Read Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, The Online
Authors: Bill James
Tags: #SPORTS &, #RECREATION/Baseball/History
Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, The (9 page)
Most Successful Managers:
1. Miller Huggins
2. John McGraw
3. Bill McKechnie
Most Controversial Manager:
Rogers Hornsby
Others of Note:
Donie Bush
Bucky Harris
Wilbert Robinson
Tris Speaker
Stunts:
Judge Emil Fuchs was the owner of the Boston Braves in the late 1920s. He had once been a night magistrate in New York City, and had been the biggest investor in a syndicate formed around Christy Mathewson. When Mathewson died, Fuchs took over as the acting partner.
In 1929 Fuchs, who had never played baseball well enough to talk about, named himself to manage the team. Amazingly, the perennial losers started out 10–2. “Why don’t you quit now?” asked a reporter. “You’re leading the league.”
“I will,” said Fuchs. “I want to hire a new manager on this next road trip.” He offered the job to Rabbit Maranville, but Maranville, who had managed the Brooklyn Dodgers several years earlier and had gotten released as a player for his troubles, didn’t want to have anything to do with it, so Fuchs continued to sit in the manager’s chair.
As a practical matter, Johnny Evers ran the team that summer. Fuchs held the title of manager, but Evers made out the lineups, and made essentially all of the in-game decisions. They finished with 98 losses.
As a consequence of this and other fiascos, the leagues eventually passed a bylaw prohibiting owners from managing their teams.
Typical Manager Was:
A second-or third-generation Ned Hanlon disciple with a baritone voice and the volume cranked permanently on high.
Percentage of Playing Managers:
24%
Most Second-Guessed Manager’s Move:
1925, Bucky Harris left Walter Johnson in the seventh game of the World Series to fritter away leads of 4–0, 6–3, and 7–6, ultimately losing 9–7. American League president Ban Johnson joined in the witch hunt, sending Harris a telegram denouncing the committment to Walter as “sentimental,” and adding that “sentiment has no place in a World Series.”
Clever Moves:
1924, Bucky Harris started Curly Ogden in Game Seven of the 1924 World Series (see “
Beard
”).
1929, Connie Mack started Howard Ehmke in Game One of the World Series
| Bloodlines Connie Mack and John McGraw were both the sons of Irish immigrants. Both were close friends of George M. Cohan, who could be described as the Mike Nichols of his era. Cohan started as a songwriter, and grew to be the biggest fish on Broadway. Cohan and Mack were childhood friends in Brookfield, Massachusettes. Cohan and McGraw were both members of the Lambs, a the-atrical men’s club. Mack married Margaret Hogan on November 2, 1887; she died in 1893, and he remarried in 1910. McGraw married Minnie Doyle on February 3, 1897; she died in 1899, and he remarried in 1902. |
Player Rebellions:
1926, Pittsburgh; see “
The Clarke Affaire
.”
Evolutions in Strategy:
Babe Ruth changed everything. The number of runs scored per game in the major leagues increased from 3.59 in 1917 to 5.19 in 1929, while the number of home runs per game quadrupled. Sacrifice bunts per game dropped precipitously (we don’t know exactly how much because of a wrinkle in the record-keeping), and stolen bases per game decreased by about 50%.
Platooning, common in the first half of the 1920s, faded away in the second half. While complete games continued to decline, experiments with full-time relievers essentially ended after Firpo Marberry in 1925. Every pitcher in the late 1920s was a starter/reliever.
Evolution in the Role of the Manager:
Until 1920, a major league manager was expected to find young players and bring them into the organization. Established managers built up networks of friends, associates, coaches, minor league managers, writers, and traveling salesmen who assisted them in finding prospects, very much like a real estate agent in the modern world. It was a personality business. In some ways, the pre-1920 manager was like a college coach today, scouring the country for prospects, except of course that the manager held the cards, and wasn’t really expected to kiss some eighteen-year-old kid’s ass to get him to come play for him.
When a manager heard about a young player who intrigued him, he might send a scout out to take a look, or he might send the kid train fare to come to the city and work out before a game. The great strength of Connie Mack and John McGraw is that they were better at this business than anyone else was. Connie Mack got Jimmie Foxx, for example, because one of his old players (Home Run Baker) was playing with Foxx on a local team and sent Connie excited telegraphs telling him what this kid could do. Connie said bring him by; I’ll sign him on your say-so.
John McGraw got Frankie Frisch in a similar way; one of his old players was Frisch’s college coach, at Fordham.
Between 1920 and 1935, with the development of farm systems, the responsibility for finding young players shifted away from the manager, and to the front office, the general manager, and the scouts who assisted him. This transfer of responsibility is the most fundamental shift in the role of the manager in the history of baseball.
M
ILLER
H
UGGINS
’
S
All-Star Team
W
ILBERT
R
OBINSON
’
S
All-Star Team
| Rat-A-Tat-Tat Miller Huggins, later famous as manager of the Yankees, broke in as a second baseman at Cincinnati and proved to be a graceful fielder despite his light frame. But all his life Huggins was sensitive because of his size. As a young man he had a suppressed desire to be a drum major, and he yearned for the glittering baton and the tall hat. Even after he made the grade in the majors, Huggins used to imitate the strut of a drum major in the offices of his club president, Garry Herrmann, demonstrating his prowess with an umbrella. —Lee Allen, |
Bill McKechnie hit. 134 in 44 games for the New York Yankees in 1913, but something good happened to him. Frank Chance took a liking to him and had him sit next to him on the bench when he played. Fred Lieb, covering the team for the New York
Press
, asked Chance why he was so fond of a .134 hitter.
“Because he’s the only son-of-a-sea-cook on this club who knows what it’s all about,” Chance said, at least if you believe Lieb’s story. “Among this bunch of meatheads, his brain shines like a gold mine.”
Despite the endorsement, a few days later McKechnie was playing second base on a muddy field in a rainstorm. The ball skidded into shallow right field, where McKechnie lost it in a large puddle of muddy water, allowing a runner to score from first. Chance was incensed, accused McKechnie of loafing, fined him, and sold him to a minor league team. McKechnie always remembered how unfair that was, as a manager, and always reminded himself to hear the player’s side before he took any action.
McKechnie got a chance to manage in the Federal League in 1915, when he was only twenty-eight years old, and apparently decided then that he wanted to manage. He retired as a player after a pretty good 1918 season and went to work in a factory in Ohio. The Pirates were left weak at third base. Barney Dreyfuss, owner of the Pirates, contacted McKechnie and asked him to return to the team in 1920. McKechnie agreed to return as a player/coach, under George Gibson; there may have been a tacit understanding that he would get the next chance to manage the team. He did, anyway, becoming manager of the Pirates after a year back in the minors.
He inherited a very good team and kept them in contention from 1922 through 1924. In 1925 they won the National League by 9 games, ending John McGraw’s four-year hold on the championship. In 1926, however, the team was ripped apart by infighting over Fred Clarke (see “
The Clarke Affaire
”), which made McKechnie’s position untenable. He was fired after that season, coached with the Cardinals in 1927, and was hired to manage St. Louis in 1928.
And he won the pennant in St. Louis.
And he was fired again.
This is among the truly strange events in baseball history, but apparently St. Louis owner Sam Breadon and Branch Rickey had a difference of opinion as to who should manage the Cardinals, and McKechnie became a Ping-Pong ball between the two of them. After the 1928 season, in which the Cardinals won the pennant but lost the World Series, Breadon fired McKechnie, and gave the Cardinals’ job to Billy Southworth, who had been managing the Cardinals’ top minor league franchise at Rochester.
Breadon asked McKechnie to accept the Rochester job and, surprisingly enough, McKechnie accepted. Southworth wasn’t yet ready to manage in the majors, and by midseason (1929) McKechnie was back in control.
After the season, though, McKechnie was anxious to get out of that zoo, and he accepted a five-year contract to manage the Boston Braves. The Braves had lost 98 games in 1929, under owner/manager Emil Fuchs, and had been an awful team for ten years, but Fuchs promised to provide a blank check to buy young players to build the team up.
The blank check disappeared in a matter of weeks, but McKechnie stayed the five years and beyond, managing the Braves until 1937. He never won them the pennant, but his record there is much better than anyone else who managed the team between the wars. In 1937 the Braves started out 21–36, rallied to finish 79–73, and McKechnie won
The Sporting News
Major League Manager of the Year Award.
McKechnie was a hot property then; at least three teams contacted the Braves, asking permission to talk to their manager. The Braves by this time were under new management, and the new management said they would not stand in McKechnie’s way. He accepted an offer from the Cincinnati Reds for $25,000 a year, plus an attendance bonus, a substantially better salary than he had been making in Boston.
McKechnie took the Reds from last to first in two years, winning the National League title in 1939 and repeating in 1940. For many years McKechnie was the only man to win pennants with three different teams, although he was eventually joined by Dick Williams and Billy Martin. McKechnie stayed in Cincinnati until 1946, the last six seasons of which were a kind of death march.
McKechnie was a coach with the Cleveland Indians in 1948, reportedly the highest paid coach in baseball history at that time. He retired from baseball following the 1950 season.
| Fundamentals Joe McCarthy’s first major league team, the 1926 Chicago Cubs, was also the first team in major league history to have more double plays than errors. When organized baseball began, fielders wore no gloves, and defensive play favored the erratic, an average team committed about six errors per game and turned about one double play for each two games—a ratio worse than ten to one. This flattened out gradually over the years, as double plays became more common, and errors less. By 1900 a normal ratio was between 3–1 and 4–1. By 1920 teams were down to about one and a half errors per game, and double play totals were in excess of a hundred a year. Still, in order to cross over (to have more double plays than errors), McCarthy’s men in 1926 had to lead the league in both categories, and by solid margins. No other team in the National League that year turned more than 161 double plays, or committed less than 183 errors. The American League champion Yankees, the Ruth/Gehrig Yankees of 1926, had barely half as many double plays (117) as errors (210). The Cubs’ ratio was 174–162. In modern baseball, most (but not all) teams have more double plays than errors. |
Year of Birth
:
1886
Years Managed
:
1915, 1922–1926, 1928–1946
Record As a Manager
:
1,896–1,723, .524
Managers for Whom He Played
:
John McGraw, Frank Chance, George Stallings, Fred Clarke, Bill Phillips, Christy Mathewson, Hugo Bezdek, George Gibson.
Others by Whom He Was Influenced
:
Despite playing for almost all of the great managers of his time, McKechnie once said that he learned more from Honus Wagner than from anyone else. He played the infield beside Wagner for three years; Wagner was always telling where he should play each hitter and why.
Another influence was Joe Cantillon, for whom he played at Minneapolis in 1921.
The 1918 Pirates were a fourth-place team, but had three of the greatest managers of all time on their roster—McKechnie, Casey Stengel, and Billy Southworth.
Characteristics As a Player
:
McKechnie was a good defensive third baseman who ran fairly well, but hit more like a shortstop or second baseman, at which positions he also filled in.
WHAT HE BROUGHT TO A BALL CLUB
Was He an Intense Manager or More of an Easy-to-Get-Along-With Type?
He was very easy to get along with. Edwin Pope wrote that McKechnie was “more nurse than Boss.” He liked to say, “You’ll catch more flies with honey than you will with vinegar.”
Was He More of an Emotional Leader or a Decision Maker?
He was a decision maker; he specifically didn’t believe in rah-rah do-it-for-the-team type of stuff. This was what got him fired a lot. Front offices in McKechnie’s era, accustomed to John McGraw-style in-your-face managers, thought that McKechnie was too flat emotionally, and too easy on the players. McKechnie said, “The average ballplayer plays for himself. He isn’t hustling for the manager or the owner, but for his own contract, his family, his future.”
Was He More of an Optimist or More of a Problem Solver?
He was an optimist. He would stick with a player as long as he reasonably could, rather than make a change.
Once, when Johnny Vander Meer was struggling and had walked a couple of hitters, McKechnie walked to the mound and said, “John, just remember one thing. These guys are a lot more afraid of you than you are of them.”
HOW HE USED HIS PERSONNEL
Did He Favor a Set Lineup or a Rotation System?
Except for platooning and switching catchers, he used a set lineup.
Did He Like to Platoon?
He did, yes; McKechnie was one of the few managers who continued to platoon through the 1930s, when platooning was out of fashion. One of his favorite sayings was, “If you take care of the percentages, the percentages will take care of you.”
Did He Try to Solve His Problems with Proven Players or with Youngsters Who Still May Have Had Something to Learn?
If it was an actual problem—something that needed to be fixed right now—he almost always used a veteran. But when he had a young player with ability, he would give him every chance to play. His record of young players developed is quite impressive.
How Many Players Did He Make Regulars Who Had Not Been Regulars Before, and Who Were They?
Among others, Pie Traynor, Kiki Cuyler, Remy Kremer, Paul Waner, Glenn Wright, Chick Hafey, Wally Berger, Elbie Fletcher, Vince DiMaggio, Lou Fette, Jim Turner, Frank McCormick, Harry Craft, Mike McCormick, Debs Garms, Johnny Vander Meer, Eddie Joost, Elmer Riddle, Joe Beggs, Grady Hatton, Frankie Baumholtz, Ewell Blackwell, and at least four people named “Moore.”
In his own words, McKechnie looked for three things in a young player:
1. Can he run?
2. Can he throw?
3. Can he swing?
“Swing” did not mean “hit.” He figured if the player had a good swing, he would eventually hit.
Did He Prefer to Go with Good Offensive Players or Did He Like the Glove Men?
Glove men, all the way, and this is the easiest answer in the book.
Almost his entire career, McKechnie used shortstops at second base. If a player was a good first baseman but a marginal outfielder, he played first base. If he had a player who could hit but couldn’t play the field, he wouldn’t play him. He was almost certainly the most extreme and consistent manager in baseball history in preferring defensive players over offensive players.
When McKechnie took over in Pittsburgh, Pie Traynor was playing shortstop and third base. McKechnie immediately made him a full-time third baseman. When the Pirates purchased Glenn Wright, who had a tremendous arm, McKechnie moved his shortstop, Rabbit Maranville, to second.
A year later (1925) the Pirates traded for George Grantham, a career .302 hitter with speed and some power, who had been playing second base for the Cubs. Grantham was an awful second baseman, but McKechnie moved him to first, where he platooned with Stuffy McInnis, one of the best defensive first basemen of all time. In the outfield the Pirates had two Hall of Fame center fielders, Max Carey and Kiki Cuyler, and another center fielder on the bench, Carson Bigbee.
The 1925 Pirates were probably the best defensive team in baseball history up to that time. After McKechnie was fired, the Pirates released McInnis and tried to get an extra bat in the lineup by switching Grantham back to second.
McKechnie was on to St. Louis. Rabbit Maranville, the punchless glove man whom McKechnie had traded away in Pittsburgh, became his favorite player. Maranville was a notorious carouser. McKechnie, in Pittsburgh, assigned himself to room with Maranville, to keep an eye on him. They were an odd couple, but they got along great. Maranville, released by Brooklyn in 1925, would play another ten years in the majors, almost all of them for McKechnie.
McKechnie got Rabbit a job with the Cardinals, then made him his regular shortstop in 1928, although he hit just .240, one of the lowest averages in the majors in 1928. The Cardinals didn’t think that was all that smart, and when they fired McKechnie they sold Maranville to Boston. McKechnie joined him in Boston a year later and kept him in the lineup for four years. Even in 1933, when Maranville was forty-one years old and hit .218 with no homers, McKechnie played him almost every day at second base. Rabbit broke his leg in spring training the next year and had to take the whole year off, but when he was able to walk around again in 1935, McKechnie tried to put him back in the lineup. He hit .149 in 23 games.
There are countless other examples of McKechnie’s fondness for defensive players. In 1928, McKechnie’s year in St. Louis, he wouldn’t play Spud Davis, a terrific hitting young catcher. Instead, he traded Davis plus another player to Philadelphia for Jimmie Wilson, a weaker hitter but a much better defensive catcher. (Years later, the teams reversed the trade, sending Wilson back to Philadelphia for Davis-plus. When McKechnie got to Cincinnati in 1938 Davis was there, and he traded him again.)
In Boston, McKechnie re-created his three-shortstops-in-the-infield trick, with Rabbit Maranville, Billy Urbanski, and Fritz Knothe, all natural shortstops, playing second, short, and third.
McKechnie’s greatest success as a manager was in Cincinnati, where he took over a last-place team and won the pennant in two years. As his first move, he purchased Lonnie Frey, who had played shortstop in the National League for five years. Frey was a good hitting shortstop, but his career was degenerating because he wasn’t much of a defensive shortstop. McKechnie made him his second baseman.
The Reds had a minor league first baseman named Frank McCormick, a .300 hitter and an exceptional glove man, who had been bouncing up and down to the minors since 1934 because he didn’t hit the home runs that first basemen were expected to hit in that era. McKechnie made him an everyday, never-comes-out-of-the-lineup type of player. He led the National League in hits for three straight years, drove in 100 runs a year on singles, doubles, and an occasional home run, and won the MVP Award in 1940.
The additions of Frey and McCormick, as well as Billy Werber, enormously improved the Reds infield. In center field, he made a major leaguer out of Harry Craft; Craft led the National League in putouts in his first season.
On the other hand, McKechnie wouldn’t use Hank Sauer, a tremendous hitter, even though Sauer unquestionably would have been the Reds’ best hitter in the early 1940s. This decision contributed to the team’s decline in those years. In 1928 at St. Louis, he wouldn’t use Pepper Martin, because Martin’s defense wasn’t up to his standard.
In the 1940 All-Star game, McKechnie started Max West in right field over Mel Ott, explaining to reporters that right field would be the sun field later in the afternoon, and he wanted the veteran outfielder out there for defense in the later innings. West hit a three-run homer, leading to a 4–0 win.
As a consequence of this, McKechnie’s teams often didn’t score all that many runs. But throughout his career, he would get tremendous performances out of pitchers whose careers were going nowhere until they joined up with McKechnie. In 1937, for example, he brought two veteran pitchers out of the minor leagues, Lou Fette and Jim Turner, both in their thirties. They won 20 games each as rookies. A few others:
- Johnny Vander Meer was 3–5 as a rookie in 1937. In the rotation for McKechnie the next year, he went 15–10 and threw two no-hitters.
- The Reds purchased Bucky Walters in June 1938; he had gone 11–21 in 1936, 14–15 in 1937, and was 4–8 in 1938. For McKechnie, he went 11–6, 27–11, and 22–10 in his first three seasons.
- Paul Derringer went 19–19 in 1936, 10–14 in 1937, with ERAs of 4.02 and 4.04. In his first two seasons for McKechnie he went 21–14 and 25–7, with ERAs of 2.93 each year.
- Ed Brandt was 9–21 in 1928, 8–13 in 1929, and 4–11 in 1930, his first season under McKechnie. But in his next four seasons he went 18–11, 16–16, 18–14, and 16–14.
- Danny MacFayden’s career foundered from 1932 to 1935, with records of 8–15, 3–2, 4–3, and 6–15. For McKechnie in 1936 he went 17–13.
The exceptional defense of McKechnie’s teams made the work of his starting pitchers enormously easier, cut a full run off of their ERAs, and thus enabled many of his pitchers to make sudden leaps to join the league’s elite starters.
Did He Like an Offense Based on Power, Speed, or High Averages?
He liked .300 hitters, speed more than power. None of McKechnie’s teams ever led the league in home runs.
Did He Use the Entire Roster or Did He Keep People Sitting on the Bench?
He used a set lineup. His bench players did not play a whole lot.
Did He Build His Bench Around Young Players Who Could Step into the Breach If Need Be, or Around Veteran Role-Players Who Had Their Own Functions Within a Game?
Mostly veterans.
| Ehmke The most brilliant managerial stratagem in the history of baseball occurred in 1929, when Connie Mack named Howard Ehmke to start the first game of the 1929 World Series. The Howard Ehmke story has been told hundreds of times, and it is not my intention to repeat it here. In broad detail, Howard Ehmke was a thirty-five-year-old pitcher. He had had a fine career, with 166 career wins, and he was still effective when he could pitch, which was hardly ever. After he pitched a couple of games his arm would hurt, and he’d be out for three weeks. In August 1929, Connie Mack called Ehmke aside, and told him that he was going to have to give him his release. “Mr. Mack,” said Ehmke. “If that’s the way it is, that’s the way it has to be. But I’ve always wanted to pitch in a World Series, and if this is my last season, I’d like to work in this one, maybe only for a couple of innings.” He flexed his arm. “I think I’ve got one more good game in there.” Mack thought about it, and finally he said okay. Both races were all but over by mid-August; the A’s had locked up the American League, and the Cubs the National. Mack assigned Ehmke to stay on the East Coast when the A’s went west, and get tickets to see the Cubs play in Philadelphia, New York, and Brooklyn. Ehmke was to send Mack reports on the Cub batters—and also, without telling anyone, to prepare himself to pitch the opening game of the World Series. When Mack named Ehmke to start the opener, the public was shocked. Mack had two 20-game winners, a lefty and a righty, plus an 18-game winner. The fans had been debating which 20-game winner would get the call. When Ehmke was announced, people thought that Mack was risking the World Series on a sentimental call. Ehmke pitched one of the best games in World Series history, striking out 13 Cub batters and shutting the team out until the ninth inning. Ehmke, who struck out only 20 batters all season, got 65% of that total in nine innings. Connie Mack’s decision to let Ehmke pitch that game was unique, gutsy—and had every probability of succeeding. Ehmke could still pitch; he was 7–2 in 1929, with an ERA a run better than the league. Mack knew that with a month to get ready for his next start, Ehmke’s arm would be fine. A month to get ready, and all the time he needed to study the upcoming opponent, to figure out exactly what to do with each hitter. A smart veteran pitcher, with a month to think: This is the biggest game of my life. I must get ready to win this one game. How could it go wrong? No one has ever really tried to duplicate this trick, but did you ever notice that there are always old pitchers around who pitch great for two or three starts after they get off the disabled list? What if you took, let us say, Fernando Valenzuela, and you stopped pitching him three weeks before the end of the season. Instead, you figured out who you might be playing in the NLCS, and you sent Fernando to watch them for three weeks. What if you told Fernando that, win or lose, this is it; we’re going to release you after the World Series. Don’t you reckon, under those conditions, that Fernando would pull it all together and pitch a four-hit shutout? I know, of course, that there are practical problems with the theory. Whoever Fernando is pitching for isn’t going to be 10 games ahead in August, and they’ll need to use every pitcher they’ve got. Even if they But that’s the beauty of what Connie Mack did. He was in a unique situation, and he figured out a way to take advantage of it. By so doing, he pulled a game out of thin air and saved his best pitchers for Game Two. It wasn’t a strategy devised to get him an |