Imagine once being able to hit a ball 500 feet to the adulation of a crowd, but now not being able to manage a single day sober. Imagine once being a famous millionaire but now not being able to pay your rent or hold on to your family.
Power and athletic prowess have a way of deluding people into thinking the rich and famous never fail or cry or need help. But when they do, when a member of the baseball family needs a helping hand, more often than not Ralph Branca and BAT are there to offer it.
The Baseball Assistance Team, which was founded in 1986 and headed by the former Dodger pitcher, provides grants for baseball people in need. Utility players and all-stars, their widows and families, scouts, umps and execs alike can all fall on hard times, and BAT is there with money for mortgages and utilities and, most of all, medical aid.
The commissioner’s office pays for BAT’s office space, small staff, etc.; and gets sponsorship from Equitable and some of the proceeds of a new book, “Baseball: The Biographical Encyclopedia.” But much of the money comes from fund-raising dinners and the contribution of about 20-25 players like Yankee pitcher David Cone, and far more is needed.
“We have to educate them. We try to talk to the union, we send a newsletter out, we have guys at spring training to discuss the BAT situation,” said Branca, known as the man who gave up Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard ‘Round the World” in 1951 and also as Bobby Valentine’s father-in-law. But he’s also president of a group that’s been a godsend to hundreds in the hardball community.
“We helped Nick Willhite, and Nick was ready to take a high dive off a bridge,” Branca said of the former Dodger pitcher who’d come dangerously close to committing suicide. “He’d used up his playing money, and was looking up his parents’ phone number [to say goodbye] when he came across the number of an old buddy, Stan Williams.
“I’d been to a Dodger old-timers game 2-3 weeks prior, and said if you know anybody that needs help or is in trouble, let me know. Stan called BAT and we got right on the case. [Don] Newcombe was working with drug rehab, and we got Willhite in a rehab center within 36 hours.
“They really saved his life. He’d basically lost his family. He was divorced, he’d lost his kids; they wouldn’t talk to him, even changed their names. But he got sober.”
BAT couldn’t save former Dodger Sandy Amoros’ life; but it made his life easier. He lost his leg as a result of diabetes, and while BAT couldn’t save him from the disease, it made the last years of his life easier.
“He had lost his leg. He was living in a room over a garage in Florida,” Branca said. “Some card dealers heard about it and were gonna hold a raffle [to raise money]. We heard about it and got him a prosthesis, and moved him in with his daughter in Miami.”
Some find it hard to reconcile the words ballplayer and broke in the same sentence, considering the average salary today is $1.9 million and they’re eligible for the maximum $122,000 pension after 10 years of service.
But the pensions before four years of service are minimal, and there are about 200 players who played before the pensions kicked in in 1946. And dozens have been helped by BAT.