The Life and Legacy of Bobby Brown: Baseball Player, Cardiologist, and American League President (1924–2021)

Robert William “Bobby” Brown, professional baseball player, cardiologist, and American League president, was born on October 25, 1924, in Seattle, Washington, to William Christopher Brown and Myrtle Kathryn (Berg) Brown. He was the oldest of three children. After he finished the seventh grade, the family moved to Maplewood, New Jersey, where he attended Maplewood Junior High School and was student body president. Although Brown was an excellent overall athlete, his father, who had been a semi-professional baseball player, urged him to concentrate on baseball after junior high school. Brown had been good enough to play on an American Legion team in Seattle, and while he was in ninth grade, he played on an American Legion team representing Maplewood and South Orange in New Jersey. He also played in the men’s Lackawanna League. As Brown became serious about pursuing a baseball career, his father told him that if he wanted to be a big-league ballplayer, he should not smoke or drink. And he never did either during his entire life. 

When Brown, as a tenth grader, tried out for the Columbia High School team, the coach informed him that he would spend that year on the junior varsity. Brown’s father had a job offer to work for a liquor distributor in San Francisco and was so exasperated by the coach’s decision that he took the offer and moved the family to the Bay Area, even though he had a good job and the family was very happy in Maplewood.

Upon his arrival in San Francisco, Brown played American Legion and semi-pro baseball with future New York Yankee teammates Jerry Coleman and Charlie Silvera. In his junior year, he starred at shortstop for Galileo High School. He batted .583 and led his team to the high school championship in San Francisco and then the Bay Area regional championship when his team defeated a team from Oakland. After Brown’s high school team blasted the University of California, Berkeley, freshman team 13–2, a Berkeley professor, who was also a scout for the Cincinnati Reds, asked if he would be interested in working out with the Reds. As a result, the sixteen-year-old Brown traveled to Cincinnati and spent two weeks working out and traveled with the club to Wrigley Field in Chicago.

As a senior, Brown was elected student body president and captain of the baseball team at Galileo High. He hit .375 while leading the school to another city championship. He graduated in 1942. He planned to attend Stanford University because he had played a semi-pro game there after his junior year, and so he matriculated there in the fall of 1942. He began as a chemical engineering major but soon switched to pre-med. With the United States entering World War II after Pearl Harbor, freshmen became eligible to play on the varsity, so Brown quickly became the starting shortstop and batted .463 for the Pacific Coast Conference season.

Brown became eligible for the military draft when he turned eighteen in October 1942. Instead, he joined the United States Navy and was able to finish the year at Stanford. He enrolled in the Navy’s V-12 officer training program and was called to active duty on July 1, 1943. As a pre-med student, he was given five semesters to finish his course work before, if his grades were good enough, enrolling in medical school. Brown was assigned to study at UCLA, which had a large V-12 program, and attended classes year-round. 

Brown was able to play baseball for UCLA in the 1944 season on a team made up mostly of other V-12 and Army Air Forces students in officer training. Brown again batted over .450 as the team won the Pacific Coast Conference title as well as the league title for schools located in southern California, including Cal Tech, Occidental, and Pepperdine.

Once Brown completed his pre-med studies at UCLA, the navy assigned him to medical school at Tulane University in New Orleans on December 1, 1944. Despite the rigors of the first year of medical school, Brown went out for the Tulane baseball team and batted .444, leading the team to the most successful season in school history with a 21–6 record. Because Brown had late afternoon labs, Tulane baseball coach, Claude “Little Monk” Simons, told the opposing coaches that, although the game was supposed to start at 4:30 or 5:00, they could not start the game until their shortstop got out of his medical school lab. 

Brown attended medical school year-round but was discharged from the navy in January 1946 after the war ended. With his discharge, he was eligible to sign a professional baseball contract and, after a bidding war involving fifteen of the sixteen major league teams, he signed with the New York Yankees for a record-tying $52,000 bonus. Due to the size of Brown’s bonus and his blond hair, he was dubbed “Golden Boy” in the press.

Wanting to continue his medical studies, Brown agreed to sign only after the dean of the Tulane Medical School, Dr. Maxwell Lapham, promised that the school would work with him to allow him to pursue a professional baseball career while he was in medical school. Amidst a flurry of publicity, Brown left Tulane with three weeks remaining in the spring semester to go to the Yankees spring training camp in St. Petersburg, Florida. He was eventually assigned to play for the Newark Bears of the International League, the Yankees’ top farm club. There his first roommate was Yogi Berra, and the two began a life-long friendship.

While playing virtually every game at shortstop for the Bears, Brown batted .341, one of the highest in the league (Jackie Robinson of Montreal led with .349). His 174 hits tied for the league lead. Brown was also second in the International League’s MVP voting behind Eddie Robinson of Baltimore, a Texan who also became a life-long friend. 

After the International League season concluded, Brown was given a late season call-up to the parent New York Yankees. In seven games spanning twenty-nine plate appearances, he batted .333. His minor league playing days were over, as he spent the next five plus years with the Yankees, platooning at third base with Billy Johnson. 

Brown had carried his medical texts with him throughout the 1946 season so that he would be prepared to take his pathology and pharmacology exams from the spring upon his return to Tulane after the season. When he returned to Tulane, he also had to catch up on the fall courses that started about six weeks earlier.

The year 1947 was Brown’s true rookie year in the big leagues, and, with the permission of Tulane, which operated on the honor system, he took a pediatrics exam in the Yankees clubhouse and another final in the Book-Cadillac Hotel in Detroit. Brown graduated from Tulane in 1950 and often said, other than his marriage and the birth of his children, that it was the greatest thrill of his life. Until Brown graduated from medical school, he typically missed spring training and arrived in New York about the time the regular season began. Even after he became a doctor, his internal medicine internship at Stanford caused him to miss spring training.

The Yankees won the World Series in 1947 and from 1949 through 1951. In those four World Series, Brown excelled and batted a then record .439 with 18 hits in 41 at bats, including five doubles and three triples. Overall, the Yankees won nine of the ten games in which Brown started in those four World Series.

On October 16, 1951, Brown married Sara Kathryn French of Dallas. She attended Sophie Newcomb College (a women’s coordinate college to Tulane in New Orleans) while he was in medical school. Together they raised three children—Peter, Beverley, and Kaydee—and were happily married until Sara passed away in 2012.

After the outbreak of the Korean Conflict in 1950, Brown was subject to the “Doctor’s Draft” for those who were in the V-12 medical school program in World War II but who had not served overseas. He began his active duty, this time with the U. S. Army, on July 1, 1952, in the middle of the Yankees’ season, and was sent to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio for basic training. Although he was able to play baseball with the Brooke Army Medical Center team, he soon was shipped overseas and arrived in Inchon, Korea, on October 1, 1952, the day the Yankees played the first game of the World Series.

Brown first served in a mobile army surgical hospital (MASH) unit and then was assigned to the Forty-fifth Infantry Division, where he served in a battalion aid station for the 160th Field Artillery Battalion. He was the only Major League Baseball player in the ground forces in Korea, although Ted Williams, Jerry Coleman, and Lloyd Merriman were all called to Korea as U.S. Marine fighter pilots. After ten months in Korea, Brown was assigned to the Tokyo Army Hospital in Japan, where his wife Sara and their infant son Pete were able to join him. Joe DiMaggio and his bride Marilyn Monroe honeymooned in Japan while Brown was stationed there, so Brown and DiMaggio, along with Lefty O’Doul, gave clinics to Japanese teams in spring training during the day before the three men and their wives were given lavish dinners in the evenings. Marilyn Monroe succumbed to pressure to fly to Korea to entertain the troops over her husband’s objection. DiMaggio did insist, however, that only Brown could administer the necessary shots to his bride to enable her to make the trip to Korea.

Brown was discharged from the U.S. Army in April 1954 and began his residency in internal medicine at Stanford on July 1. In the meantime, he joined the Yankees and served mostly as a pinch hitter for the team. On June 30, 1954, Brown got two hits and played third base for the Yankees against the Red Sox in Boston. After the game, he boarded a red-eye flight to San Francisco to begin his residency the following day and, at the age of twenty-nine, effectively retired from baseball.

After Brown completed his three-year internal medicine residency at the Stanford Service at the County Hospital of San Francisco, he returned to Tulane in 1957 for an additional one-year residency in cardiology. Although offered a position on the Tulane Medical School faculty, he instead accepted an offer to join Dr. Albert Goggans, who had been a Tulane resident when Brown was in medical school, in his cardiology practice in Fort Worth. He entered the practice on August 1, 1958, and they practiced together for more than twenty-five years. The only interruption in that span was in 1974, when Brad Corbett purchased the Texas Rangers baseball club. Corbett did not know much about running a baseball team and asked Brown to serve as interim president of the team. Brown did so for six months, then returned to his medical practice in October. 

In 1983 Brown was offered the job as president of the American League. He accepted, moved with his wife from Fort Worth to New York City, and began his new position on February 1, 1984. He served for ten years before retiring in August 1994 and returning to live in Fort Worth for the rest of his life. Bobby Brown passed away at the age of ninety-six on March 25, 2021, in Fort Worth. He was buried in Greenwood Memorial Park and Mausoleum in Fort Worth. A cenotaph honoring Brown was also erected in the Texas State Cemetery.

Among the many honors bestowed on Brown was his induction into the sports halls of fame of three universities—Stanford, UCLA, and Tulane. He was also named New Jersey Professional Athlete of the Year in 1946 after his year with the Newark Bears. He got honorary doctorates from Trinity College in Connecticut; the University of Massachusetts; and Hillsdale College in Michigan. Finally, he also received a Presidential Citation from the American Academy of Otolaryngology. The award that meant the most to him, however, was the United States Coast Guard Silver Lifesaving Medal for his rescue, along with another, of a radio operator in the May 6, 1943, crash of a Kingfisher anti-submarine surveillance plane about a quarter of a mile offshore from San Gregorio Beach in California. Brown was a freshman at Stanford spending the afternoon at the beach when they saw the plane crash into the ocean. On February 11, 2009, the Albert M. Goggans-Robert W. Brown Regional Heart Center at the Baylor All Saints Medical Center in Fort Worth was dedicated in honor of Brown and his longtime mentor and medical partner Goggans.

When asked if he had any regrets, Brown commented that he wished he had been able to play baseball exclusively for a few years to see what he could have achieved in the game. When asked if he regretted going to medical school, he said, “Not going to medical school would have been a tragedy.”