To Win: The Inspiring Story of One Man Who Overcame Incredible Odds and Came Out a Champion,” has even marveled at his journey from a poor Los Angeles neighborhood to holding the keys to the “Eighth Wonder of the World” and the “House that Ruth Built.”
By “holding the keys,” he meant he has literally had in his pocket a key to every door in the iconic venues of the Astrodome and Yankee Stadium.
The Astros have honored one of their greats by naming a multimillion education center at the Astros Youth Academy in Acres Homes after him. This summer, the franchise will salute Watson by inducting him into the Astros Hall of Fame.
These are the next chapters in a half-century long love story of an all-time Astros and baseball great.
Watson, who was diagnosed with Stage 4 kidney failure nearly four years ago, was overjoyed at Thursday’s unveiling of the Bob Watson Education Center.
In August of 2016, Watson was too weak to attend a 20th anniversary celebration honoring the 1996 World Series champion Yankees, a team that he had a significant role in putting together. The prognosis then was dire.
Watson is a fighter. A champion.
Watson, 73, was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1994. He beat that.
The kidney is a different challenge.
“To be honest with you, I’ve felt better,” Watson said. “But I feel good that I was alive to be here to see the turnout for this building and my name on the building and what it stands for.”
A veritable Astros’ all-star squad was on hand for the ceremony. The franchise has done a commendable job in connecting with former players.
“The ownership here is fantastic,” Watson said. “When he took over the club (Astros owner Jim Crane) asked me what I wanted to do, and I said I would like to be part of something in the community that I could give back and this is how he said he would do that.”
The Astros say their youth academy serves more than 10,000 kids yearly with baseball, softball and educational activities, and the new Watson facility will produce “educational tutoring, college readiness and character-building programs.”
The work there will change lives. I know this neighborhood.
The academy is a couple blocks from the library named after my aunt, Beulah Shepard, where I spent hours and hours as a kid. It is almost across the street from the elementary school I attended in first grade and is around the corner from Lucky Street, where I was hit by a car and almost killed as a 3-year-old. It is up the road from my mama’s house.
Every time I see the first-class facility, I am amazed that it exists. Even more so, now that an educational wing honors Watson, one of my bespectacled sports heroes.
No. 27. The greatest jersey number in Astros history.
Watson. Glenn Davis. Jose Altuve.
After graduating from a veritable baseball factory at Fremont High School in 1964 — a year before the MLB draft began — Watson signed his first contract with the Astros for $2,000.
That wasn’t much money, but it was the start of a profitable life.
Watson’s baseball legacy has long been established thanks to an extensive list of accomplishments in the game.
He hopes the education center at the Astros Youth Academy makes an impact that will surpass his extensive on-the-field and front office accomplishments.
“This is very important because a lot of times kids don’t have any place to go, don’t have any place to look to,” Watson said. “We’re going to have a number of different kinds of classes here. That word ‘education’ out there means just that. We’re going to have things that help them make it in life.”
“Bull,” the nickname most called him when he was a sturdily built first baseman, has an excellent understanding of that.
During the 1981 strike, Watson referred to himself as “plain Robert J. Watson,” a trainee at C.J. Lawrence, a Wall Street brokerage firm.
Quite impressive for a man who had not studied business or finance in college. Or anywhere else for that matter.
In 1999, six years after the Astros hired him as general manager, Watson earned his degree in business, with a concentration in sports management, from Empire State College in New York.
Watson was the first black general manager in baseball history. (Bill Lucas was the first black man to take over an MLB team’s front office operations when he was named vice president of personnel for the Atlanta Braves in 1976. Lucas had the duties, but Braves owner Ted Turner kept the title of GM.)
Watson’s place in history isn’t about being at the right place at the right time. It’s being an outstanding player and the right man to take advantage of the places he has been.
He left the Astros and led the Red Sox in hitting the next season, then led the Yankees in hitting the year after that.
Watson is the first player to hit for the cycle in both the National and American Leagues, the first black general manager to win a World Series and the man who led the Yankees to a Series after an 18-year drought.
OK, there is one significant “right place, right time” for Watson. Of all the players to have stepped onto a Major League Baseball diamond, Watson won the national race to score the 1-millionth run in the league’s history.
It happened on May 4, 1975, 99 years after the sport’s first official run. Watson scored on Milt May’s three-run homer the day after an Astros-Giants game was rained out at Candlestick Park.
His teammates screamed at him to run faster because a player in another game could score it first. (Watson hit .324 and was an All-Star that season.)
Thanks to a promotion, he was awarded 1 million Tootsie Rolls, which he donated to Boys & Girls Clubs of America.
“As the (‘Saturday Night Live’) joke says, baseball has been very, very good to me,” Watson said.
And Watson has been very good to the game.
It has been a mutual love.