Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,748

This is the grave of Bob Howsam.

Born in 1918 in Denver, Robert Howsam, but always Bob, grew up pretty well off. His father ran a bee-keeping business, which I assume is an earlier version of using traveling trucks of honeybees to fertilize crops as opposed to making honey. Anyway, they made plenty of money. He went to the University of Colorado and then was a pilot in the Navy during World War II. He got to know the state’s bigwigs and married the daughter of Governor Edwin Johnson, who was a really terrible person. Well not necessarily the daughter, but Big Ed.

But Howsam’s real interest was baseball. He got his family to buy the Denver Bears in the Western League and then the American Association. At a time when minor league baseball was mostly run by people who didn’t care much and when even most of the major league teams didn’t take it that seriously (thus leaving the world open for the Yankees to dominate), Howsam wanted to make the Bears the best team in the minors. He and his family built Mile High Stadium for the Bears, of course later for the Denver Broncos. The Bears hooked up with the Pirates in the early 50s and then the Yankees, as their top farm team, in the late 50s.

Howsam was critical to the attempt to create a third major league, the Continental League, in the late 50s. He wanted to bring Major League Baseball to Denver. His friend Branch Rickey was involved in this too. It didn’t happen because the AL and NL finally decided to expand to avoid the antitrust case, which led to the Mets and Astros in the NL and the Angels and the new version of the Senators in the AL after the first version moved to Minnesota and became the Twins. This actually screwed Howsam over. He had built Mile High specifically as a baseball stadium. The Bears couldn’t fill that. So using his many connections, he lobbied the new American Football League to create the Denver Broncos. I will try to forgive him for this. He then sold both the Broncos and Bears in order to focus on his love of baseball.

In 1962, Howsam joined the St. Louis Cardinals as an advisor under Rickey. In 1964, the Cards fired their GM and Rickey urged the owner to hire Howsam, which he did. In fact, the 64 Cardinals had a huge comeback and won the pennant and Howsam can’t really take any credit for that. He GM’d the team through 1966, making some key changes and keeping them competitive.

After the 1966 season, a new group of owners bought the Cincinnati Reds and they paid Howsam a lot of money to become their GM. He took it and went forward to put together the Big Red Machine, one of the greatest baseball teams ever and arguably the best in the post-expansion era. In truth you have to make a divide at the expansion era since the Yankees were so dominant in an era where most of the teams didn’t even take winning remotely seriously and they could just have most of the good players. Doing that post-expansion was much more difficult.

Howsam was GM of the Reds from 1967-77. Now, he inherited a hell of a good situation. Players such as Pete Rose, Tony Perez, and Johnny Bench were already either on the team or in the farm system. But he was aggressive in bringing up good young pitchers such as Gary Nolan and Don Gullett. Then, before the 1970 season, he fired manager Dave Bristol, making many fans and players unhappy. But he replaced him with a young guy named Sparky Anderson, which proved to be one of the great managerial hires of all time. Howsam and his player development director, Chief Bender, did a great job of continuing to sign and develop talent, especially position players. Up to the major league roster came Ken Griffey, Dave Concepcion, Ray Knight, Bernie Carbo.

But the real coup came in 1971. Howsam made two trades that would solidify the Reds as the greatest team of the 1970s. First, he moved Lee May and Tommy Helms (very good players in their own right) to the Houston Astros for the second baseman Joe Morgan. Then he moved Frank Duffy, a disposable utility infielder, to the Giants for George Foster, then just a backup for that team, but who would be a key slugger for the Reds.

Now, when Holsam took over, the Reds were an acceptably good team. They had a great season in 1970, winning 102 games and losing the World Series to the Orioles, but then really regressed in 71, with a losing record. It was at that point that Howsam brought in Morgan and Foster and they just took off in 1972. Rose and Morgan were a great team at the top of the order and with Bench, Perez, and Foster to drive them in and solid players through the lineup, this was just a juggernaut.

Between 1972 and 1979, the Reds would go to five World Series, winning it twice, in 1975 and 1976. The worst team in that era was the 77 team, which still won 88 games. Howsam had a ton of power in these years. Not only did he become team president as well in 1973, but the owners were more than happy to let him do whatever he wanted and allowed him to represent them at owners’ meetings. What this also meant is that Howsam became a real dictator. He was an extremely conservative man who hated the idea that players could have long hair or mustaches and he banned both on the team, which the Reds continued for a very long time (the Yankees still have some of these restrictions I think). He also absolutely loathed the idea of players unionizing and led the hardline faction of owners refusing to negotiate with the players when they struck in 1972.

Of course players age and things change. Free agency, another thing Howsam hated, forced him to make hard decisions about his roster and the quality of team began to decline after 1976. They were still good in 1977, finishing second to the Dodgers in the NL West, though Howsam tried to push them over the top by trading for Tom Seaver. The Reds were second again in 1978 and then Howsam fired Sparky Anderson and they really declined from there. But Howsam hung around and traded for Pete Rose to become player/manager in 1984, which, well that didn’t work out well.

Later in life, Howsam had one last goal: bring major league baseball to Denver. He eventually succeeded in that with the Colorado Rockies, which started in 1993. Whether that product is actually. major league quality is an open question.

Howsam died in 2008, at the age of 89.

Bob Howsam is buried in Fairmount Cemetery, Denver, Colorado.

And here’s an upclose shot of that baseball, where you can see Johnny Bench’s signature, among others.

In 1973, Sporting News named Howsam its Major League Executive of the Year. If you would like this series to visit other winners of this award, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Jim Campbell, who won in 1969 for his work with the Detroit Tigers, is in Huron, Ohio. Dick O’Connell, who won for his work with the Boston Red Sox in 1975, is in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.