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Brakettes To Pay Tribute to Legendary
General Manager Bob Baird Saturday Night
 July 6 - The Stratford Brakettes will pay homage to their late great General Manager Bob Baird on Saturday night at 7:00 at Frank DeLuca Hall of Fame Field. The Brakettes and Massachusetts Drifters will play their scheduled doubleheader immediately after the tribute, which will feature short speeches from longtime Brakettes Manager John Stratton and others.
Bob Baird served as the General Manager of the Brakettes for 35 years, following more than two decades as the Raybestos Brakettes’ local beat reporter for the Bridgeport Post and Telegram. Baird’s earliest sportswriting duties had him on assignment covering Bertha (Ragan) Tickey, Micki (Macchietto) Stratton, and Joan Joyce’s teams, and his lifelong career promoting the Brakettes began to take shape.
Baird’s tenure as Brakettes GM began in 1988 with him and longtime friend Frank DeLuca navigating a move for the team from the iconic Raybestos Memorial Field to Textron Lycoming Field, (now Frank DeLuca Hall of Fame Field) at 1000 Main Street. The move kept the most successful softball team in history together and in Stratford, but Baird’s work was just beginning.
In his first season pulling the strings, Baird and the (then Hi-Ho) Brakettes enjoyed a continuation of the dominance that the franchise had come to expect, winning the ASA Nationals in Pekin, IL over the Orange (CA) Majestics. Although they dropped the 1989 final to the Whittier (CA) Raiders, the (again) Raybestos Brakettes won the next three ASA National titles and finished runners-up once more in 1993 to the Redding Rebels. With four titles and two second place finishes in Baird’s first six years with the club, the Brakettes were thriving in their new surroundings.
Baird worked with ten National ASA Hall of Fame Brakettes in his years with the team, nine of which played during his first seven seasons. He also shared the stage with two National ASA Hall of Fame managers.
Recent Oklahoma City inductee John Stratton summed up the early years working with Bob… “from Kathy Arendsen and Barbara Reinalda to Dot Richardson, Pat Dufficy, Shelia Cornell, Lisa Fernandez… there was always an understanding that Bob was doing a lot of work behind the scenes. We didn’t even know half of it. They didn’t always agree with his decisions, but there was a respect he commanded and deserved from some of the game’s greatest players.”
 However, Baird would soon need to lead the Brakettes through another transition, as the dawning of Olympic softball would decimate the team’s star-studded lineup with the creation of the US National Team. As Hall of Fame manager Ralph Raymond left to coach the Olympic team, Baird turned to his trusted softball partner-in-crime, John Stratton, to rebuild the roster and return the Brakettes to glory.
The second go-round of Raybestos sponsorship also faded away, and Stratton helped recruit Westport resident Dave “Doc” Carpenter as the team’s new primary sponsor, leading to the renaming of the team as the Stratford Brakettes in 1996. Major renovations to DeLuca Field also came in 2000, a few years after the Town of Stratford purchased the field, bringing a stadium feel to Brakettes games yet again.
With Baird and Stratton leading the team and Carpenter as the sponsor, the Brakettes ended a nine-year ASA winless streak in 2002 and captured five of the last six ASA titles during their time together. Baird realized another dream in 2006, as the professional Connecticut Brakettes competed in the now-defunct National Pro Fastpitch league for one season, while the Stratford Brakettes continued to compete with their amateur status. Despite a successful season and runner-up finish, the pro Brakettes folded after one season, leaving Baird to focus solely on the Stratford Brakettes.
The “Doc” years lasted through the 2007 season, with Carpenter’s passing that year marking the end of a magical era of Brakettes softball. The Brakettes won one last ASA title - in memory of “Doc” - that summer, but another period of financial uncertainty for the Brakettes was settling in.
Big Bob was also central in the recruitment of the next Brakettes’ sponsor, HYPACK software founder Pat Sanders. With HYPACK on board, Baird led the Brakettes away from the crumbling ASA Women’s Major tournament structure and created the Women’s Major Softball (WMS) National Championship in 2009.
One lasting combined effort by Sanders and Baird was their push to make the Brakettes a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit entity, a model that has served the team well ever since. After a decade of generous sponsorship under Sanders, which featured several successful trips to the Midwest and Las Vegas in search of the best competition, Baird sought to find new sponsor dollars to help pick up the tab.
Eventually, Baird oversaw the creation of a Junior Brakettes farm team in 2019, while even fielding a third “Select Brakettes” team in 2021 and 2022. The younger squads proved to be valuable developers of talent, and Bob surely loved rooting for the newfound Brakette teams.
 One of Baird’s proudest and most impactful moments may have come during the summer of 2020, when the Brakettes played a shortened season due to the Covid-19 pandemic and were legitimately the only game in town (and anywhere else?). Not even a pandemic would stop Bob Baird from putting on Brakettes games for their beloved fans, and he was quick to point out that the Brakettes are the longest continuously operating (since 1947) women’s fastpitch softball team in the world.
The Brakettes won 12 of the 14 WMS titles under Baird’s watch, while attracting the best women’s amateur club teams to compete annually in Stratford, CT.
Baird’s decades-long pursuit of a Brakettes Museum and Hall of Fame finally saw progress in his last months. After Joan Joyce passed away in 2022, her $50,000 posthumous gift to the Brakettes was made known in a letter to Baird and Stratton. Though seriously ill, Baird felt immediate relief knowing that there would finally be a way forward to memorialize all the Brakettes’ greats.
Bob Baird’s presence continues to be felt in so many ways at DeLuca Hall of Fame Field, and one day, he too will be properly honored with a much-deserved spot in the Brakettes Museum and Hall of Fame. He was inducted into the CT ASA Hall of Fame in October 2017 for his lifetime of work with softball.
Although he missed the 2022 season while in treatment for acute myeloid leukemia, Bob watched every game online and followed his three Brakette teams’ progress throughout. Soon after beating leukemia for the second time in five years in August 2022, Bob was diagnosed with terminal lung disease in early December 2022. He passed away peacefully at home on New Year’s Eve, with his wife, Diana Joy Baird, and their loving family at his side. He is survived by his four sisters, six children, and 15 grandchildren.
The 15th annual WMS Tournament will be hosted by the Brakettes in Stratford from August 2nd-6th, 2023, and continues to serve as a testament to Baird’s relentless pursuit of softball excellence. In addition to the Stratford Brakettes and Junior Brakettes, the 2022 WMS runners-up Stripes & Strikes (PA) will return to this year’s tourney, as will the Maryland Chill, (New) Jersey Kaboom, Connecticut Freedom, while the Mid-Hudson (NY) Mustangs and several other newcomers will join the field. |
| Bob Baird Tribute Night, July 8th |
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| Bob's Family |
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