Bobby Brown was a hero long before he shipped off to fight in the Korean War. He was awarded the Coast Guard’s Silver Lifesaving Medal at 18 years old, but he wasn’t in the Coast Guard. He was a student at Stanford University; he rescued a member of the Coast Guard.
In 1943, he was drafted for service in World War II and was assigned to a naval unit at UCLA, where he finished his pre-med courses before reporting to San Diego Naval Hospital. As the war progressed, the Navy sent him to Tulane Medical School, where he wore a midshipman's uniform. The war ended before he finished medical school, however, and he stayed at Tulane.
Before the United States joined the war, Brown was already an accomplished athlete. As a high school baseball player in San Francisco’s Galileo High School, his squad caught the eye of a Cincinnati Reds scout who watched the high schoolers smash the University of California baseball team in 1941.
The scout invited him to come work out with the Reds in Cincinnati. After graduating, he also worked out with the Detroit Tigers, New York Yankees, Brooklyn Dodgers and Philadelphia Athletics.
At Tulane, the stress of medical school and being a Navy midshipman did nothing to diminish his love for baseball. For the year he played shortstop at Tulane, the school’s baseball team had its best year to date.
When the Navy discharged Brown, the scouts came calling. Shortly after, the Yankees signed Brown to a three-year contract as a third baseman, with a bonus that was the highest ever in professional baseball.
By the time the Korean War broke out in 1950, Brown was already a two-time World Series champion. Before shipping out to Korea, he won two more with the Yankees. Since Brown never deployed during World War II, he was drafted for Army service in Korea. He spent 19 months in service on the Korean Peninsula with the 160th Field Artillery Battalion aid station, the 5th Regimental Combat Team and the 8225th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. He later was transferred to the Tokyo Army Hospital in Japan.
Brown returned home to the Yankees in 1954, when they were struggling. After losing nine of their first 16 games, Manager Casey Stengel famously told the press: “Boy, do we need a doctor!” But after 1954, Brown retired as a baseball player, went into cardiology and opened his first practice in Texas in 1958.
He was far from done with baseball, however. He briefly took a break from his practice to become president of the Texas Rangers in 1974. That only lasted a year, but a decade later, he took the job of American League president, which he held for the next 10 years.
Brown never regretted leaving baseball for cardiology, but once wrote, “The only regret I might have is that I didn’t play ball exclusively for two or three years. I’d like to know how well I could have done if I’d concentrated exclusively on baseball for several years.”
He died at his Fort Worth, Texas, home in March 2021 at the age of 96.
-- Blake Stilwell can be reached at blake.stilwell@military.com. He can also be found on Twitter @blakestilwell or on Facebook.
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