1979
BOB WATSON   DH

Bob Watson was born in Los Angeles on April 10, 1946. He acquired the nickname of “Bull” because his high school baseball coach asked each of his players to pick a major leaguer to pattern themselves after. He chose Orlando Cepeda, AKA “Baby Bull.”

He grew up in a time when Los Angeles had an embarrassment of baseball riches. He played on a sandlot team called the Pirate rookies, and his teammates included future major-leaguers Dock Ellis, Don Wilson, Reggie Smith, Bobby Tolan, Willie Crawford and Brock Davis. As good as that team must have been, the downside was that Bob, the catcher, was frequently overlooked by scouts.

Bob attended Fremont High School in L.A. and Los Angeles Harbor Junior College before being signed by the Houston Astros prior to the 1965 season. He had a quick ascent to the major leagues but a slow journey to become an everyday player. His whole major league career almost ended in A-Ball. While playing left field for Salisbury in 1965, he ran into a brick wall trying to track down a fly ball and dislocated his shoulder, broke his wrist and knocked himself unconscious. The injured shoulder bothered him the next season as well, so the team decided to move him to the outfield or first base.

After two productive seasons in A-Ball, Bob was promoted to the major leagues in September of 1966. After splitting most of 1967 between AA Amarillo and AAA Oklahoma City, he returned to the Astros for six games at the end of the season. The shuttling back-and-forth between the Astros and the minor leagues would go on for a few more years. He didn’t stick in the big leagues until 1970, and he didn’t become a full-time player until 1971, his seventh year of professional ball.

Bob moved to left field in 1971, and homered nine times, just one of which was in the Astrodome. He was a productive hitter with the Astros, but he never put up the gaudy home run numbers he might have had for a different team. Still, the baseball world took notice of his ability. Between 1971 and 1978, he was selected to two All-Star teams and received MVP votes in three seasons.

His 1972 and 1973 seasons were pretty similar  and he was named to the All-Star team in 1973, when he led the NL in hits at the All-Star break. He earned his second nomination in 1975, which was possibly his career year. He hit a career-best .324 and had 18 home runs and 85 RBIs. From 1971 until 1978, he had a .303 average, 15 homers and 86 RBIs during those eight seasons, and that’s playing half of his games in a cavern like the Astrodome.

After the 1978 season, he asked to be traded from the Astros, said he only wanted to play for a couple more years, and he wanted to play on a winning team. In June 1979, he was traded to the Boston Red Sox. The Sox were in a tight race with the Baltimore Orioles for first place in the AL East. He batted .337 and slammed 13 homers. That performance made him a hot commodity on the free agent market, and he signed with the New York Yankees as a 1B/DH.

Bob was traded to the Atlanta Braves in 1982. The Braves had tried to sign him way back at the start of his career, even offering more money than Houston.

He worked for the Oakland A’s as a minor-league hitting instructor in 1985, and joined the big league club as a hitting coach in 1986 and was being groomed for off-field responsibilities, as well. He said he got back into baseball to get an executive job, and saw the progressive Oakland team as a way to do it.

After serving as the bench coach of the 1988 World Champion A’s team, Bob took a job as assistant general manager with the Astros. Even as he worked with the Astros, he was thinking of baseball’s bigger problems. He proposed in 1992 that every major-league teams should establish baseball academies in their home towns in order to develop minority players. The funding would come from Major League Baseball, the players and private corporations.

Bob cautioned that if baseball didn’t do something to attract minority fans and players, the game could face some long-term problems. Again, in 1992, baseball has its RBI (Reviving Baseball in the Inner Cities) Program, but the problems that he warned about have pretty much come to pass.

He was promoted to general manager after the Astros’ 1993 season and shortly after the 1995 season ended, the Yankees hired Bob as their general manager. He resigned from the Yankees GM job in February of 1998, after two years on the job. Two years as GM under George Steinbrenner is 20 years under a normal owner, given his penchant for meddling and inflammatory statements to the New York media.

After taking a few years off from baseball, Bob organized the 2000 U.S. Olympic Baseball Team, which won the gold medal in Australia. He also worked for Major League Baseball and was in charge of player discipline.

The dedication of the Bob Watson Center was one of his last public appearances. The ceremony was as much a celebration of his life as it was the Astros’ successful Urban Youth Academy — the kind of thing Watson was advocating that every team should have back in the ’90s.

Bob Watson died on May 14, 2020 in Houston from kidney disease. He was 74 years old and had been in ill health for several years.