Brooklyn’s baseball bridge

Every baseball fan is aware — or should be — that Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson were key figures in breaking the major leagues’ color barrier in 1947.

Less well known is the important role Emil “Buzzie” Bavasi played in paving the way.

Bavasi, who died May 1 in La Jolla, Calif., at 92, was general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Class B farm club in Nashua, N.H., when pitcher Don Newcombe and catcher Roy Campanella made their debuts in Organized Baseball, as it was called in 1946.

The same season, Robinson played at Class AAA Montreal.

Dodgers president Rickey asked longtime club employee Bavasi to find a city outside the South where the black players might avoid much of the racial prejudice then prevalent in the nation. Bavasi chose Nashua and asked the publisher of the Nashua Telegraph to become president of the club, thereby assuring the newspaper’s support for integration. As lieutenants, Bavasi enlisted Clyde Sukeforth, who had scouted all three players, and midwesterner Walter Alston as manager.

How vital were these and other moves by Bavasi?

“Without Buzzie, I would have had nothing in baseball,” Newcombe, who won 149 games in 10 subsequent major league seasons, told the Boston Globe in 1997.

When Rickey left the Dodgers in 1951 after losing a power struggle with co-owner Walter O’Malley, Bavasi became general manager in Brooklyn and saw the Dodgers win four pennants over the next six seasons. Later he ran both the expansion San Diego Padres and the California Angels, but the part he played in making baseball truly the national pastime remains his most significant achievement.

The pivotal 1946 season was highly successful for the Nashua Dodgers, who finished second in the Class B New England League and defeated the Lynn (Mass.) Red Sox in the Governor’s Cup series. Newcombe went 14-4 with a 2.21 ERA. Campanella batted .291 with 13 home runs and managed the team for one game after Alston was ejected.

Residents of Nashua, which had fewer than 50 black citizens, accepted Newk and Campy enthusiastically. Only two racially motivated incidents marred the season’s serenity. Campanella accused Manchester catcher Sal Yvars of throwing dirt in his face, a charge Yvars denied, but the matter was resolved peacefully.

In a crucial late-season game, some Lynn players hurled racial slurs at Newcombe and Campanella. Rickey had told his black players not to respond in such cases, but Bavasi went to the Red Sox bus in the parking lot after the game, challenged the entire team to a fight and had to be restrained by his own players.

“The whole Lynn team was there behind the manager, and I said to him, ’Why don’t you say to me what you said to them?’ ” Bavasi recalled decades later. “That was the first time I ever challenged anybody, and now I was challenging a whole team.”

Fortunately for Bavasi, perhaps, no fisticuffs ensued.

Like most people, Bavasi had different sides to him.

His personality was described by author Roger Kahn, whose tale about “The Boys of Summer” Brooklyn teams he covered for the New York Herald Tribune in the 1950s remains one of the classic items in baseball’s vast library.

“Whoever covered the Dodgers had to deal with Buzzie,” Kahn told fellow author Peter Golenbock.

“Buzzie had a little of the Sinatra quality, poised, good-looking, always would pick up the tab, fun to be with. … [But] he would say, ’I think you’ve been knocking the club, and it upsets me. … If you keep knocking the club, how can I talk to you? So let’s have a drink.’ Buzzie had sort of a Medici-Machiavellian conspiratorial nature to him. He loved planting things and throwing things out and seeing what happened.”

In the long run, though, Bavasi was an honest man.

Once, after the Dodgers had moved west, Kahn asked O’Malley how much the fat-cat club owner was worth and was told $24 million.

“That’s about right,” Bavasi said when Kahn told him the story. “All he left out was 400 acres of downtown Los Angeles.”

Only three years after Brooklyn’s long-awaited first World Series victory in 1955, the Dodgers were gone from the Borough of Churches, thus breaking a million hearts.

“The office staff took a vote, and it was 8-1 against the move,” Bavasi said. “Of course, the one vote was O’Malley’s.”

On both coasts, then, Buzzie Bavasi served his clubs and his sport well for 46 years. As commissioner Bud Selig put it the day Bavasi died, “He was one of the game’s greatest executives.”