Photo: Legion Park, Greenwood, S.C., in 1976. Home of the Greenwood Braves Single A team. (Courtesy of digitalballparks.com)
When you spend baseball season working with 30-40 guys on a Single A minor league team, and you’re the newbie, initiation into the culture is an eye opener.
Richard Andersen, who became general manager of the Greenwood (S.C.) Braves at the tender age of 23, recalls some classics.
Soon after the team came to town, Coach Smokey Burgess calls to the new GM.
“Hey kid, we’ve got to start batting practice. Go get me the keys to the Batter’s Box. They’re probably up there in that big key box.”
“Yes, Sir.”
He heads up to the office and scrambles to find the keys. He doesn’t want to look like an idiot.
Twenty minutes later, Richard comes running back to the field.
“Mr. Burgess, I’m so sorry, I can’t find the keys.”
All of a sudden, the entire group breaks up into laughter. The Batter’s Box is the chalk area on the field — there are no keys.
Richard got two years of that kind of jovial kidding, and he loved every minute of it. He loved that he got his dream job out of pure luck.
He loved that the prediction made by an early mentor, his boss Joe Irby at Gulf Life Insurance, had come true. Joe Irby was the first man to fire Richard Andersen.
Richard was living in South Florida and was selling insurance door to door. “I was terrible at it. I was called in by the manager one day.”
That’s when Joe told Richard:
“Richard, you are a bright young guy, with great enthusiasm, great energy. When you decide where you’re going to make your stand, you are going to be great at it. It’s just not going to be here.”
Today, he uses that story to advise clients that they should not hang on to employees who are not right for the job. That’s why, when he got to the Greenwood Braves, he recalled Joe’s words. “I was alone, scared, uninformed, and unprepared, but I knew this was where I would make my stand,” Richard says.
It was 1977. Richard was 23, living in Atlanta, a college dropout, working for IBM at a menial late shift job he hated and spending his free time attending Atlanta Braves games at Fulton County Stadium. He was a big baseball fan. Tickets were $2-$3 and games were sparsely attended. By the second inning, he could work his way down to box seats. He still remembers his ’66 Volkswagen Beetle and he remembers thinking, ‘wouldn’t it be cool if some day I could get a job in sports.’
Someone said put your resume in. He didn’t know what a resume was. But with help, he put a resume together, “all this crap on one sheet of paper, as tidy as it could be, but it was still crap.” He mailed it in and heard nothing.
Then he gets the call:
“Are you still interested in working for the Braves? Can you come in tomorrow for an interview? 10 a.m. Come to our offices at Fulton County Stadium and ask for Mike Warren.”
He puts on the only suit he owns, brown corduroy, and goes to the stadium and sits in this tiny little lobby until they call him in.
The second question is strange but critical:
“Do you know how to drive a bus?”
He’d driven some farm equipment. How hard could a bus be?
Answering in the affirmative, he was hired two days later and shipped to Greenwood, population 25,000, still honoring blue laws (no alcohol on Sundays), in fact nothing was open on Sunday. The town was so small it didn’t even have a McDonalds on March 1, 1977.
“The only reason I got this job is all the good people got hired at baseball’s winter meetings in November. They hired someone else, but he got an opportunity to go to Joe Robbie Stadium, so he quit.
“They were looking for a warm body who could drive the bus. I was paid $6,500. I was so poor I literally went to Montgomery Wards and bought a rollaway sleeper. I put it in a corner of a little office at the ballpark, where I lived for two years. No TV. Next to the dog pound. In the middle of nowhere. There were nights I cried, I was so lonely. I knew nobody.”
But he had a job in sports.
The team arrived shortly thereafter, driving the bus up from West Palm Beach, Fla. It ended up being a Bluebird School Bus, no AC, stick shift. When no one was looking, Richard took it out to practice, grinding the gears. “I had to drive the team all over South and North Carolina to cities like Asheville, through the mountains, Gastonia, and Spartanburg. Forty 18-22 year old kids, a manager and a couple of coaches in the heat of summer.
“I was later told they hired me just to get through the season. Basically, I didn’t screw things up bad enough to get fired. They gave me another chance and I stayed another year. I was the one-stop shop, the GM. I had no idea how to do it.”
He never hesitated to try things. He learned some basic principles that, as a statesman of baseball years later, he now teaches others:
- Always be enthusiastic.
- Work really hard.
- Embrace change.
You don’t have to be highly educated. You don’t even have to be smart. “I made it easy for people to want to work with me.”
“I had no idea what I was doing. I just survived it. I cut the grass, painted the seats, helped make the hot dogs. We had 300-400 attendance a game.”
After they initially hired Richard, they brought him back in to introduce him to the new farm director, the guy he would report to. It’s one of Richard’s greatest memories.
“I went back to the same little lobby. I sat there. I got called in by a woman named Susan Bailey. She takes me into this little office about the size of two Priuses, with a desk and two chairs. I’m waiting for whoever is going to come in.
“All of a sudden, this African American, fit but large, middle aged, is in the room. I must have gone completely pale.
“It was Hank Aaron. He was one of my heroes.”
Aaron was 34 at the time. He had just retired and Ted Turner had hired him to be the farm director for the Atlanta Braves. They became a good friends. “I worked for him for 10 years. For the first year, it was a little awkward.”
Little known fact – Richard Andersen was Hank Aaron’s first direct report…ever.
Two or three months into his first season, Richard scored a coup. He somehow lined up McDonald’s for a promotion. They were giving out free tickets and had placemats with the Greenwood Braves logo. All the good stuff.
“I was hoping, ‘gosh, maybe we’ll get 1,000 people tonight.”
Burgess, a cool guy and a former major league player, the one who told Richard to get the keys to the batter’s box, and Coach Bob Veale, also a former Major League Baseball player, taught Richard the ropes.
Coach Veale was watching from the infield early that night and asked Richard:
“Hey, what do you think the crowd will be.”
“I don’t know, I hope it will be 1,000 people.”
“I’ll bet you $100 you’re going to get 15 to 3,500 people here tonight.”
He took that bet, of course. “That night, we had 700 people and we won. I went into the clubhouse and sat with Bob and said I’m excited to win that $100.”
“You didn’t win.”
“Yeah, I did. We didn’t get anywhere near 1,500.”
“I didn’t say 1,500. I said between 15 and 3,500. You need to learn to listen, boy.”
Smokey Burgess constantly got Richard. He thought it was funny. He did it with such straight grace.
Richard was shagging balls one day and Smokey saw him running and challenged him to a race. They bet $25.
The players set up a course and the race was on. Richard beat Smokey by 20 yards. Smokey didn’t even finish.
Smokey says: “Great race. You can put the $25 on my desk.”
“What are you talking about? I beat you.”
“I didn’t say I’d beat you. I said I’d race you.”
Richard learned to LISTEN.
His career in baseball grew exponentially. His third year, he was promoted to the Double A team in Savannah, Ga., making $12,000. One year later, it was on to Triple A in Richmond, Va. He was 27 years old, running a Triple A team. Seven years later, he was recruited by the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Sometimes, he thinks that couldn’t happen today to someone with one year of college on his resume but, on the other hand, it still could happen to anyone who works hard, is enthusiastic and embraces change.
And that’s the point of the story. — Based on a true story as told to Linda Deckard