Sports at Lunch, Jerry Coleman, Buzzie Bavasi, Duke Snider and Dave Garcia.
They sat together on Center Court for Sports at Lunch at the San Diego Hall of Champions. They represented 200-plus years of baseball as players, general managers, scouts and broadcasters.
Then the four baseball legends -- Duke Snider, Jerry Coleman, Buzzie Bavasi and Dave Garcia – gathered to talk baseball. They can still draw a crowd, too, as a sellout of 300 turned out on Tuesday, May 10. It’s the largest lunch crowd in the history of the Hall of Champions’ Sports-at-Lunch series.
They talked about baseball in New York and Brooklyn in the 1950s, about baseball salaries then and now, about Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series, about Little League parents, about Don Zimmer, about the Pacific Coast League, about Joe DiMaggio, about road trips by train, about Gil Hodges deserving to be in the Hall of Fame and about center fielders in New York in the 1950s.
Nobody went home wondering why it is they still love baseball after all these years.
“You had Duke (Snider) and Mickey (Mantle) and Willie (Mays) all paying center field in the same town,” said Coleman, a second baseman with the Yankees. “No town ever had three great ball players like that.”
Coleman, of course, has become the voice of the Padres in his 33 years as a play-by-play man. He is being inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame this summer in Cooperstown in the broadcasters’ wing as the recipient of the Ford C. Frick Award.
Snider was the Duke of Flatbush with the Brooklyn Dodgers and has made Fallbrook long before he received the call to be inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1980.
Bavasi ran the Dodgers in Brooklyn and Los Angeles and was the Padres’ first General Manager for the expansion franchise in 1969. He has lived in La Jolla ever since then.
Garcia was a coach with the early Padres and later a manager with the Cleveland Indians and California Angels. He has made San Diego his home since 1961 and is still active as a scout for the Seattle Mariners.
“Baseball is still a wonderful game,” Snider said. “But there are too many teams and the loyalty is not there between the players and the organizations. The dollar sign rules the game of baseball, but unfortunately that has not helped the game.”
Snider drew a long line of Brooklyn and New York transplants seeking his autograph.
“We did have three great center fielders in New York,” Bavasi said. “But I always thought Duke was the better ballplayer. In the 1955 World Series, Duke hit .320 with four home runs. Mickey hit .200 with one home run. Now who’s the better ball player?”
As someone who still watches the Major League games and scouts the high school and college players, Garcia says big-league players don’t love the game with the same passion as in his day.
“In my era 100 percent of the guys played for the love of the game,” Garcia said. “I don’t see that today. I’m not too sure too many of them even like to play.”
But there were much lighter moments with the legends swapping stories about figures in the game they’ve known. You’d never know baseball was anything but a game after listening to the four legends over lunch.
