Bump Wills, a baseball mentor and a legend

As you get older, it becomes harder to make friends. Even more so, to find someone you can learn from.

In early 2020, my wife told me that my son would have a new coach for his 12 and under Dallas Mustangs baseball team. It was after a long day at work and maybe I was not as careful a listener or interested as I should have been and baseball season seemed a long way off.

Upon getting no acknowledgment, she got my attention announcing, “His coach is a former Texas Ranger.”

Now, I was interested. Former Texas Ranger sounds magical to my ears.

She told me, “It’s some guy with a funny nickname, Jump or Hump, or something.”

Immediately, I excitedly asked, “Bump Wills? My son is going to play for Bump Wills?”

And he did for three seasons and we both learned a lot about baseball and life. And I made a friend.

Since it’s Jackie Robinson Day in Major League Baseball, it seems appropriate to bring up Elliot “Bump” Wills. He has played the most games of any Black player in Texas Rangers history — 703. He broke into the big leagues for the Rangers in 1977 when he finished third in the Rookie of the Year balloting.

In his first big league game he had his first hit, a single off Hall of Famer Jim Palmer in the 10th inning to score a runner and give the Rangers a win.

He stole 52 bases the next year, which remains a team record 45 years later.

He and his teammate, Toby Harrah, are the only players to ever hit back-to-back inside the park home runs. They did it in Yankees Stadium on Aug. 27, 1977, on consecutive pitches. You can look it up.

Bump’s dog today is, of course, named Toby for his longtime friend and teammate. That’s who he is.

Bump, 71, was an excellent baseball player. He’s an even better guy.

Dallas Mustangs founder Sam Carpenter noted, “He makes every kid smile and somehow play better.”

It’s not just his own team loves him, everyone does. Other teams, parents and even umpires line up before and after games for photos and autographs with Bump. Even my father-in-law got in on the act, posing with him. Turns out, everyone needs a bump in life and Bump in their life.

Carpenter knows a little about baseball, having coached 45 big leaguers who have played for the Mustangs, including Texas Rangers General Manager Chris Young. Carpenter noted Bump makes them better ballplayers and young men, but he won’t accept any of the credit.

Bump is always early for any team activity. He is always focused on every member of the team. He always does it right the first time. His equipment and his person and his uniform are perfect.

What you really need to know is that Bump is a Baseball Man. He played five seasons in the majors for the Rangers and then one for the Chicago Cubs. He then moved on to play in Japan for two seasons (where he learned to speak Japanese), where he once raced a horse before a game and won.

Bump tells his players two things: “Go as hard as you can as long as you can” and “swing it like you mean it.” He lives his life along these lines and he has since 1962, when, at age 10, he was allowed to sit in the dugout of the great Dodgers teams of his father, Maury Wills. Managed by Walt Alston, those teams featured Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale. He’s been a Baseball Man ever since.

Bump will continue to instruct, mentor and coach Mustangs. It’s in his nature, but last year was his last season to manage a team. Baseball men don’t have years; they have seasons.

Fittingly, in his last game he went out a winner. In his final game, his 14U Dallas Mustangs won the consolation bracket in Omaha at a national tournament. It wasn’t the championship the team had sought, but they went as hard as they could as long as they could.

Bump made it about the players. My son picked up the win as Bump’s last starting pitcher.

“Bumpy deserved to go out a winner,” the team’s first baseman, Cooper Alt, told me after the game. He sure did. How many 71-year-olds throw batting practice (with their shirts off no less) multiple times a week. Only a Baseball Man does that.

Youth baseball may seem like a big step down for a big league star, but not if you are a Baseball Man. Wills had to overcome the fact that his father, the National League MVP, was one of the great players of the 1960s to forge his own identity as a player. Bump stutters. He talks slowly, quietly, carefully. He selects his words—and they land. He is among the most effective communicators I have seen. He can get teenage boys, a pretty tough audience, to not just listen, but put his words into their actions. He manages to make others impart his thoughts as their own—often because his thoughts are about the group, the team, and not himself. That’s what managers do: they get others to do their bidding, thinking it’s their own.

He played in the day before players made the big money. He lives happily with his wife, Deborah, in a well-tended home in Garland. Bump does his own yard work, the housework, and the laundry. If you played for him none of this would surprise you.

Last summer, Bump returned to the new home of the Rangers to throw out the first pitch. A well-deserved honor for a fine player and a better man. He did so with his team, his last team, in the stands watching him. And, of course, he threw a strike, smiled broadly, and embraced his friends and family because he’s a Baseball Man — and baseball is for everyone.

Maybe no one noticed that on that night he didn’t wear his Ranger’s No. 1. I did. He was a childhood hero. He wore his dad’s number. On Jackie Robinson Day, it’s worth celebrating a Ranger who has stayed in the community, making it a better place.

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