Playing and Early Front Office Career
Fanning attended Buena Vista College in Storm Lake, Iowa. In his professional playing days, he was a catcher who played most of his career in the minor leagues. He spent the 1957 season and parts of three others with the Chicago Cubs between 1954 and 1957, compiling an anemic batting average of .170 with no home runs and 24 hits. He then became a manager in the minor leagues, eventually joining the Milwaukee/Atlanta Braves organization, where in the middle of the 1960s he was promoted to the positions of Director of Minor League Operations and assistant general manager.
Fanning was briefly listed as a coach for the 1968 Braves, but before the season began he resigned to become the first director of the Central Scouting Bureau. Just months later, when his old Milwaukee boss, John McHale, became the first president of the expansion Expos, Fanning accompanied him to Canada as the Expos' general manager. Fanning and McHale built the Expos from scratch; in those days, prior to the era of free agency, newly-formed clubs could only rely on expansion and amateur drafts and trades to build their talent base.
Read more about this topic: Jim Fanning
Famous quotes containing the words playing, early, front, office and/or career:
“Give me mine angle, we’ll to th’ river; there,
My music playing far off, I will betray
Tawny-finned fishes; my bended hook shall pierce
Their slimy jaws; and as I draw them up,
I’ll think them every one an Antony,
And say, “Ah, ha! y’ are caught.””
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“A two-year-old can be taught to curb his aggressions completely if the parents employ strong enough methods, but the achievement of such control at an early age may be bought at a price which few parents today would be willing to pay. The slow education for control demands much more parental time and patience at the beginning, but the child who learns control in this way will be the child who acquires healthy self-discipline later.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“Culture is a sham if it is only a sort of Gothic front put on an iron building—like Tower Bridge—or a classical front put on a steel frame—like the Daily Telegraph building in Fleet Street. Culture, if it is to be a real thing and a holy thing, must be the product of what we actually do for a living—not something added, like sugar on a pill.”
—Eric Gill (1882–1940)
“Even the utmost goodwill and harmony and practical kindness are not sufficient for Friendship, for Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody. We do not wish for Friends to feed and clothe our bodies,—neighbors are kind enough for that,—but to do the like office to our spirits. For this few are rich enough, however well disposed they may be.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)