Game Over 
Sports
Hardball
As Bob Watson has found, the only thing tougher than playing for the struggling Houston Astros is running the world-champion New York Yankees.
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Born and raised in south central Los Angeles, Watson was a nineteen-year-old catcher-outfielder with limited fielding skills and a chronically sore shoulder but a terrific bat when he signed with Houston in 1965. For four seasons he played mostly in the minor leagues in such off-the-beaten-path towns as Cocoa, Florida, and Salisbury, North Carolina, where he quickly encountered racial discrimination the likes of which he had never seen. “It was total culture shock for a kid from L.A.,” he says. “Emotionally, I definitely wasn’t ready for it.” In Cocoa and Salisbury he couldn’t find a single hotel or apartment complex that accepted blacks, and until the Astros placed him in the home of a black family, he would do the most desperate things to get a semi-decent night’s sleep: He once even curled up on a wooden bench in a black-owned funeral home. What he remembers most about Salisbury isn’t his sleeping arrangements but an ongoing promotion that awarded free Salisbury steak dinners to home-team players who hit home runs. “Except,” he says, “that the restaurant serving those dinners wouldn’t serve blacks, not even out the back door. So I would end up hitting all these homers and giving away the certificates to my teammates.”
Racism nearly caused Watson to quit for good in 1969, when, after playing left field for the Astros on opening day, he was sent down to a double-A team in Savannah, Georgia, to work on his catching. “Our regular catcher, Johnny Edwards, was struggling, and they wanted me to take over for him,” he recalls. “But when I got to Savannah, I couldn’t get into a hotel. I said to myself, ‘This can’t be happening to me again. I mean, I’m coming from the starting lineup in the big leagues!’” Three weeks into his time in the minors, sleeping most nights on the ice-cold trainer’s table in the team’s clubhouse, Watson told his manager, Hub Kittle, that he just couldn’t take it anymore; he was packing it in—in fact, he had booked a flight back to L.A. But when his plane stopped over in Houston, Tal Smith, then the Astros’ assistant general manager, met Watson at the airport to deliver the news that he had been called back up to the majors. “If not for that,” he says now, “believe me, I was done. I was definitely ready to do something else.”
In a total of nineteen seasons playing for the Astros, Yankees, Boston Red Sox, and Atlanta Braves, Watson logged impressive numbers: a .295 batting average, 184 homers, and 989 runs batted in. Still, he can’t help but wonder what might have been if he hadn’t played all those years in the dead air of the Astrodome. “If I played in almost any other ballpark,” he says, “I probably would’ve had about two hundred more homers and four hundred more runs batted in. But I don’t regret it: I think the ’Dome actually made me a better hitter. I learned how to hit the ball hard and not care where it went.” With a slightly downward swing that put a backspin on his longer fly balls and using bats as huge as forty ounces, he hit .300 or better six times in an era dominated by pitchers—and hit when it counted: .375 in two playoff series and .318 with two homers in his only World Series appearance as a player, with the Yankees in 1981.
Despite his genial demeanor, Watson was also one of the fiercest base runners ever to break up a double play. Once, in the mid-seventies, he barreled so hard into Montreal Expos shortstop Tim Foli that Foli was knocked unconscious and had to have his jaw wired back together. It wasn’t that Watson had a mean streak; it was just the way he thought the game should be played. “Bob was so incredibly businesslike and sensible,” says the Astros’ current manager, Larry Dierker, a former star pitcher who was Watson’s teammate for eleven seasons. “When all the young guys were out spending money on fancy cars and crazy clothes and gallivanting at all hours of the night, Bob was watching over his money like a hawk, wearing stuff that looked like it came from Sears, and staying home with his family.”
Yet in all his years in Houston, Watson never saw his team finish better than ten games out of first place. “If I learned anything with the Astros,” he says, “it was about losing—and about how much I hated it.” His most humiliating season, he says, was 1975, when he hit a career high .324, was named to the National League all-star team, and scored baseball’s one millionth run; the Astros, however, finished in last place, a laughable 43 games behind the Cincinnati Reds. “I mean, I did all that I could do personally that year,” he says, “and it still wasn’t good enough.”
After retiring from playing, Watson coached with the Oakland A’s for four seasons, moving up from minor league hitting instructor to major league batting coach to bench coach, and in 1988 he returned to the Astros as an assistant to general manager Bill Wood—though not without accepting a huge pay cut, from $120,000 a year to $40,000. “I knew I had to take three steps backward before I could move back up,” he says. Watson was chiefly in charge of Latin American scouting and development, and occasionally he handled contract negotiations. But paperwork was far from his forte back then, and in drawing up one of his first contracts, he left out a single word in a clause relating to an incentive bonus—the word “active,” as in active roster—and it ended up costing the Astros $30,000.
In 1992, five years into Watson’s apprenticeship, trucking tycoon Drayton McLane bought the Astros from John McMullen and promptly fired Wood and manager Art Howe. Watson figured he was next and packed his office belongings, only to find out shortly thereafter that he was being retained and would be asked to take over as general manager. “It’s funny,” he says. “Here I was, having my dream come true and with no doubt that I could do the job, and yet I still felt this huge pressure to be a role model for other blacks. I’m a workaholic anyway, but during the first year as general manager, I was overly concerned about everything. I knew if I did well, I could open a lot of doors.”
After leading the Astros to two straight second-place finishes, Watson quit with a year remaining on his contract (afterward citing new payroll constraints and uncertainty over a possible sale and move of the team) for the same position with the Yankees, agreeing to a two-year guaranteed deal worth $350,000 a season. At the time, observers couldn’t help but seriously question Watson’s decision to work in a pressure cooker like New York for a boss who had hired and fired a single manager, Billy Martin, five times. “Well, for one, it looks great on your résumé,” he says with a laugh now. “And for another, I’m a guy from inner-city L.A., and now I have the keys to the House That Ruth Built. Whatever the downside was, the upside was better.” He points to a blue-and-gold ring on the ring finger of his right hand: his World Series ring from 1981, when he was playing for the Bronx Bombers. “I’ve worn this thing every day since the day I got it,” he says. “I was always proud to be a Yankee.”
And he still is, although this winter was indeed a difficult one for the team. While managing somehow to avert all three arbitration cases, Watson nevertheless lost two star pitchers to free agency, including World Series most valuable player John Wetteland (now with the Texas Rangers); had his nerves frayed by Cecil Fielder’s weekly demands to be traded; and had to endure his $13.5 million off-season acquisition, pitcher David Wells, breaking his hand during a street brawl in San Diego. Now some preseason baseball magazines are picking the Yankees to finish as poorly as third place.
All of which, frankly, doesn’t seem to concern Watson one bit. “I’ll be the first to admit that we weren’t the best team last year,” he says. “But we were the team with the most heart and desire and the best attitude. And that’s the big question coming into this season: Are we still as motivated as we were last year?” It’s a question he says he answered for himself a long time ago. “Oh, I’m motivated, believe me,” he says. “I’m going after another dream. It has always been about the dream for me. It’s the only reason I’ve put up with so much for all these years.”
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