Paul Bako - Louisiana Athletics Hall of Fame Class of 2021
Paul Bako's 12 years in major league baseball were memorable for many different reasons.
The Lafayette native and UL standout played for two of the top managers in baseball history, Bobby Cox and Dusty Baker. He was in the dugout watching teammate Sammy Sosa's 500th home run, and later had the same view of teammate Ken Griffey Jr.'s 600th.
He caught Greg Maddux's 250th and 300th victories with the Atlanta Braves. He was in the National League Championship Series with the Chicago Cubs, five outs away from the World Series, before the infamous Steve Bartman incident.
He was on a Braves team that played the Mets in Shea Stadium in the first game back in New York after 9/11. And he got to a World Series, at age 37, with the Philadelphia Phillies in his final season.
And none of it may have happened had he not learned a lot of baseball lessons as an 18-year-old true freshman catcher, and been surrounded by much older and more experienced teammates on what at the time was UL's best-ever baseball squad in the 1991 season.
"That was really a blue-collar, high-level baseball program," Bako said of the 49-20 Ragin' Cajun squad that year. "Determination, perseverance, grit, all things that if I didn't have it in me prior, they were instilled in me during that season. We had strong personalities … I played on pro ball teams that had weaker personalities and less determined guys than that 1991 team."
Two years later, Bako – known much more for his stellar defensive play behind the plate than his hitting – led the Cajuns in triples, home runs and runs scored to cap his college career. Five years later he finished his ascent through the minor leagues and broke in with the Detroit Tigers in 1998.
What followed were stints with Houston (1999-2000), Atlanta (2000-01), Milwaukee (2002), Chicago Cubs (2003-04), Los Angeles Dodgers (2005), Kansas City (2006), Baltimore (2007), Cincinnati (2008) and Philadelphia (2009). In all, he wore 11 different major league uniforms and was part of teams that made four postseason appearances.
Those years of baseball excellence on both the college and professional levels put Bako into the 2021 class of the Louisiana Athletics Hall of Fame. He will be honored with the University's highest athletic honor during this week's Homecoming activities.
He will join the late Cajun baseball coach Tony Robichaux, fellow baseball standout Phil Devey and softball pitching great Ashley Brignac Domec as Hall of Fame inductees at a Friday ceremony in their honor. They will also participate in the Homecoming parade and will be honored during Saturday's Homecoming football game against Texas State.
With all those notable moments, it was longevity, consistency and a rare knack for assembling and retaining information that made Bako unique in professional baseball. It's not out of the realm of possibility that Bako worked with more pitchers and had more teammates than anyone in recent major league history.
"I think about how many different pitchers I caught, all the spring trainings, how many different teammates and different personalities I was around," he said. "You think about it and it's just so neat."
Defense got Bako a chance to play on a high level, but it was pure baseball knowledge and insights that allowed him to play in 789 major league games and average more than 500 plate appearances per season.
"If you're not hitting 30 homers and getting 100 RBI, you better be better than average defensively," Bako said. "I was always much better defensively. What kept me around wasn't just because I could throw guys out. I had a knack for seeing what a guy's swing looked like and how that matched up with that certain pitcher.
Before the time of extensive video scouting and analytics, Bako was valuable to his teams because of those traits. He provided things that didn't show up on most box scores, even though he threw out 187 base stealers and had only 58 passes balls in 12 seasons. He was a lifetime .231 major league hitter, but it's the hits that opposing batters did not get while he was behind the plate that were more important to his success.
"I learned how to call a game and work with pitchers, picking that up along the way," he said. "That just comes from experience and paying attention. Pitchers on my team knew batters' strengths and weaknesses because I was able to retain that. That became my reputation and that's what kept me around."
Before those major league exploits, Bako helped lead UL to a pair of conference titles. He was the starting catcher as a freshman on that 1991 team and on the 1992 squad that won the Sun Belt Conference title and ranked in the top 30 nationally in pitching. He had his best offensive year the following season when he led the Cajuns in five different batting categories and was a fifth-round draft pick by the Cincinnati Reds.
Bako credits former UL coach Mike Boulanger for helping him forge a successful baseball career, both while a collegian and even more importantly in his pro career.
"Coach Bo treated us like men and not like college kids," he said. "He was a pro ball coach that happened to be coaching college. He taught me and taught us how to play winning baseball and how to compete. That was a rough, tough bunch of guys when I got there, and that forced me to grow up pretty quickly.
"He stressed competing more than anything else, and through that environment and playing alongside older teammates, I learned a lot of grittiness that helped me get through the minor league and stayed with me in the big leagues, and now even after baseball."
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