All The Right Tools

So it’s done.

After two days of cocktailing, tale-telling, dining, schmoozing, lunching, dedicating, roasting, laughing and eulogizing - and we’re not even counting the politicking which had to be done in advance - what was Bailey Field on the Washington State University campus is now Bailey-Brayton Field.

And not a legend too soon.

But did you know that the old ballyard’s honorific came within a saw swipe of being a memorial before it was even finished?

Surely you’re aware that Frederick Charles “Bobo” Brayton, in his single-minded drive to erect the ultimate monument to Cougars baseball 20 years ago, squeezed in the last 600 or so of the 1,162 victories he amassed as Wazzu’s coach among his “hobbies” - rainmaker, kitchen-table architect, hole-digger, concrete-pourer and very general contractor of what in 1980 became the new Buck Bailey Field.

Baseball people like to talk about “five-tool players” - those who can field, run, throw, hit and hit for power. Well, Bobo was a five-tool guy, too.

Pick, shovel, saw, sledge and drill.

He was clearing space for what he calls “Century One” - a cozy plaza dedicated to Cougars baseball history - when he had his brush with fate.

“I’m digging holes for these pillars with lights on them,” he recalled, “and I run into a pipe. There had been a lot of garbage hauled off in that area years ago, and that’s what I thought it was. I was working with a hacksaw and you know how with hacksaws - it’s hard to stay straight, it wants to bend on you like a spoon. So finally I go off to get a handsaw to finish it off.

“Well, I’m walking back and I start thinking, `You know, that might be an electrical thing.’ So I call Buildings and Grounds and somebody comes out, and it turns out that if I’d taken one more swish with that saw, I’d have gone into a 4,611-volt line.

“That would have been all she wrote.”

Now that’s an expression with some irony. All she wrote. It seems unlikely we will ever reach the point with Bobo Brayton where it’s all been written.

For 3-1/2 hours on Friday, friends and family roasted Bobo with a program that was alternately uproarious and moving, without ever becoming maudlin. The whole thing was so quintessentially Cougar that the video ought to be required viewing for any new athletic department employee as a proper indoctrination of what this place simply has to be about.

If all the humor doesn’t especially translate to the printed page, the sentiment does. What was it Brayton used to constantly tell his teams? Good things happen to good people?

Must be true. At one point Friday night, John Olerud - newly of the Seattle Mariners and only the finest baseball player WSU has ever produced - proclaimed that his days at Wazzu under Brayton amounted to “the best time I’ve had playing baseball.” This is the Olerud who flirted with hitting .400, and won two World Series with the Toronto Blue Jays.

In the next breath, the stoic Olerud said, “I know this is where I’m supposed to say something funny.” And so Bobo - still coaching - prompted him into an anecdote about a terrible homering the umpires gave the Cougars once in an Alaska summer league game. It seems catcher Kevin Scott was having a horrible day, too, and finally flat missed a foul tip that wound up dinging the home-plate ump flush in the cup.

As the poor guy doubled over in misery, Olerud heard his coach’s familiar rasp from the dugout.

“Hey, blue,” came the growl. “Bad things happen to bad people.”

The line didn’t get him tossed, so even the umpire must have laughed.

The good thing is that Bailey-Brayton Field is now old enough that it is often taken for granted, yet Brayton himself never could. In the great facilities shuffle athletic director Sam Jankovich engineered in the late 1970s, he mostly left Brayton to his own devices in building the stadium - starting with a $20,000 loan Bobo took out to buy and transport old Sicks Stadium from Seattle to Pullman.

In time, Bobo found those spare parts didn’t fit the ever-evolving plans. He sold off the seats to junior colleges, a team in Fairbanks, the Whitman County parks system. In the end, only some wire fencing, some fence supports and the two foul poles remained from Sicks.

So he scrounged some more. The farmers who donated wheat for lights, the volunteers who ran backhoes, the players who dug foundations and the citizens who ponied up materials and money - they didn’t do it out of love for baseball as much as they did it out of love for Bobo. One day, he went out to the field and found Jim Walden and his football team installing a restraining fence.

“I found,” Brayton said, “that all I had to do was ask somebody.”

What Bobo had going on was a barn-raising - occasionally to the chagrin of the campus officials charged with making sure codes and procedures were followed. In that respect, what Bobo did - and the way he did it - for a couple of million dollars probably couldn’t be done today on the hilltop at any price.

And that, just as much as the 1,162 victories and the players’ treasured tales, is why his name belongs with Bailey’s above the gate.

It took some doing. Joe McIntosh - still the school’s winningest pitcher as well as Olerud’s agent - and several other former players dropped the idea on athletic director Rick Dickson last spring. Dickson’s immediate endorsement took the matter before the campus naming committee - “the `No’ committee” as Dickson called it. With some prodding, but no obvious reluctance, the “No” committee said “Yes.”

The field of Bobo’s dreams would, quite properly, have his name on it.

“You know, one of Buck’s stepsons wrote something in the (Spokane) paper that said sharing the name kind of cheapens it,” Brayton said. “And you kind of wonder if maybe it doesn’t. I would have been opposed to it all the way if we hadn’t put so much into it. But I worry a little about that.”

He shouldn’t. Nor should anyone fret over the order of the names. Buck built the program. Bobo built the ballyard, ensuring that the program would last.

“Besides, in a few years, I’ll be the same place Buck is,” Brayton said, “and it isn’t going to matter then.”

Here’s hoping it’s longer than a few years. It’ll help if he keeps that hacksaw holstered.