Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, The (29 page)

For most of Al Lopez’s career, his first-base spot was occupied by old left-handed power hitters who had almost interchangeable records:

These five records were compiled by Luke Easter (1951–1952), Vic Wertz (1956), and Roy Sievers (1960–1961); Sievers actually was a right-handed hitter. In addition to their almost identical records, these batters had a couple of obvious things in common. They were all thirty-three years old or older, and none of them could get out of his own way.

Lopez had numerous other old first basemen who
would
have compiled almost the same records, were it not for injuries. His 1959 team, American League champions, didn’t have one of these guys. They had Earl Torgeson, an old left-handed power-hitting first baseman who couldn’t get out of his own way, but Torgeson didn’t hit, so they replaced him in midseason with Ted Kluszewski, another old left-handed hitting first baseman who couldn’t … you get my drift.

One time when he got away from the mold was in the early 1960s, when the White Sox traded for Joe Cunningham. Cunningham was younger, faster, and wasn’t a power hitter. Lopez tried him for a couple of years and decided to bo back to Bill Skowron.

Skowron by this time was in his mid-thirties. He had been a part of Stengel’s Yankees for many years and had then been traded to the Dodgers in one of the strangest trades of all time, a trade which hurt both teams. Skowron never did hit 27 homers and drive in 96 runs for Lopez, but we know what Lopez had in mind.

I once wrote an article discussing the greatest seasons ever by relief pitchers. I got a letter from a reader, in response, saying that Elroy Face, 1959, should not have been included in the discussion. Face won 18 games in 1959, a relief record; his 18–1 record is still the best one-season won-lost percentage ever, but the reader felt he didn’t have a great season because “a relief pitcher’s job isn’t to
win
the game, but to close out somebody else’s victory. A relief pitcher gets a win,” he explained, “when he
doesn’t
do his job. Face had only ten saves in 1959. That’s what you judge a reliever by.”

“No, no,” I wrote back (or if I didn’t write back, at least I intended to). “You’re projecting the present onto the past. You’re reading Face’s record as if he was a modern reliever. Face wasn’t used that way. Face wasn’t used to ‘save’ games; he was simply used to pitch in close games whenever the starter was gone.”

But years later, on a pregame show, I heard one of Face’s teammates from the 1959 team talking about Elroy’s big season. He remembered it pretty much the way the reader assumed it was—Face would come in with a 4–3 lead, give up a run, and become the winning pitcher when the Pirates scored in the ninth. So then I got to wondering, what are the facts here? How many of Face’s wins
were
vultured? How many times did Face come into a game with the Pirates ahead, give up the tying run, but then get credited with a win when the Pirates came back to retake the lead?

I sent John Sickels to the library, to make a log of Elroy Face’s performance in 1959. Here’s what we found:

1.
Only three of Face’s wins were vultured from other pitchers
. On April 24, May 14, and August 9, Face did enter the game with Pittsburgh ahead (in all three cases ahead by a single run), did allow the other team to score, and then was credited with a win that had originally belonged to some other pitcher.

2.
Two of Face’s wins came after he entered the game with the Pirates behind
. On May 13 and June 11, Face entered the game with the Pirates trailing (in both cases trailing by a single run), and became the winning pitcher when the Pirates rallied.

3.
The great majority of Face’s 1959 wins (13 of the 18) came after Face entered a tie game
.

We found that Face in 1959 had 10 saves, using a modern definition of a save. He is credited with 10 saves in the encyclopedias, but this was figured in the late 1960s, using a very broad definition of a save. A save was credited whenever a pitcher finished a game won by his team and was not the winning pitcher, regardless of the score. I mentioned this in another book, but Ernie Shore pitched a game in 1912 in which he entered the ninth inning with a 21–2 lead and surrendered ten runs, but held on to win, 21–12. Under the rules used to compile the encyclopedia, he should have been credited with a save, and he was. All of Face’s saves were legitimate. Almost all of them were one-run games in which he pitched a full ninth inning or more to protect the lead.

What I am really investigating here, of course, is
how managers used their relief aces at that time
. Face is a case in point. His record is unusual, but not all that unusual; many relievers, from 1950 to 1966, had lopsided won-lost records, including the rookie troika of Hoyt Wilhelm, Joe Black, and Eddie Yuhas in 1952 (15–3, 15–4, and 12–2) and others such as Ron Perranoski, 1963 (16–3) and Phil Regan, 1966 (14–1). A 1990s relief ace would never compile such a record, because of the way relievers are used now. So how
was
Face used?

1.
Face never entered a game earlier than the seventh inning
. In this respect he was much like a modern reliever. He pitched 57 games, 93 innings. He entered the game 13 times in the seventh inning, 19 times in the eighth inning, 21 times in the ninth inning, and 4 times in the tenth inning. A modern relief ace normally makes about 80% of his entrances in the ninth inning.

2.
Face was used exclusively in close games
. In 41 of the 57 games in which he appeared, either the score was tied when he entered, or it was a one-run game. Most of the other games were two-run games. In this respect, Face was like a modern relief ace.

3.
Face was used utterly without respect to whether the Pirates were ahead or behind
. Face was brought into the game 16 times when the Pirates were ahead, 18 times when the score was tied, and 23 times when the Pirates were behind. In this respect, he was completely different from a modern relief ace.

4.
Face normally was brought in to start an inning
. Over 70% of the time, Face entered the game at the start of an inning, after a pinch hitter had been used in the previous half-inning.

In short, Elroy Face was used in the late innings of any close game whenever the starting pitcher was gone, regardless of whether the Pirates were ahead or behind.

For most of his career, Fred Haney was no doubt a fine manager. In 1959, Fred Haney had the worst season of any major league manager in baseball history.

Haney’s first major league manager was Ty Cobb. Unlike most people, Haney liked Cobb and felt that Cobb treated him well. Haney hit .352 in 81 games as a rookie in 1922, but his average sank like a bowling ball after that, and his career was short. He was a feisty little infielder with a quick wit, the very picture of a manager. Beginning in 1935 he was player/manager at Toledo, what had been Casey Stengel’s job, and then Steve O’Neill’s; the job was a springboard to the majors.

In Haney’s first five seasons managing in the majors he finished eighth, sixth, eighth, eighth, and eighth. One season he didn’t finish; he was fired at 15–29. This record isn’t as bad as it sounds; he managed first the Browns and then the Pirates. Both teams had grown accustomed to mildew on the ceiling long before Haney took over, and the general perception was that Haney in St. Louis and Pittsburgh was like Casey in Brooklyn and Boston—a good manager, but nothing to work with.

His chance to work with good material finally came in Milwaukee in midseason, 1956. Milwaukee, a perennial contender, started slowly in 1956, and Charlie Grimm met the reaper in mid-June. The team went on a tear as soon as Haney was hired, seized first place within three weeks, and held a 5½ game lead in late July.

And a 3½ game lead on Labor Day.

And a one-game lead going into the final series of the year. The interesting question about the ’56 Braves is how they avoided becoming infamous. If you ask any baseball fan to list teams which “blew” the pennant race, he’ll list a few teams which had essentially the same type of record as Milwaukee—three or 4 games in front in early September, but a game short at the wire. The Braves avoided notoriety, I would guess, because:

1) They weren’t a preseason favorite, and thus weren’t expected to win, and

2) They got hot after Haney took over, creating the (justifiable) feeling that it would be unfair to load the failure on Haney.

Anyway, in 1957 they won the World Series. In 1958 they repeated as National League champions, and in 1959 Fred Haney walked around with his head so far in a gopher hole he couldn’t wiggle his elbows. This is, of course, a subjective judgment; the Braves went 86–68, and stumbled into a playoff with the Dodgers, which left them 86–70. My assertion that Haney screwed up the pennant race is based on five things.

First, the talent on the 1959 Braves and Dodgers is an incredible mismatch. Without any exaggeration, the 1959 Dodgers shouldn’t have been within 20 games of the Braves.

And second, third, fourth, and fifth, Haney made a string of obvious mistakes.

1) He rode his two best pitchers, Lew Burdette and Warren Spahn, into the ground, although he had many other talented pitchers.

2) He platooned Joe Adcock, one of the best power hitters in baseball, with Frank Torre and Mickey Vernon, who were hopeless.

3) Lacking an established second baseman after Red Schoendienst went down with tuberculosis, he refused to decide who he wanted to play second base. He ran second basemen in and out all year, getting worse performance from all of them than he could possibly have gotten from any of them.

4) He loaded up his bench with so many over-the-hill veterans, grumbling about the fact that they couldn’t play anymore, that it was almost inevitable that the clubhouse atmosphere would turn sour.

Let’s deal with the specific allegations first, and then we’ll talk about the talent.

1) Warren Spahn won 21 games every year—had for years before Haney came, and would for years after Haney left. He went 21–12 in 1954, 20–11 in 1956, 21–11 in 1957, 22–11 in 1958, 21–10 in 1960, and 21–13 in 1961. Occasionally he would go 23–7 for variety.

In 1959, however, he pitched more innings than usual, leading the majors with 292—so he went 21–15. Lew Burdette was the same; after going 19–10, 17–9, and 20–10, he also pitched 290 innings (second in the majors), and had the same record as Spahn, 21–15.

It seems obvious, in retrospect, that loading an extra 40 innings each on his top two pitchers didn’t get any extra wins out of them; it just got him three or four extra losses.

This would be excusable, perhaps, if Haney had been short of options. In fact, however, he had an excellent third starter, Bob Buhl, and a raft of hard-throwing youngsters. He tried to work Buhl harder than usual, too, but Buhl pulled up with a sore arm, so he had to back off. That still left him with Juan Pizzaro, Joey Jay, Carlton Willey, and Don Nottebart. Pizzaro, who may have had the best fastball in baseball at that time, went 6–2 in 1959, in limited action. When he got a chance to pitch regularly, with the White Sox in 1961, he immediately became one of the best pitchers in the American League. Joey Jay a bonus baby pushed into service in 1958, went 7–5 (in 1958) with an ERA of 2.13. In 1961, when he got a chance to start regularly for Cincinnati, he won 42 games in two seasons. In 1959, used sporadically, he was not effective.

Carlton Willey had won 21 games for Wichita in 1957, and had gone 9–7 with a 2.70 ERA for Milwaukee in 1958, leading the National League in shutouts, with four. Still in the minors was Don Nottebart, who won 18 games that summer—and had won 18 in 1955, 18 in 1956, and 18 in 1957. When finally given a chance to work, he, too, turned out to be quite a competent pitcher. Haney didn’t want to use any of them. He jerked them all in and out of the rotation, getting nothing much out of any of them.

Quite simply, Haney was afraid to let the youngsters pitch. He knew that he had an outstanding veteran ball club, and he was afraid that if he allowed the youngsters to pitch, they’d lose it. He was back on his heels, playing defensively, playing not to lose. He did exactly what Casey Stengel never did with Whitey Ford: He tried to force his best pitchers to win it all on their own.

2) Joe Adcock was one of the best power hitters in the National League at that time. He had belted 38 homers in 454 at bats in 1956, as well as 15 in 288 at bats (1955), 12 in 209 at bats (1957) and 19 in 320 at bats (1958). Over a four-year period, that comes to 40 home runs per 600 at bats.

Adcock, however, was not much of a first baseman, and he and Haney never got along. Adcock had an injury in 1956, which enabled Frank Torre, a better defensive player, to slide into a platoon role with him.

Torre, however, didn’t hit like a first baseman. He hit .258 with no homers in 111 games in 1956, and .272 with five homers in 1957. He did hit .309 in 1958, but in 1959 he fell into an intractable slump.

Joe Adcock was unhappy when he didn’t play, and Adcock was not a man to suffer in silence. To try to keep Adcock happy, Haney played him some in the outfield, and if you thought Adcock was a bad first baseman, you should have seen him play the outfield.

It was one of those things. It was obvious to everybody (except Haney) that this just wasn’t working, but once people began to question him about it, Haney couldn’t admit that it wasn’t working. He kept doing it, and it kept getting worse. Facing Don Drysdale in the one hundred fifty-sixth and deciding game of a 154-game season, Haney chose as his cleanup hitter not Henry Aaron (.355 with 39 homers), or Eddie Mathews (.306 with 46 homers), or Joe Adcock (.292 with 25 homers in 404 at bats), or Wes Covington or Del Crandall, both of whom were pretty good hitters. He chose Frank Torre, who had hit .228 with 1 homer in 115 games.

3) In spring training, 1959, Braves’ second baseman Red Schoendienst developed tuberculosis. Schoendienst was a tremendous player, and many people felt that the acquisition of Schoendienst in an early-season trade had propelled the Braves to the 1957–1958 pennants.

Lacking a second baseman, Haney decided to use fifty of them. Actually, he used eight—Bobby Avila (51 games), Chuck Cottier (10 games), Felix Mantilla (60), Joe M. Morgan (7), Johnny O’Brien (37), Mel Roach (8), Red Schoendienst (4 games, late in the season), and Casey Wise (20 games). The results, offensively and defensively, were gruesome. Whereas a typical National League team in 1959 got 100 double plays from their second basemen and 19 errors, the Braves got 88 double plays and 28 errors. Offensively, only one of the eight second basemen hit higher than .217, that being Bobby Avila, who hit .238.

None of those players, left alone, would have played as badly as all of them, playing a few days at a time in unfamiliar circumstances and under performance pressure.

4) On the Braves bench in 1959, in addition to whichever three second basemen weren’t playing today, were Stan Lopata (thirty-three years old), Del Rice (thirty-six), Andy Pafko (thirty-eight), and Mickey Vernon (forty-one). In his bullpen was Bob Rush (thirty-three). All of these men had been fine performers in their day. Mickey Vernon, for example, had led the American League in batting in 1946, and Andy Pafko had driven in 110 runs for the Cubs in 1945. By 1959, they were done.

As anyone who has been around athletes ought to know, the most difficult years of an athlete’s life are the years when he is coming to grips with the fact that his skills have gotten away from him. By loading his roster with players at that stage of their careers, Haney virtually guaranteed an unhappy clubhouse.

None of this would bother me, I suppose, if the Milwaukee Braves had accomplished some reasonable portion of what they should have accomplished between 1955 and 1965. Now, this is a dangerous argument, and it is a type of argument that I normally reject. There are people who would argue, for example, that Sparky Anderson gets no credit for the Reds of the 1970s, because the talent on that team was so tremendous they could have won for J. Henry Waugh. Joe McCarthy, of course, was called the “Push Button Manager,” because his talent was such that it made winning seem automatic.

I reject that argument in those two cases, and in almost all others, for two reasons. First, the manager (usually) plays a huge role in
shaping
the talent available to him. Second, when the team wins, everybody deserves to participate in the credit. If the team loses, if they underperform, the manager will take the lion’s share of the blame for that. If they win, he’s got to get his share of the credit.

But there is an exception to every rule, and this is the exception to the rule that talent should not be held against the manager. The New York Yankees in the thirteen years beginning in 1949 won eleven pennants and eight World Series. The Braves, in their thirteen years in Milwaukee, won two pennants and one World Series. I would argue that if you compare the talent on those two teams, the Braves have the better of it. Both teams had three superstars who span most of that era—a left-handed starting pitcher (Warren Spahn and Whitey Ford), a power-hitting outfielder (Mickey Mantle and Henry Aaron), and one more, in both cases a left-handed slugger (Yogi Berra and Eddie Matthews). The Braves are not behind in this comparison. Spahn won about 50% more games in his career than did Ford, and Aaron and Matthews hit almost 50% more home runs than Mantle and Berra.

If you get beyond that point, you have a lot of players who match up well—but the Braves have
more
good players, beyond those front three, than do the Yankees. Both teams have right-handed power-hitting first basemen who platooned most of their careers, Adcock and Skowron. Advantage, Adcock. The Braves, throughout that era but in 1959 in particular, had a great number-two starter, Lew Burdette, and a fine number-three starter, Bob Buhl. They had one of the best relief aces of that era, Don McMahon. They had at least four other outstanding players—catcher Del Crandall, shortstop Johnny Logan, center fielder Bill Bruton, and left fielder Wes Covington.

Lots of teams had talent, but this team had Talent. They had talent like the Big Red Machine, talent like the Boys of Summer, talent like the 1936 Yankees.

And then you look at the 1959 Dodgers, who are one of the two or three weakest championship teams in the history of the National League. The ’59 Dodgers had three or four leftover pieces of their glory days in Brooklyn (Gil Hodges, Duke Snider, Junior Gilliam), but, with the exception of Gilliam, they were half the players they once had been. They had several pieces of the great team that would emerge in the 1960s (Sandy Koufax, Maury Wills, John Roseboro), but those were immature players, their best years still on the horizon. They had Don Drysdale, who was 17–13, and who won only two of his last eleven starts. The only players they had who were in their prime were Charlie Neal, Wally Moon, Johnny Podres, and Roger Craig—none of whom was a star, let alone a superstar. It is astonishing that this patchwork collection, this team in the very center of a five-year transition, could somehow manage to beat a team like the 1959 Braves.

But how much of this was Fred Haney? Let’s look more carefully at Haney’s first two managerial opportunities, in St. Louis and Pittsburgh. It is true that the Browns had been bad for many years before Haney was hired. It is also true that they were worse under Haney than before or after. The Browns record under Haney, 125–227 (.355), was their worst under anyone who managed them after 1913, except interim managers. Their record in 1939 (43–111) was the worst in their history. They had a better year in 1940, but Haney was fired early in 1941, with the team at 15–29. They played .500 ball the rest of that season, and were 13 games
over
.500 the next season.

Pittsburgh was very bad in 1952, the year before Haney was hired, but on the other hand, that was their first 100-loss season since the days of Honus Wagner. While Haney was there, they gave him Dale Long, Dick Groat, Roberto Clemente, Frank Thomas, Vern Law, Elroy Face, and Bob Friend. He gave them three last-place finishes, losing 100+ games the first two. I mentioned that Milwaukee took first place in late June 1956, shortly after Haney was hired. I didn’t mention whom they took it away from: Pittsburgh. The same team that Haney had lost 94 games with the season before.

Of course, the Braves did
not
improve after they fired Haney; they continued to flounder. 1960 was a different race; the 1960 Pirates were a better team than the 1959 Dodgers, although not a whole lot better.