Hitting Hard to All Fields: The Life of Bobby Brown

As a New York Yankee in the late-Joe DiMaggio, early-Mickey Mantle era, Bobby Brown sprayed line drives, an appropriate style of hitting for a man whose life has turned out to be a line drive of constant achievement in many directions.

The ballplayer, cardiologist, highly-demanded banquet speaker, and current American League President is the only American athlete enshrined in three separate college Halls of Fame (Stanford, UCLA, and Tulane). In a society screaming for role models, there is none better than Dr. Brown, who will return to Fort Worth later this summer as a full-time resident.

Brown repeatedly has been profiled by newspapers, magazines and medical journals. He also has been the subject of chapters in at least three books about the great Yankee teams of the late 1940s and early ’50s.1 Authors Robert L. Shook and Ramon Greenwood made him the only baseball figure in their 1992 book, The Name of the Game is Life, a survey of celebrated athletes who have achieved success in business or government after their playing days.2

Despite this media coverage, no biographer yet has reviewed exhaustively the life of Bobby Brown, and the good doctor never has had the time to attempt an autobiography. Arguably, Dr. Brown has had more relationships and encounters than anyone else in this century — stretching from teammates Berra, DiMaggio, Mantle, and manager Stengel to manager Billy Martin in Brown’s Texas Rangers’ team president year to Ueberroth, Giamatti, White, Vincent, Selig, and Steinbrenner during his 10-year tenure as American League President.

A. Childhood and Amateur Career: 1924-46

Baseball likes to promote the image of the game’s impact on fathers and sons — playing catch and going to games together. The relationship between Bobby Brown and his father, Bill, is one of a fairy tale father if there ever was one and a son who exceeded expectations.

Bill Brown played the game well enough as a young man to compete on the semipro level and think about making the big leagues. Bill reluctantly abandoned the game for a career in business, and then along came Bobby.

Bobby started swinging the bat at age five with his father as mentor and coach. When Bobby turned nine, Bill tied a ball to a rope and then hung it from the ceiling of their basement to work indoors when the family lived in New Jersey. By the time he was 11, Bobby was playing with high school-age youngsters. At 13 he attracted the eye of New York Yankee scouts while playing American Legion ball and exhibiting a perfect, lefthanded swing.

When Bobby turned 15, his father took a job on the West Coast to necessitate the family’s move to San Francisco. The young hitting star now could play year-round. The decision to move was made easier by a misguided coach who was scheduled to be Bobby’s high school coach in New Jersey. The coach confided to Bill that Bobby would not be starting on the team, and the California job offer to Bill became instantly acceptable.

Attending the DiMaggio brothers’ high school in San Francisco, Brown played shortstop and hit .583 as a junior. Bobby, shouldering duties as team captain and president of the school’s student body, saw his average dip to .360 as a senior in a prep league with future Yankee teammates Jerry Coleman and Charlie Silvera.

When minor leaguers came home to the Bay Area in the offseason, Brown honed his skills by playing with them in pickup games. He hit so well as a teenager that both teammates and opponents saw his major league potential.

As important as baseball was in the Brown family, the game was not allowed to interfere with Bobby’s education. In college Bobby played for three schools. In spring, 1943, at Stanford he hit .460 and gained All-Coast Conference honors while changing his major from chemical engineering to pre-medicine.

When his World War II military service began in summer, 1943, Bobby had to transfer to UCLA where he completed his pre-med studies while participating in the Navy’s V-12 officer training program. In 1944 he hit .444 for the Bruins, was elected team captain of the Coast Conference champion, and again earned All-Conference laurels. Finally, he went to Tulane for medical school in spring 1945, where he hit almost .500 while pacing the team to a 22-6 mark.

When the baseball season ended at Tulane, 15 of the 16 major league teams lined up to sign the hard-hitting infielder. Bobby’s father served as negotiator and awarded his son to the high-bidding Yankees for $52,000 over three years, the second-highest signing bonus at that time.3 When Tulane’s Dean of Medicine heard about the bonus, he asked Brown if the Yankees would like to endow a chair.

New York delighted in the signing of its prize rookie. At Brown’s news conference after the signing, Yankee President Larry MacPhail’s bragging about the heavy-hitting medical scholar prompted a writer to ask, “Are you hiring a player or a doctor?”

B. Life in the Pros

Bobby’s minor league career began and ended in 1946 at Newark (the Yanks’ top farm club) in the International League. Playing with the famed Bears in his native state, he roomed with Yogi Berra and pored over his medical books while Yogi devoured comic books. Brown led the league in hits while batting .341, second only in the IL to Jackie Robinson’s .349. Garden State sports writers named Brown the New Jersey Athlete of the Year in ’46.

The Yankees called up Brown, Berra, Frank Coleman, and Vic Raschi at the end of the 1946 season. In an era when 80% of major leaguers did not attend college, Yankee veterans at first resented the clean-cut third baseman and med student, whom the media already had started calling the “Golden Boy.” The vets countered with the nickname, “Quack,” but the sarcasm stopped when they saw Brown hit. In the last week of his first major league campaign after the Red Sox wrapped up the American League pennant, Brown and Berra each got to appear in seven games with Brown hitting .333 (8-for-24) while Berra batted .364 (8-for-22).

At 1947 spring training Brown battled popular right-handed hitting veteran Billy Johnson to a stalemate for the third base position going into the season. Two weeks after Opening Day, Boston’s Mel Parnell broke Brown’s finger with a pitch. By the time the injury healed, Johnson’s hot hitting and consistent fielding cemented his position in the starting lineup. Brown made the most of leading the AL in pinch hitting with a 9-for-27 (.333) showing and overall average of .300.

Bobby Brown’s favorite moment as a player, however, came in the 1947 World Series when a somewhat-magical hitting performance earned him the nickname “The Wand.” In four trips into the box against the Dodgers he was 3-for-3 with a walk and three RBIs. Brown had time to glance after an RBI double in the fourth inning of Game Seven to see his father sail a favorite hat into the sky. He had fulfilled the dream of his personal hero and greatest fan.

In 1948 Brown again hit .300 but couldn’t break into the starting lineup on a daily basis. Though the ’48 Bronx Bonbers finished 2 1/2 games behind the Indians in the pennant race, the year had a historical highlight. On June 13, 1948, Brown and teammates witnessed the retirement of Babe Ruth’s No. 3 as the Bambino made a final appearance at Yankee Stadium before dying.

Casey Stengel arrived on the Yankees’ scene in 1949 and led the team to a last-day pennant in a season immortalized by David Halberstam in Summer of ’49. Stengel believed in platooning hitters more than any previous major league manager, leading him to split the third base duties between Brown and Johnson that year.

Bobby had his most productive season in 1949 while knocking in 61 runs in 104 games (16 of which saw him appear as a pinch hitter), and he proved his 1947 postseason heroics were no fluke. In the 1949 World Series he was 6-for-12 with a bases-loaded triple to break open Game Four after an intentional walk to DiMaggio to get to Brown.

When the ’49 season ended, Bobby returned to Tulane to finish medical school duties and in the autumn was introduced to Sophie Newcomb College homecoming queen Sara French of Dallas’s Highland Park High School by his sister. She became Mrs. Bobby Brown in 1951.

The Yankees repeated as Series champions in 1950, with Brown and Johnson again platooning at third. Stengel knew of Bobby’s postseason success and handed him the starting position for the World Series against the Philadelphia “Whiz Kid” Phillies. After a 4-0 sweep of the Phillies Brown had a three-year Classic average of .520 and became the first major leaguer ever to earn his M.D. as an active player. Bobby Brown’s last season as a full-time player came in 1951 when he platooned with young Gil McDougald at the hot corner.

Stengel continued to play Bobby and Gil evenly in the ’51 Series against the Willie Mays-Bobby Thomson Giants. Brown had another great Fall Classic with a .357 average (5-for-14), which could have been higher if the umpires had not ruled that Mays had made a catch in center on a ball which rebounded off the outfield wall. Mays’s talent made it appear that he had made an over-the-shoulder catch similar to the one he grabbed in 1954 against Vic Wertz.

The Korean War disrupted Dr. Brown’s career from 1952-54 as he received a Treasury Department Medal for Bravery as a Battalion Surgeon in an Army MASH unit. Brown understandably suffered during those war years while having to listen to the 1952 World Series, riding on a plane to Tokyo when his first child was born, and doing his part for the Korean effort while being able to play in just 57 games during the 1952-54 seasons.

Brown took pride in his interrupted eight seasons in the majors with a .279 average, but, more importantly, he never batted below .333 in four World Series and still holds the all-time record with a .439 batting mark for players with a minimum of 40 times at bat in the Fall Classic. His .707 slugging percentage is fourth in Series history behind Reggie Jackson, Ruth, and Lou Gehrig.

Tommy Henrich had one of the most apt descriptions of Bobby Brown, the player, when he wrote: “He couldn’t run, field, or throw but with $1,000,000 on the line, he wouldn’t choke up at the plate. In every pressure situation, Bobby was always the one in charge at the plate.” Brown’s teammate Irv Noren told author Dom Forker, “Bobby would call up the visiting team before the game to find out if he could come to hit. He wanted it.”

Brown steadily improved in fielding from the point where Casey Stengel joked, “Brown looks like he had been a hitter for 12 years and a fielder for one.” But in 1950 the Good Doctor had a better fielding percentage than his rival Johnson at third base through perseverance.

The talented physician split his focus between baseball and medicine constantly through his career, even asking the team doctor to drill him on questions and answers from medical books, which he read daily. Brown attended to his teammates as a long-distance physician during the offseason as he prescribed a special diet to help Johnson overcome weight and heart problems. He counseled McDougald on Gil’s hearing loss.

C. The Doctor: 1954-84

After retiring as a player in 1954, Dr. Bobby Brown spent three years as a resident in internal medicine in San Francisco and then went to Tulane for a one-year cardiology fellowship in 1957. Afterward, medical school best friend Dr. Albert Goggans persuaded Bobby to join him in cardiology practice in Fort Worth in 1958 where they remained partners for 26 years.

Brown practiced cardiology with the same intensity he had as a hitter in World Series, and the pressures were comparable. “His very strengths caused him his biggest problems,” noted Goggans. “There are just a lot of sick people who need cardiologists, and Bobby’s nature is to want to make everyone better. When one of his patients died — and in cardiology you do lose patients — he would take it very personally.”

“The trick is not to be too euphoric when you do well and not to be too depressed when you do poorly,” Brown later told authors Shook and Greenwood. “You have to get a psychological balance to keep yourself on an even keel. You can’t get discouraged when things go badly. You never can give up until it’s over — just as Yogi said.”

During his Fort Worth years, in addition to his medical practice and raising a family, Brown somehow found time to chair Fort Worth’s Park Board, sit on the board of a major bank, and serve as one of the massive Amon Carter Foundation’s three trustees.

D. The Baseball Executive: 1974, 1984-94

During the 1958-84 span of his medical career, Bobby Brown took six months away from the surgical smock to become president of the Texas Rangers in 1974 for his friend and then-owner Brad Corbett. The manager of the Rangers that year was Brown’s former New York teammate, Billy Martin. Brown objected to Martin’s insistence that David Clyde, Houston Westchester High School phenom and the Rangers’ first-round draft choice in 1973, remain in the big leagues throughout 1974. Encouraged by his medical associates, Brown left the Rangers as president at the close of the ’74 campaign.

Nine years later, major league owners searched for a replacement for Bowie Kuhn as commissioner. To Bobby Brown’s surprise, they called him to interview for the position. Brown was a finalist, but because of a then-precarious financial situation due to the 1981 players’ strike, the owners opted for Peter Ueberroth, who had helped the 1984 Olympics at Los Angeles become a huge financial success.

But Brown’s leadership and talent kept him on short lists for executive positions in baseball, and retiring American League President Lee MacPhail personally pushed through Bobby Brown as his successor. The decision to return to full-time baseball was not difficult for the specialist. “A cardiologist sees and experiences a great deal of bleak times in a patient’s life,” noted the Fort Worth resident, “and I decided it was time for me to leave, so I did.”

Brown immediately announced his goals for the the position when he became AL President in 1984. In no particular order, he wanted to get more young kids playing the game, to have baseball become more integral in the inner city, to wage a campaign against the players’ use of smokeless tobacco, and to assist owners in gaining control of expenses to permit economic survival.

He had made progress toward achieving his goals and White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf spoke for the other owners in his evaluation. “Everybody likes him,” Reinsdorf said. “He’s a true gentleman. He’s a low-key individual who doesn’t cause confrontation and keeps the league running very smoothly.”

From 1986-88 the triumvirate of Commissioner Ueberroth, AL President Brown, and NL President A. Bartlett Giamatti constituted possibly the best assemblage of versatility and executive talent in baseball history. “In 1988 after the World Series, the rules committee met,” explained Giamatti in an interview with the New York Times. “Dr. Brown was marvelous.”

“Every time someone would propose an anatomically inoffensive term, like the breastbone,” Giamatti continued, “he would explain that wasn’t where we wanted the strike zone to be. So we ended up with mid-chest to the knees to get the umpires to focus on the high pitch zone.”

Giamatti’s death in September 1989 dealt a severe blow to baseball and grieved good friend Bobby Brown, who paid an eloquent tribute to the essence of baseball’s Renaissance man. “Bart Giamatti was a brilliant, warm, lovable man,” said the AL leader. “His life on earth was far too short, but certainly no one made better use of his time. He was a man of tremendous ability but did not flaunt it. His only aim was to do good.”

Successor commissioner Fay Vincent did a superb job initially at handling such crises as the earthquake during the 1989 Oakland-San Francisco World Series, but he later had many rough dealings with major league owners. The owners finally ousted Vincent in 1992, but the vacant post has left Brown, Bill White, and interim baseball head Bud Selig with the task of leading an uncertain future for the major leagues.

Approaching 70, Bobby Brown is eager to return to Fort Worth, resume full-time relationships with his three children, 10 grandchildren and friends while he awaits completion for a search for his successor.

The scholar-athlete with three successful careers is a living testimony to his philosophy. “There’s more to life than being an athlete,” he observed. “If you think otherwise, you miss a lot and spend many days looking back. Life has taught me to do the very best I can every single day.”

When Bobby gets to retire this year, one of baseball’s all-time role models surely will take a “line drive” approach to life and find new challenges for his considerable talents.

TALMAGE BOSTON’s first book, The Centennial of Thirty-Nine: From Cooperstown to Television, will be released later this year through the Summit Group. A noted essayist and reviewer, Boston is a trial lawyer in Dallas, a member of the Hall-Ruggles SABR Chapter and a member of the Steering Committee for SABR 24.

 

Notes

1 Tom Meany’s The Magnificent Yankees (Grosset & Dunlap, 1952); Dom Forker’s The Men of Autumn (Taylor Publishing, 1989); Phil Rizzuto and Tom Horton’s The October Twelve (Forge, 1994).

2 The book has chapters on such sports luminaries as President Ronald Reagan, President Gerald Ford, Senator Bill Bradley, Roger Staubach, Willye B. White, among others, as well as Brown.

3 The Yankees had their eye on Brown for eight years, and top scout Joe Devine told Bill Brown that his son was the greatest prospect he had ever seen. Hall of Fame manager Joe McCarthy told the teen-aged Bobby, “Don’t ever let anyone change you.”