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  • Los Angeles Times

    Signed, sealed, delivered: How the gift of a 1963 baseball connected two California men

    by Steve Henson, Los Angeles Times Dec 22, 2021 9 minutes

    LOS ANGELES — Feeling buoyant from his Oxnard High graduation ceremony and dinner with his mom and girlfriend, Denver Clayton Lemaster — everyone called him Denny — turned onto his narrow street and let out a nervous chuckle. Cars lined the curb, and about a dozen men stood in his driveway.

    "Oh, my," his mother said from the back seat. "What's all this?"

    The men were major league baseball scouts jockeying to shovel more money to Denny than he'd ever imagined. The year was 1958, a major league baseball draft had yet to be implemented, and prospects could sign with any team upon graduating high school. Denny, a left-handed pitcher with an explosive fastball and knee-buckling curve, was the subject of a bidding war.

    The Lemasters invited the scouts into their home and politely asked them to line up in an orderly fashion. One after another they made their pitch.

    "You've got a country mother who didn't know anything about baseball and the son who just turned 19 bargaining with these guys, and this is all they do," Denny says today.

    He knew enough to use a scholarship offer from USC as leverage and signed with the Milwaukee Braves for an $80,000 bonus, about $769,000 today. Within days he'd catapulted out of Ventura County and launched a 15-year professional career that by 1962 would make him a teammate of future Hall of Famers Warren Spahn, Hank Aaron, Joe Torre and Eddie Mathews.

    That same June evening, six-year-old Baudelio Salinas Jr. — everyone called him Buddy — lay awake

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