Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, The (10 page)

Spencer Abbott never managed in the major leagues, but won 2,180 games as a minor league manager, and was recommended by Wilbert Robinson to be his successor as manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Born in Chicago in 1877, Abbott’s astonishing managerial career began in 1903 with Fargo in the Northern League, and ended in the Tri-State League in 1947. His story of how he became a manager:

“I was a pitcher, but my arm petered out and so I went about the country trying to land a job of any sort. Finally I hit Fargo, North Dakota, and that team needed a first baseman. I hit pretty well, and got to be manager of the club. George Tebeau, who owned the Kansas City club, heard something about an Abbott and he supposed it to be some youngster. I had known him earlier and he had concluded I had quit when my arm became useless. Kansas City acquired me by the draft route, Tebeau paying $300, a good deal of money in those days. I won’t forget the look on his face when I walked into his office.

‘“Why, how are you, Abby, old fellow,’ he said. ‘I thought you were dead. What are you doing?’”

“I’m your new first baseman,” Abbott replied. “You just paid $300 for me.”

Tebeau put Abbott in the lineup and, according to Abbott, tried to sell him to every team that Kansas City played. Finally he had a good game against Topeka, and the Topeka team bought him to be their player/manager.

At this time there were a huge number of minor league teams. Abbott managed in small leagues in Kansas from 1904 through 1911, managing Topeka, Hutchinson, Wellington, and Lyons, Kansas, in the Missouri Valley League, the Western Association, and the Kansas State League. In his first ten years as a manager he almost always had a losing record. “When I first started out I had a bad failing,” he would recall years later. “During games I would lose my temper. I found out how it was to the players at times, and started trying to curb it.”

In 1914 baseball attendance collapsed, dozens of minor leagues folded, and Abbott was out of baseball for five years. Somehow he caught on as manager of the Tulsa team in 1919. He had a good ball club in Tulsa, and the Western Association at that time was an exciting league, with many players just a step away from the major leagues. In 1920 the lively ball era came to the Western League as it did to the majors, and a catcher named Yam Yaryan hit .357 with 41 home runs. Yaryam had been playing for Wichita for several years, without impressive results, before 1920. Anyway, leading Wichita 8–5 in the ninth inning, Abbott saw Yaryan come to the plate with the bases loaded. “Now I get a flash of genius,” Abbott would say. “I tell my pitcher to give Yam an intentional pass. It forces in a run, of course, but we get the next guy out and win, eight to six. Now I’m expecting I’ll get a pretty good write-up for my strategy. Know what the headlines said next day? ‘Yellow Abbott Walks Yaryan!’”

After winning the Western Association with Tulsa in 1920, Abbott jumped to Memphis in the Southern Association, where he hit big again, finishing with a 104–49 record. A part of a minor league manager’s job in that time was to hype his players to help sell them to the higher leagues. In 1924, managing a rather poor Reading team in the International League, Abbott’s top star was a slugging outfielder named Shags Horan. In an exhibition game against the Dodgers, Horan belted a pitch through the window of a schoolhouse beyond the left-field fence. “Does it all the time,” Abbott yelled to the Brooklyn writers. “They’ve got a special monitor in the class room who watches the game from the window and yells, ‘Under the desks, kids, Horan is up!’”

Abbott was able to sell Horan and a veteran pitcher (Al Mamaux) to the Yankees and infielder Rhodie Miller to their top competitors at the moment, the Senators. “One of the best deals I ever made,” he said. “I got about seventy thousand dollars all told for the three of them in August and had them all back in Reading with me the next spring.” Abbott got fired a couple of months into the 1925 season, but then it was on to the next job, Kansas City in 1926.

Abbott was always a difficult man to play for. Tom Meany wrote that he “probably put verbal blowtorches to even more players than John McGraw.” When he was hired by the Kansas City Blues in the spring of ’26, Blues president George Muehlebach said “I want a manager who will make the players work.”

“The average fan has the conception that Spencer Abbott is a slave driver,” reported a KC writer. “A despot hard upon his men, a ruler whose scepter is wielded savagely.” The Kansas City dugout had a low roof. Once KC lost a game when the tying run was picked off first base. Abbott yelped and leaped off the bench, whacking his head on the dugout roof so hard that he knocked himself out. A young player tried to revive him.

“Let the old sonuvabitch lay there,” said a veteran. “At least we’ll be able to dress in peace.”

“There have been times when I would have liked to commit murder,” Abbott acknowledged. “At that, I believe they should pass a rule permitting a manager to carry a shotgun.”

Abbott lasted one year in Kansas City and then on to the next job, Jersey City, in 1927. He managed in the top minor leagues almost continuously from 1919 through 1943, though he never spent more than three years in any job, and usually only one. When Wilbert Robinson left the Dodgers in 1931 he recommended Abbott as his replacement, but Abbott was only a few years younger than Robinson, and the Dodgers chose Max Carey instead. In 1935 Abbott coached with the Senators, then went back to the minors. Managing Williamsport in the early war years, Abbott lost three second basemen in one year to the draft. “I guess they’re going to fight this damn war around second base,” Spence concluded.

Out of baseball for three years, the sixty-nine-year-old Abbott returned as manager of Charlotte in the Tri-State League in 1946, leading that team to a rout of the pennant race with a 93–46 record and a win in the playoffs. Retiring as a manager after 1947, Abbott was hired to scout for the Washington Senators, and died in Washington in 1951.

In the seventh game of the 1924 World Series, Bucky Harris started a right-handed pitcher. His name was Curly Ogden, but that’s not really the point; the reason Ogden started was that he was right-handed. Harris was trying to get Bill Terry out of the game. Terry, a rookie, was a left-handed platoon player; he had hit .500 in the series (6 for 12), but he sat down when a lefty came in. Harris’s idea was to list Ogden as the starting pitcher, get Terry in the lineup, then bring in a lefty and force him to sit down. Then, when it was time for Harris to go to his relievers (Firpo Marberry and Walter Johnson), Bill Terry would be unavailable for comment.

It worked. John McGraw listed Terry in the starting lineup. Harris let Ogden face two batters, then switched to a left-handed pitcher. McGraw left Terry in to go 0 for 2 against the lefty. When Terry was due to bat with none out, two on in the sixth, however, McGraw blinked. He pinch-hit for Terry, and Harris immediately switched to his right-handed pitchers. New York grabbed a 3–1 lead, but the two right-handers, not having to face Terry, shackled New York for six innings, allowing Washington to win in twelve.

This gambit has been used a few other times. In 1990, for example, Jim Leyland started Ted Power in the sixth game of the NLCS, for essentially the same reason. The question I wanted to pose, though, is why
isn’t
this a normal part of the game? Why isn’t a “beard” or “cover pitcher” used more often? If the other team platoons at three positions, you could gain the platoon edge, in theory, for twelve at bats. If the other manager refuses to grant you that advantage, then you can drain his bench before the game gets to crunch time. Managers routinely make moves, offensively and defensively, which get them the platoon edge for only one hitter. Why
don’t
they make a move which has the potential to reshape the game?

I can think of four reasons why they might not choose to use this move.

1. It wouldn’t work.

2. It might work, but might backfire.

3. It might work when it is not anticipated, but fail to work when it is anticipated.

4. Not using it is a kind of gentleman’s agreement.

I think the strategy
would
work, or at the very least I think the use of a cover pitcher would have a higher probability of gaining an advantage for the team naming him than many other common strategies. I’ve seen people use the strategy in table-game leagues, and it works there.

There are two ways the move could backfire. First, you could find yourself in a situation in which you need to use the pitcher that you burned by naming him to start the game. Second, the other manager could list the wrong hitters, forcing you to stick with the pitcher you were only intending to fake with, who might not be the best pitcher you have.

Neither of those, however, seems to be all that big a problem. Anytime you use a player, you might wish later that you had saved him; that’s just a normal part of the game. And, since the opposing manager can only negate the advantage by using players he would not normally use, it’s hard to see how the danger of losing to that set of players could outweigh the danger of losing to the other set of players.

Perhaps this might be a good strategy when it is sprung upon the other team unexpectedly, but not otherwise. But I don’t think that’s the right explanation, either, for two reasons. First, if an average team did this, let’s say, five times a season, that would seem to be infrequent enough to preserve the element of surprise. It’s used about once every thirty years. There is no way the need to keep the strategy a surprise is going to drive the frequency of use
that
low.

And second, so what if the other manager suspects what you’re up to? What can he do? If it’s Greg Maddux’s turn to pitch and you list some left-handed rookie with an ERA about Cecil Fielder’s belt size, that’s not much of a fake, but you wouldn’t do that, would you? As long as the fake starter has credibility, then the only way to avoid taking the fake is to list the wrong hitters, the ones who cede the platoon advantage to the pitcher. That leaves the manager who used the cover pitcher with a credible pitcher
who has the lineup stacked in his favor.
Some risk.

So why don’t they do it?

It’s a gentleman’s agreement. Everybody understands that if I did this to the other guy, he would do the same to me. The advantage I gain today, I would forfeit tomorrow. The result would be that every manager’s job would be a lot more complicated, and everybody would have one more damn thing to worry about. The job is hard enough as it is. If we complicate those semiroutine things like setting your lineup to face a lefty and scheduling regular work for your bench players, it just adds pressure to the job. Who needs it?

One of the most famous player mutinies in baseball history involved not an effort to discredit the manager, but a misdirected effort to support the manager. It happened in Pittsburgh in August, 1926, and centered around Fred Clarke.

Fred Clarke was the most successful manager of the early years of this century. He was the same age as McGraw, give or take a few months, started managing a year and a half sooner, and by 1909 he was 250 wins ahead of John McGraw. This is a large number of wins. McGraw won less than 3,000 games in his career; if Clarke had kept managing, McGraw would never have caught him. Clarke’s Pirates won four pennants between 1901 and 1909, and won 90 or more games nine times in his career.

Clarke’s ability as a manager decreased significantly as soon as Honus Wagner began to grow old, however, and he was forced out after the 1915 season. He retired to his ranch in Kansas, where oil was discovered on his property, the best break he’d had since he hooked up with of Honus. By the early 1920s he was a millionaire gentleman, able to deal with Pirates’ owner Barney Dreyfuss more or less as a social equal.

Clarke was well liked by press, public, and the Dreyfuss family, which owned the team. He was a hero in Pittsburgh second only to Wagner. He invested some of his money in the Pirates and rejoined the team as a vice president/minority partner. Despite the VP title, Clarke sat on the bench, in a suit, during the games. Nobody saw any reason why he shouldn’t do this, as he was more than qualified to be a coach.

The Pirates in 1925 won their first World Series since 1909, with Fred Clarke once more in the dugout. For the moment everybody was happy, but there was a suspicion even then that Clarke was trying to position himself to take credit for the team’s success.

Only two men remained with the Pirates who had played for Clarke—Babe Adams, star of the 1909 World Series, and Max Carey, who had become the team captain. Both liked Clarke well enough, and had welcomed him back, but as the 1926 season progressed, some members of the team began to feel that Clarke was angling to get back in the manager’s chair.

The Pirates were playing well, holding first place. In Boston on August 7, the team was shut out in a doubleheader by the Braves, a bad team. Max Carey, fighting a sinus infection, had a bad day at the end of a string of bad days, and Clarke suggested to Bill McKechnie that he ought to put somebody else in center field. McKechnie asked who else he could play in center field, probably with a tone of voice that suggested “You’re not going to bring up this shit about Kiki Cuyler playing center field again, are you?”

“Put in the bat boy,” said Clarke in annoyance. “He can’t be any worse.”

Carson Bigbee, an outfielder who had been with the team for years, reported the remark to his friend Max Carey. The insulted team captain talked to several other players. He found a number of players whom he believed to be nursing grudges over things Clarke had said. He asked Babe Adams what he ought to do. Adams was a soft-spoken man in his mid-forties, the village elder. “The manager is the manager,” Adams shrugged. “Nobody else should interfere.”

Max Carey, speaking for the players, asked that Fred Clarke be removed from the bench. The newspapers got wind of the dispute almost immediately, forcing players to choose sides. Adams and Bigbee stood with Carey publicly on the issue. Carey felt that he represented the majority of the players, maybe all of them, and that as team captain he was acting properly as a spokesman for the players in support of their manager. They met with McKechnie before going public with their statement.

McKechnie at first seemed to appreciate the support, but then studied the situation and found himself between a brick wall and baseball bat. If he supported his players, he was in effect criticizing the management of the team. He was forced to denounce the players’ “attempt to meddle in the administration of the team.”

Fred Clarke announced publicly that he would not return to the bench until heavy penalties were inflicted upon the offenders.

Headlines flew. Barney Dreyfuss was vacationing in France, leaving the club in the hands of his son Sam, who was universally hated by the players. Exchanging telegrams with Paris, the Pirate front office met August 12 in a crisis atmosphere. They scheduled a meeting the next day with the players. The players held their own angry meeting on August 12, and while it is not clear exactly what happened, there was a notable shortage of people willing to stand up in support of Max Carey and the other dissidents. Reportedly, a resolution to demand the removal of Clarke was supported by only six players.

The World Champion Pittsburgh Pirates were in chaos.

Sam Dreyfuss began the meeting of August 13 with the announcement that “I’ll do all the talking here.”

Bigbee and Adams were given their unconditional release. Max Carey was put on waivers and suspended without pay; Pie Traynor replaced him as team captain.

Expecting support from two sides, the dissidents had been cut off at the knees when neither arrived. Meeting in Pittsburgh on August 15, the three appealed to Commissioner Landis for a hearing of their grievance. “We have been unjustly treated and penalized without a hearing,” they said in a telegram. Landis agreed that there should be a hearing, but asked National League president John Heydler to conduct the hearing, which was held in Pittsburgh on August 17.

“I cannot go back of the right of the officials of a league club to release, suspend or ask waivers on any of its players,” said Heydler in his report, “nor would I wish to do so if I had the right; but it is my opinion, after a most complete and thorough hearing of this case, that none of the three players—Carey, Bigbee and Adams—has been guilty of willful subordination or malicious intent to disrupt or injure his club.” In effect, Heydler had cleared the players’ names, but refused to reinstate them.

The historical import of the controversy is twofold. First, it obstructed the development of a dynasty in Pittsburgh.

The Pirates, divided by the confrontation, collapsed to a third-place finish. McKechnie was fired after the season and Clarke removed from the bench. In view of the fact that the Pirates were World Champions in 1925 and added several outstanding players in the next few years (including the Waner brothers), it may well be that the crisis prevented the Pirates of the late 1920s from becoming one of the game’s great dynasties. The rift deprived the Pirates of an outstanding manager. They replaced McKechnie with Donie Bush, who won another pennant, but had conflicts with his players.

Even more significantly, this incident did a great deal to define the roles played by coaches and executives in the modern front office.

The front office in 1926 was at a critical point in its evolution. Branch Rickey moved into the Cardinal front office in 1925; Billy Evans in 1927 became the first man to wear the title “General Manager.” Baseball was leaving the era of the major league owner/operator, the guys who ran their own teams with a treasurer, a secretary, a manager, and a couple of part-time scouts. In a few years, there would be farm directors and scouting supervisors and executive vice presidents with Rolodexes and reservations for lunch. Never again would there be a coach/vice president. The Clarke affair exposed the dangers in doing that. Placing an executive on the field, below the manager but also above him, fatally undercut the man in charge. In effect, this incident built a wall between front office and field level management, a wall through which the manager was—and is—the only door.

Max Carey moved on to the Dodgers, where he played, coached, and managed for several years. Bill McKechnie would manage three more teams, with great success. The major league careers of Carson Bigbee and Babe Adams had come to an end. “A series of misunderstandings,” Heydler said, which it was beyond his power to undo.