I think Clark was the last notable player drafted while my gramps was in the front office . . . they had a good run there with the Mitchell/Clark/Williams/Thompson bunch.  Hard not to like all the late-inning comebacks.

Anyhow . . . can we start calling Bill Neukom “Duke?”  That’d be cool.

The Royals employ George Brett as, I think, VP Baseball Ops.  They’ve also employed John Wathan, Hal McRae and Bob Boone (consecutively, as a matter of fact) as managers, and have a lot of former players contracted to provide spring instruction to young players and/or rove throughout the minor leagues in various jobs.  Paul Splittorff is a broadcaster.

The Dodgers do that also. They have Ron Cey and Steve Garvey do a lot of publicity stuff like McCovey. And they always have lots of former players around at spring training (I suspect a lot of teams do; I know the Yankees do), most notably Maury Wills and Sandy Koufax. As for front office—well there’s Tommy Lasorda. What he actually does administration-wise, who knows, but technically he’s a former player.

My gramps was Jack Schwarz - he was with the team for over forty years, with most of the good times at the beginning and towards the end.    Luckily, I wasn’t around for the post-McCovey, pre-Clark era.