Bobby Brown (baseball)
For other uses, see Bobby BrownRobert William Brown, M.D. (born
October 25 1924 in
Seattle, Washington) is a former
third baseman and executive in
Major League Baseball who served as president of the
American League from
1984 to
1994. He also was a physician who successfully studied for his medical degree during his eight-year (
1946-
52,
1954) career as a player with the
New York Yankees.
Brown - also nicknamed "The Golden Boy" during his playing career - attended
Stanford University and
UCLA before receiving his medical degree from
Tulane University.During his time at Stanford, he and another student were involved in the rescue of a Coast Guardsman from a plane crash, for which he received a
Silver Lifesaving Medal.
Concurrently, he played 548 regular-season games for the Yankees, with a lifetime
batting average of .279 with 22
home runs. In addition, he appeared in four
World Series (
1947,
1949,
1950,
1951) for New York, batting .439 in 17 games - while participating in four world championships. He batted left-handed and threw right-handed. He missed 1 1/2 seasons due to military service during the
Korean War.
A famous, perhaps apocryphal, story that has made the rounds for years in baseball circles concerns the time when Brown's road roommate was star Yankee
catcher Yogi Berra, who had little formal education. The two were reading in their hotel room one night - Berra a comic book and Brown his copy of
Gray's Anatomy. Berra came to the end of his comic, tossed it aside, and asked Brown, "So, how is yours turning out?"
Brown practiced
cardiology in the
Dallas-Fort Worth area until the early
1980s, when he returned to baseball as a vice president of the AL
Texas Rangers. In
1984, he succeeded
Lee MacPhail as AL president and held the post for a decade;
Gene Budig replaced him. In
1992 and
1993, Brown presented the
World Series Trophy (on both occasions to the
Toronto Blue Jays) instead of the Commissioner of Baseball. The presidencies of the American League and the
National League were abolished in
1998 and their functions were absorbed into the office of the
Commissioner of Baseball.
*
The Crash of a Kingfisher off San Gregorio - Rescue By Bobby Brown
