You Can’t Hit the Ball with the Bat on Your Shoulder:
The Bobby Bragan Spirit

By Bill McCurdy

On Friday morning, February 24, 2006, I went to our backyard patio with my cell phone to call Bobby Bragan in Fort Worth for a scheduled interview about his life in baseball. It was a special moment for me because of Bobby Bragan’s unchangeable place in my personal baseball memory bank. You see, 58 years earlier, Bobby Bragan already had become the second name I remembered best as an 11-year old kid following the Houston Buffs of the AA Texas League closely for the second season in a row. The first name in my mind back in 1948 was, and always will be, Solly Hemus, the fiery pepper pot second baseman of the 1947 Houston Buff champions of the Texas League and Dixie Series. I would remember Mr. Bragan initially for a painful reason. As the manager of the 1948 Texas League champion Fort Worth Cats who dethroned my Buffs, Bobby Bragan is the fellow who taught me that other cities and ball clubs could win pennants too.

Bragan’s ’48 Cats, true to Dodger farm club style, were a bunch of talented, running stars-in-the-making who could also stop the opposition with a pitcher like the young future Dodger great, Carl Erskine. Back then, I mainly worried about the Buffs’ inability to stop the Cats from stealing bases. In my kid’s mind, base stealing always seemed to be how the Cats beat my Buffs. “Dad,” I remember asking on our way to a 1948 Cats-Buffs game in Houston, “what are the Buffs going to do to keep Fort Worth from stealing us blind again today?” I recall my dad chuckling as he answered: “Probably not much.”

With iconic respect for Bobby Bragan, I felt in awe to be calling the man whose name I had associated with my earliest baseball heartaches. By the time we had finished talking, an hour later, I felt that I had known Bobby Bragan personally all my life. At 88-years of age, the man simply exudes warmth, wisdom, baseball savvy, hope, and humor in large and infectious portions. Spend time with Bobby Bragan and you cannot keep from feeling better about everything. If you don’t, you’re not listening.

Thanks for the hour, Bobby. I wish it could’ve been a lifetime, but I will take what I was meant to get. Take care of yourself too. The world needs the presence of your goodness.

At 9:30 AM, I called Fort Worth.

“This is Bobby Bragan,” the soft-speaking voice on the other end of the line answered.

I introduced myself, explaining quickly my memory of him from the days of the 1948 Forth Worth Cats. Bobby’s response seemed to smile back at me over the phone. “That’s wonderful,” he said. “It’s nice to be remembered from those early days.”

Bobby knew of me from my work with the Texas Baseball Hall of Fame. We had spoken in passing at a few functions, but this interview was the first time we had ever talked at length about anything. I told Bobby that I wanted to congratulate him in behalf of all of us at the Texas Baseball Hall of Fame in Houston on his recent induction into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame in Waco.

“It only took me 88 years to get there,” Bobby said, “But I was deeply appreciative of the honor.”

Deeply appreciative? How about humble too.

When Bobby Bragan was inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame on February 15, 2006, it marked the 8th time that he had been selected for induction into someone’s Hall or Wall of Fame. In addition to our own Texas Baseball Hall of Fame (1981), Bobby has been honored previously by inductions into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame (1980), the Fort Worth Sports Wall of Fame (1988), the P.O.N.Y. League Baseball Wall of Fame (1989), the Cuban Baseball Hall of Fame (1997), the Kinston, North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame (1998), and the Hurst-Euless-Bedford Sports Hall of Fame (2001).

It didn’t take long for us to rush into a wide range of baseball subjects and other matters.

“Baseball has been my life for seven decades,” Bobby states. “The only real difference in the game today is free agency and the big money that’s involved.” Speaking bluntly, Bobby adds that he has no answer for what could be done, if anything, to bring back the kind of closeness that existed between players with each other and their fans during the days of the reserve clause and lower pay.

“Big money sets people apart from the everyday person,” Bobby says. “Once money becomes a big part of the equation, it doesn’t go away. Big salaries and free agency are what baseball today is all about. I don’t see that there’s anything we can do about that. That’s just how it is.”

Although Bobby understands from personal experience the financial shortfall that players suffered under the reserve clause, he still misses certain aspects of the game that existed under the old system.

“Back in my playing days,” Bobby says, “fans connected certain players with certain teams. Stan Musial was the Cardinals. Joe DiMaggio was the Yankees. Ted Williams was the Red Sox. And Pee Wee Reese was the Dodgers. That ability to connect players to certain clubs helped the fans feel more loyalty to their various hometown teams. It’s not like that now. Today everybody knows that you may lose your best players next year to a club that’s willing to pay them more money. The idea that a guy is playing for your club out of loyalty these days is a real hard sell.”

The more you listen to Bobby reminisce about his own life and playing career, the more you realize that he isn’t talking about taking baseball back to the stone age of the reserve clause system. He’s talking about his longing for a time when club loyalty based on a love for the game itself, and not money, was the driving force in the lives of almost all professional baseball players. He’s talking about a time when ballplayers just assumed that they would have to work at other jobs in the off-season like every other Average Joe who wasn’t lucky enough to get paid something to play baseball for half the year. He’s talking about a time when players traveled together on busses and trains, and also lived baseball around the clock with each other during the season. He’s talking about a time when club loyalty and camaraderie never obscured the biggest fact in a baseball player’s life. If a player didn’t get out there and perform in his job every day, some other guy would be wearing his jock strap in the next game. He’s talking about a time when guys played hurt to keep from losing their spots on a baseball club roster. He’s talking about baseball as a way of life, and not as a job that makes millionaires of its biggest stars.

“I broke into the big leagues with the Phillies as a shortstop in 1940,” Bobby says, “but I turned ‘Dodger Blue’ pretty fast when I was dealt to Brooklyn before the 1943 season.”

Small wonder.

The Philadelphia Phillies of the three Bragan years (1940-1942) were unarguably one of the worst clubs of all time, finishing in last place each season, and losing 103, 111, and 109 games as the signature on their ineptness. Over the same period, the Brooklyn Dodgers were on the move upward under general manager Branch Rickey and field manager Leo Durocher. The evolving prototype for writer Roger Kahn’s 1955 Boys of Summer was already well underway over a decade earlier. The 1940 and 1942 Dodgers had wrapped 2nd place finishes around a 1941 National League pennant.

This baseball tale of two cities was at first somewhat lost upon the 25-year old Bobby Bragan who joined the Dodgers in the winter of 1942. Because Mr. Rickey had been complimentary to Bobby over his play at Philadelphia, young Bragan went to see the Dodger general manager about getting a raise from his $5,500 salary with the Phillies. Going into the meeting with Rickey, young Bragan also assumed that the richer Dodgers probably wouldn’t have any trouble giving him a raise. He even pointed out to Rickey that he felt that a pay raise for 1943 seemed both deserved and affordable to a rich club like the Dodgers.

“Mr. Rickey taught me a lesson in psychology that day,” Bobby says. “By the time I got out of that meeting, Mr. Rickey had convinced me that I was just lucky to be sitting on the Dodger bench and no longer playing full-time in Philadelphia and still getting the same money I made in 1942. I signed for no raise over my $5,500 salary.”

Branch Rickey gets Bobby Bragan’s vote as the greatest figure in baseball history. “For breaking the color line by bringing Jackie Robinson in to play for the 1947 Dodgers and for his genius development of the farm system approach to player development, there’s no question in my mind that Branch Rickey stands alone as the most important person in baseball history.”

As a native of Birmingham, Alabama, it is well documented in many places, and in his own autobiography, You Can’t Hit the Ball with the Bat on Your Shoulder, that Bobby Bragan was one of the 1947 Dodgers who first resented and resisted the idea of playing baseball with a black teammate. According to Bragan, word got back to Mr. Rickey that he was one of the Dodger players who were having trouble with the idea.

“Mr. Rickey called me into his office to talk about Jackie Robinson joining the Dodgers in 1947.” Bobby says. “He made it abundantly clear that skin color was not going to stop him from putting the best players he could find on the field as Dodgers. He also made it clear that anyone who had trouble with that commitment, or who stopped playing his best as a Dodger in protest, would be gone.”

“I got called into Mr. Rickey’s office to talk about the matter,” Bragan says. “I was scared to death,” he adds. “As a bench player, I was afraid that I was about to get toasted and I sure didn’t want that. I loved being a Dodger and wanted to stay with Brooklyn.”

“In that meeting with Mr. Rickey, I mainly listened,” Bobby relates. “After Mr. Rickey had made his stand on Jackie Robinson totally clear, he flat out asked me, ‘Bobby, now that you know my position, can I still count on you to play your best anytime you take the field for the Dodgers?’”

“Yes sir, Mr. Rickey,” I answered. “You can count on me.”

What happened after that meeting is beautifully described in Bragan’s autobiography, but it also comes through clearly, and genuinely, when you talk with this good man. After a year of being pretty standoffish with Jackie Robinson in 1947, Bragan, and most of the other Dodgers, began to bond with the first black man to integrate organized baseball since the 19th century.

Jackie Robinson’s ability and courage under fire were too great to ignore. Bobby Bragan’s basic goodness and big heart were too strong not to open. By 1948, Bobby Bragan and Jackie Robinson had become close friends. It was a friendship bond that would endure until Robinson’s death in 1972.

Bragan’s list of greatest players starts with Jackie Robinson. “Jackie was the best player I ever knew as a teammate,” Bobby says. Willie Mays, followed closely by Joe DiMaggio, get Bragan’s vote as the greatest players of all time, and Hank Aaron draws the nod from Bobby as the greatest player he ever managed or coached. When it comes to managers, Bobby’s choices line up as follows in this order: Bobby Valentine, Tony LaRussa, and Joe Torre. Valentine also occupies another special place in Bobby’s heart.

“Every year we have our annual fundraising dinner in Fort Worth for the Bobby Bragan Youth Foundation,” Bobby says. “We call it the “Lifetime Achievement Gala” and every year we honor someone special as we also raise funds for our youth programs. In 2005, our honoree was Willie Mays.”

“Well, every year that we do our benefit dinner,” Bragan emphasizes, “Bobby Valentine comes in from wherever he is to serve as our auctioneer. I have learned that I can always count on Bobby Valentine to be there for us — and to get good results too. In 2005, for example, Valentine made an out-of-the way trip to be with us before he left for Japan, where he is now managing. When Willie Mays then took off his coat and tie that night, and offered his whole suit up for auction from the head table, Bobby Valentine jumped on the opportunity and got a closing bid from a lady of $20,000 for it.”

“Fortunately,” Bragan chuckled, “the lady who won the bid turned right around and gave the suit back to Willie Mays without ever removing it from his body. It’s a good thing she did. Willie would’ve looked a little silly up there on the dais had the winning bidder not been so generous.”

Bobby Bragan is best remembered today as a big league manager (Pittsburgh Pirates, 1956-57; Cleveland Indians, 1958; and Milwaukee, 1946-65 / Atlanta Braves, 1966) and for a successful previous tour as a minor league manager (Fort Worth Cats, 1948-52; and Hollywood Stars, 1953-55). He is so much more than the sum of these jobs, but we’ll get to those points before we’re done here.

“Everything you’ve ever heard about managers being hired to be fired is true,” Bragan affirms. “I got my first shot at managing the Fort Worth Cats in 1948 when Mr. Rickey asked me to take over for Les Burge at the Dodger farm team in the AA Texas League. My playing career as a major leaguer was pretty much done, but Mr. Rickey gave me a way of staying in the Dodger system.”

“The ’48 Cats were good. Your memory serves you well,” Bobby said to me directly. “We finished in 1st place with a record of 100-48 and then we won the league playoff championship too, as I’m now sure you recall.”

Yep. I did.

“When I took on my first big league managing job at Pittsburgh in 1956,” Bragan fondly recalls, “I inherited a club that looked like it had a great chance of becoming something special. We had young players like Roberto Clemente and Bill Mazeroski and everything looked bright for a rosy future. Unfortunately, I got fired the next year when the rose didn’t bloom fast enough. Mired in 8th place, the Pirates fired me and hired a former infielder named Danny Murtaugh to take my place. Three years later, Murtaugh took the Pirates to the 1960 World Series championship over the Yankees. As you know, that was the year of Maz’s walk-off homer in Game Seven.”

“In my second run at Cleveland in 1958,” Bobby continues, “we didn’t even have a chance to plant the seeds of growth. I got fired after 37 games. We were in 5th place and only five games under .500, but I still got the axe. Once more, I was replaced by a former infielder. This time the guy was Joe Gordon.”

“In my last big league managing job with the Braves,” Bragan goes on, “we didn’t play all that well, but I did get to manage some more future Hall of Famers in Warren Spahn, Eddie Mathews, and the great Hank Aaron. By the time I was fired from the Braves in 1966, the club’s first year in Atlanta, I had established three franchise records: I was the last manager for the Braves in Milwaukee, the first manager for the Braves in Atlanta, and the first Atlanta Braves manager to ever be fired. One last time, I was replaced by another former infielder named Billy Hitchcock.”

“Getting fired is just part of a manager’s life,” Bobby concludes. “I just happened to be a guy who was always followed by former infielders.”

In 1960, Bobby Bragan returned to the Dodgers as a coach during their third year in Los Angeles. He later served as a member of the first coaching staff for the 1962 Houston Colt .45’s during their first year of existence.

Former 3rd baseman and original Houston Colt .45 Bob Aspromonte remembers Bobby Bragan fondly from the 1962 season. In a recent conversation we had about Bragan, Aspromonte recalled that first year with the Colt .45’s: “We were at spring training out in the desert in a place called Apache Junction, Arizona. We were miles from civilization and we were a bunch of mostly young guys with no place to go at night. Bobby kept us entertained in the evenings with his baseball stories. He had an endless stream of them.”

Aspromonte’s words came back to me as I talked to Bobby Bragan for this article. The man is a fountain of game-wise and entertaining baseball information, and many of his stories simply flow from his enduring admiration for the mind of Branch Rickey.

“When I was managing at Fort Worth,’ Bobby explains, “I learned fast that Mr. Rickey wanted his minor league managers to take responsibility for speaking up about the players they liked and didn’t like. If you were to stall around, he would put you through the “lost at sea” test and make you choose one player over another on close calls about who to keep and who to let go.”

“It happened to me when he asked me about a couple of pitchers I had on my roster at cutting down time. Their names aren’t important now, but they were then. I was going to get to keep the one I liked and Mr. Rickey was going to either waive or trade the other. He demanded that I pick one over the other.”

“Mr. Rickey,” Bobby reports saying, “I just can’t make up my mind. There’s so little difference between these two guys.”

“At that point,” Bragan adds, “Mr. Rickey put me out at sea. ‘OK, Bobby, you’re out at sea in a boat with both these pitchers when they both fall overboard. You want to help them both, but you can only save one. Which one is it going to be?”

“I got the point,” Bobby says. “I right away named the pitcher I wanted to keep.”

Bobby Bragan was on a roll with Branch Rickey stories.

“In 1950,” Bragan explains, “Pepper Martin was the manager of the Dodger farm club in Miami. He had a pitcher on his roster with two problems from the previous season. One problem was a broken arm that may not have been healing right. The other problem had to do with alcohol. The guy drank too much.”

“Mr. Rickey had all of us managers together in a spring training meeting down in Florida when he turned to Pepper Martin and asked about one of the problems with this particular player. The trouble was,” Bobby says, “Mr. Rickey’s scholarly language sometimes went over somebody’s head.”

“Pepper,” Bragan reports Rickey asking of Martin, “how is so-and-so’s calcification problem coming along?”

“Just fine, Mr. Rickey,” Bobby reports Pepper Martin answering. “I haven’t seen him take a drink all spring.”

The more he talks about his Brooklyn days, the more Bragan’s memories kindle into stories that all burst brightly into a Dodger blue flame.

“Tommy Lasorda really is the bluest of all us Dodger Blues,” Bragan states clearly. “Tommy has even carried it forth to planning his own funeral in Dodger detail. He already has his epitaph carved on his marker. It reads: ‘Dodger Stadium was my headquarters. Every ballpark was my home.’ It’s also Lasorda’s plan to have an information case installed at his gravesite that will each year post the current Dodger season schedule. That way, all visitors to his grave will always be advised as to when they may catch the next Dodger home game.”

In spite of Bragan’s admiration for Lasorda’s Deepest Dodger Blue pedigree, Bobby had a moment on the field of play that Tommy would’ve given his eyeteeth to have known as a big leaguer. It happened in the 1947 World Series.

By 1947, Bragan was nearing the end of his career as a backup catcher for the Dodgers. He spent most of his game time warming up relievers in the bullpen. Then a funny thing happened. The Dodgers won the National League pennant, setting themselves up to play the New York Yankees in the World Series.

Bobby’s excitement over the remote possibility of actually playing in a World Series breached containment. He made arrangements to bring his parents, George and Corinne Bragan of Birmingham, Alabama, all the way up to New York in the hope they might see him get into a game.

By Game Six, the Dodgers trailed the Yankees, 3 games to 2, and were facing the prospect of elimination. In the top of the 6th inning at Yankee Stadium, the Dodgers trailed the Yankees, 5-4, and things looked grim. Bragan was down in the Dodger bullpen, warming up pitchers. Bobby had yet to see action and it seemed likely that his chances for a World Series appearance had blown away with the leaves of another colorful autumn in New York.

Then it happened. The Dodgers got two runners on base and the call went out to the bullpen from Brooklyn manager Burt Shotton. With everything on the line, Shotton wanted to put Bobby Bragan into the game as a pinch hitter for pitcher Ralph Branca.

Can you spell cardiovascular palpitations?

Bragan flipped down his catcher’s mitt and exited the bullpen for a brisk jog to the Dodger dugout and bat rack. Running across the outfield grass of the most legendary ballpark in America, Bobby couldn’t keep from stealing a glance at what he was up against as he neared the infield. Out on the mound for the Yankees stood Joe Page, the best reliever in baseball during the 1947 season. Bobby’s heart pumped Dodger blue blood as never before. Bobby Bragan’s biggest playing moment finally had arrived and it was playing its way out on the biggest stage that baseball has to offer.

Bobby Bragan best describes what happens next on page 131 of his book, You Can’t Hit The Ball with The Bat On Your Shoulder:

“In my mind, the game is still being played. I can see the sky, smell the grass, hear the crowd. I can also feel my knees shaking. They were, hard. Major leaguers get nervous in the same way anyone else would. The difference is we can perform anyway.

“With a count of one ball and two strikes, I hit a line drive down the left field line. It might have been five feet fair, and I pulled into second base with a double. My RBI tied the score. Immediately, Burt Shotton sent in Dan Bankhead to run for me. I trotted off the field into our dugout, to be met there by teammates who pounded me on the back. It was wonderful. Euphoria.”

Because of the door opened by Bragan’s game-tying double, the Dodgers went on to score three more runs and take the lead in the top of the 6th of Game Six. They would go on to tie the Series with an 8-6 win over the Yankees. Sadly, the Dodgers would lose the 1947 World Series by dropping Game Seven, 5-2, at Yankee Stadium the following day.

How did Bobby’s parents feel about their son’s World Series heroics in his only plate appearance in Game Six? Well, they were happy about it, of course, but they missed seeing the whole thing. Having long since abandoned the idea that their son would even get into a game, George and Corinne Bragan were on a restroom break when Bobby came to bat.

“Nothing’s perfect,” Bobby now says in retrospect.

You’re right, Bobby, nothing’s ever perfect for people who get out there and try, but imperfection is the price we pay for making the effort. People who worry about striking out never go to bat and, in your own way of thinking, people who hit the ball have the guts to risk missing it because they understand your basic philosophy: You can’t hit the ball with the bat on your shoulder.

Bobby Bragan is a living treasure and one of baseball’s renaissance men. He has taken a swing at more things for the good of baseball and life in general than we can possibly hope to adequately summarize in a single article.

Following his playing and managerial career, Bragan served for six years (1970-1976) as President of the Texas League. On his watch, the first experimental application of the designated hitter was tried in the Texas League. Bobby still likes the “DH”, but he recognizes that many people in baseball do not.

“What I don’t like about the DH,” Bobby says, “is the way it has split the Major Leagues into two brands of baseball. I would prefer to see baseball either adopt it totally or get rid of it completely. It’s hurting the game to let it go on as is, and I don’t like that one bit.”

On the heels of his Texas League presidency, Bobby Bragan then served for two years (1977-1979) as the President of Minor League Baseball. Then he followed that service with 24 years of public relations work for the Texas Rangers. Today, at age 88, he heads up the Bobby Bragan Youth Foundation in Fort Worth, a non-profit organization that he started to raise thousands of dollars annually in college scholarship money for deserving high school students. A visit to the foundation’s website at http://www.bobbybragan.org  will be worth your time.

Bobby Bragan and his six brothers all have played organized baseball. Brother Jimmy played minor league ball and even made it to the big leagues as a coach. Brothers Frank, Lionel, and Peter also played minor league baseball, and Peter today also owns the professional club in Jacksonville, Florida. Brother George played semi-pro ball and brother Walter played service baseball during his military career.

There is also a musicality that lives within the soul of this 3rd son and 4th child of nine children born to George and Corinne Bragan in Birmingham, Alabama. During the early 1960’s, Bobby Bragan appeared in three musical productions at the Casa Manana Theater in Fort Worth, playing featured roles in Promises, Promises, Tom Sawyer, and Damn Yankees.

You guessed it. Bobby Bragan played Benny Van Buren, the manager of the Washington Senators in “Damn Yankees.” — Ya’ gotta have heart to play that role — miles and miles of Bobby Bragan heart!

Last year, at age 87, Bobby recorded a musical CD with several family members for the benefit of the Bobby Bragan Youth Foundation. The CD contains 39 songs and, like Bobby himself, it ranges in genre through popular, Dixieland, religious, and baseball music. Bobby plays the piano on several cuts and even does a great dramatic reading of “Casey At The Bat.”

If you would like a copy of Bobby Bragan: A Brotherly Love you may purchase the CD through the Bobby Bragan Youth Foundation. You will be in for a really entertaining experience with this CD and also be helping a very worthy cause at the same time. — What a sweet deal that is.

My favorite cut on the CD, by far, is the song written with and for Bobby Bragan by his CD producer, Jason LeBlanc. “You Can’t Hit the Ball with the Bat on Your Shoulder” simply oozes lyrics that are typical of the way the powerfully positive Mr. Bragan lives his life. My only wish is that you could hear Bobby belting out this number as I conclude this story with some key lyrics. This song sings for Bobby Bragan the man and his very positive attitude about life. When it comes to reaching out, helping, and getting his spirit across to young and old alike, the Bobby Bragan message flies home in song on the wings of great wisdom and hope:

“You can’t hit the ball with the bat on your shoulder,
You gotta get up there and swing!
You’ll never hit that apple til you start gettin’ bolder,
Hittin’ the ball is the thing!

“Now when you get the chance,
Look the facts in the eye!
You’ll never hit a homer,
If you watch ‘em go by!

“You can’t hit the ball with the bat on your shoulder,
You gotta get up there and swing!”