A couple of years ago, the Commonwealth Club of California hosted an evening with Bruce Bochy, where he was asked questions about baseball, the Giants, and life in general. The talk goes an hour long and he’s interviewed by Roy Eisenhardt, former president of the Oakland A’s. This is the first I’m hearing of the Commonwealth Club, despite its long history (it was founded in 1903), and even though it’s a nonpartisan public affairs organization, I recognize that nothing is nonpartisan anymore by virtue of partisans viewing nonpartisans as a partisan against partisans. Anyway —
In the embedded YouTube video below, there’s a lot of talk about Bruce Bochy’s first book, A Book of Walks (reviewed here), but also some insight into his managerial thought process with familiar and specific game situations cited. He also talks about pace of play and his thoughts on the game in general.
If you’ve never stopped to listened to the Bruce Bochy Show before every Giants broadcast on KNBR, you should check it out. Jon Miller doesn’t grill him, but he asks probing managerial questions and sometimes about a topic of the day and Bochy almost always provides some sort of thoughtful answer or tosses out an idea you never figured he had in him. It’s because he’s a bit of a rough around the edges renaissance man.
But if you don’t want to hear Bruce Bochy talk for an hour, at least take a minute to hear Barry Bonds talk about Bruce Bochy.
As much as I love Dusty Baker, I feel like a lengthier Bochy-Bonds pairing would’ve provided some dynamite history for a franchise overflowing with it.