Always stepping up to the plate
Late Astros star Bob Watson gave to baseball as much it gave to him.
Bob Watson spoke of baseball with a rapture of one who loves beautiful music.
But Watson’s relationship to the sport was not that of a passive listener.
When it comes to baseball, Watson was an artist who played with the best of them. A band leader who built great teams. A trailblazer who opened the door for others.
The game gave him so much. Likewise, he gave so much to the game.
Watson, the first black man to be named general manager of a Major League Baseball team and a 2020 inductee into the Astros Hall of Fame, died Thursday. He was 74.
His playing career, an inspiration to many bespectacled youngsters in Houston, is a small part of his legacy.
Watson liked to joke that when he played with the Yankees, he was often mistaken for Reggie Jackson, but Jackson never was mistaken for him.
Jackson wore glasses, too. But he was no Bob Watson.
Watson was ours. He belonged to Houston.
A leader on every team he played, Watson was destined to leave a mark on the world of baseball.
In explaining his leadership style to the Miami Herald during spring training in 1984, his last as a player, Watson, who hit .295 for his career and an impressive .309 at age 37, said he led by example and was not “a rah-rah guy.”
“My high school coach told me one thing I’ll never forget — he said he would rather see a sermon than hear one,” Watson said.
When Watson spoke, people listened. Of course, that he once worked for E.F. Hutton made that the natural joke in the clubhouse.
“Bull” as he was known, was bigger than life on the field — standing tall and swinging a 40-ounce bat — but he wasn’t a self-promoter.
As his accomplishments grew, friends and family were more concerned that he received his due recognition than he was.
Watson may not have set out to make history, but his place in the game didn’t come by accident.
Desire and determination controlled the destiny.
Even the luck-of-the-draw event that resulted in him scoring the one millionth run in MLB history would have been just a footnote had he not hustled his way around the bases to score.
On that day, 45 years ago this month, Watson rushed down the third-base line to cross the plate in San Francisco just a few seconds ahead of Dave Concepcion of the Reds, who was running full speed around the infield after hitting a home run in Cincinnati.
Watson didn’t fall into a management position following a playing career that included parts of 19 major league seasons. When he retired in 1984, he became the hitting coach for the Oakland A’s, but already had bigger plans.
During his job interview with Oakland, he told GM Sandy Alderson just that.
“Bob said, ‘I want to sit in your seat,’ ” Alderson said. “I liked that.”
Watson coached hitting on the field and coached himself into the front office. Four years later, the Astros hired Watson as an assistant GM, and in
1993, he became the first black man to have the title of general manager of an MLB team.
Two years later, he moved to New York and helped build the Yankees’ late-1990s dynasty. The Yankees won the 1996 World Series with him running the show.
Born a year before Jackie Robinson broke the majors’ color line, Watson was just 39 when he walked through the door to the top spot in the front office.
One hundred years of baseball, and finally, a team saw fit to hire a black man to run a ballclub.
Watson would say he wasn’t any more special than others who could have been the one, but with his intelligence, knowledge of the game, ability to communicate at all levels and the respect of those who had been around him, he was an excellent choice.
Watson almost didn’t have the opportunity. He thought of quitting the sport in the face of the blatant racism he dealt with early in his career.
But, as per the title of his 1997 autobiography, which was written after a bout with prostate cancer in 1994, he survived to win.
Watson, a Southern California kid, came of age in baseball at a time when skin color mattered.
He was a teenager in 1965 when he signed on for his first minor league assignment with Salisbury (N.C.) in the Western Carolinas League.
Watson and teammate Edmundo Moxey, a black man from the Bahamas, weren’t able to partake in a local restaurant promotion that awarded a free steak dinner to any player who hit a home run, because, well, you know.
One evening, Watson and Moxey made the mistake of attending a movie in town. When they walked out of the theater, they spotted a group in strange attire.
“I thought to myself, ‘This is a funny time for a parade,’” Watson told the Chronicle in 1994.
Of course, those hooded men weren’t part of a parade.
Watson and Moxey ran into the woods and hid until they could escape under cover of darkness.
A few years later, Watson told his wife Carol that he was giving up the sport and would return to Los Angeles to take a job as a technical illustrator.
The frustration of the Astros’ horrendous 1969 start — a 4-20 mark through April, with Watson hitting only .136 in nine games, all losses — was exacerbated when he was sent down to the minors to be converted back to catcher because of the squad’s need at the position.
He left a Marriott in Atlanta, where the Astros had been swept in a series in which he didn’t play, to go to Double-A Savannah (Ga.) of the Southern League. When Watson arrived, a taxi driver informed him that he would gladly take him to the Hilton, but it wouldn’t matter.
Watson wasn’t allowed to stay there, or at any other decent hotel in town. He slept on a training table at the stadium.
A couple weeks later, Watson left Georgia, intending to retire. When his plane stopped in Houston for a layover, he was met by Tal Smith, then the Astros’ minor league director.
Smith told Watson the Astros were bringing him back up to the big leagues. He stayed there for the next 15 years.
“I think some of a lot of the success that I’ve had in my life goes back to the way I was raised,” Watson said. “I’ve always been able to overcome a lot of things because of the way my grandmother and grandfather taught me about working hard and being able to handle the bad things that happen in life as well as the good things.”
There was far more good in Watson’s life than bad. He gave a lot of credit for that to the sport he loved.
“I have to thank baseball, because without baseball, none of this would be possible,” he said at a ceremony for the opening of the Bob Watson Education Center at the Astros Youth Academy in March.
The game owes thanks to Watson as well.
As first black general manager, Watson left indelible impact on game he loved, Astros