Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, The (11 page)

Ty Cobb managed the Tigers from 1921 to 1926, finishing over .500 every year except the first one. Tris Speaker managed the Indians from 1919 to 1926, winning the pennant in 1920, and finishing over .500 six of eight seasons.

On November 2, 1926, Ty Cobb resigned as manager of the Tigers and was released as a player. This was hard to explain, as the 1926 Tigers had a decent enough year, and Cobb, although pushing forty, had hit .339.

Rumors circulated about that for a month, and then on December 2 the other shoe dropped. The same exact thing happened to Tris Speaker. This was truly inexplicable, in that Speaker, a year younger than Cobb, had hit 52 doubles in 1926, and his team had finished second, their best season in years.

The newspapers tugged at the corners of the story for a few weeks, and eventually the commissioner’s office had to come clean. It was the last gasp of the Black Sox scandal. Dutch Leonard, a former American League pitcher, had accused Cobb and Speaker of participating in fixing a game at the end of the 1919 season. Leonard turned over to authorities two letters, one from Joe Wood and one from Ty Cobb, which seemed to corroborate their participation in the scam. American League president Ban Johnson, paying a reported $20,000 for the letters, had ordered the dismissal of the two great center fielders.

The commissioner had no choice but to get involved. He held a hearing and released a report (more than a hundred pages long) exonerating Cobb and Speaker of anything more serious than long-ago bad judgment. Cobb and Speaker, he stated, were free to sign with any team that wanted them.

However, neither Cobb nor Speaker ever managed again. There has always been a suspicion, among baseball historians, that while Cobb and Speaker were publicly acquitted and allowed to stay in the game as players, Judge Landis gave a private order that they were never to manage again.

I have thought about this issue for years, and I have reached the conclusion that there was no such order. Why? Because there isn’t any evidence against Tris Speaker.

We have a tremendous willingness, as Ogden Nash observed, to believe the worst of our fellow men. The assumption of innocence is a legal posture; as a practical matter, no one who is accused of wrongdoing can ever really clear his name.

Our willingness to accept the guilt of the accused has few more vivid examples than that of Tris Speaker. When baseball historians speak of this issue, many or most will casually assume that of course Speaker did participate in fixing the game.

But based on what? I agree that there is significant evidence (Wood’s letter) that Joe Wood bet against his own team that day, and there is some evidence (Cobb’s letter) that Cobb may have known that the Indians were laying down for them, although Cobb’s letter is vague, and Cobb’s 1926 interpretation of it is as reasonable as Leonard’s.

But I defy anyone to show me any credible evidence that Tris Speaker was involved. Neither letter produced by Leonard makes any mention of Speaker, and neither makes any mention of any third party who reasonably could have been Tris Speaker. Cobb’s letter discusses Wood’s role in the affair, and Wood’s letter discusses Cobb’s role. Neither mentions Speaker. Isn’t that odd?

Dutch Leonard did claim in 1926 that Speaker was involved, but

a) Leonard was nursing a grudge against Speaker, and

b) Leonard refused to repeat his allegations under oath.

Speaker swore that he knew nothing about the matter. Both Wood and Cobb, although acknowledging some role in betting on the game, said that the conversation related by Leonard, which is the only thing which involved Speaker, never took place.

Given that factual basis, there is just no possible way that Landis could have authorized any action against Tris Speaker.

Further, while Speaker never managed again in the major leagues, he did manage again in the minor leagues. Judge Landis always insisted that, as far as matters of ethics and propriety were concerned, the standards for minor leaguers were exactly the same as the standards for major leaguers.

So to assume that Speaker was allowed to manage in the minors, but wouldn’t have been allowed to manage in the majors, you have to assume that Landis was a hypocrite. Of course, this isn’t a big hurdle for many people, because there are always people around who will say that any authority figure is a hypocrite, and if you’re willing to believe the worst of Tris Speaker, you’re probably going to be willing to believe the worst of Judge Landis, too.

But there isn’t any evidence that Landis was a hypocrite. That portrayal of him is just random cynicism, a reaction to the contemporary efforts to portray him as a crusading knight determined to defend the honor of Organized Baseball. As a practical matter, there is much better evidence that he was a crusading knight defending the honor of Organized Baseball than there is that he was a hypocrite.

Is it strange that Cobb and Speaker, both of whom have pretty good records as managers, never managed again?

Well, maybe. Speaker and Cobb were forced out of their positions by American League president Ban Johnson, who in turn was forced out of his position for so doing. I am a great admirer of Ban Johnson’s, but it was appropriate to ask him to leave the game at that point. There was no justification for Johnson to force the resignation of Cobb and Speaker. It was a witch hunt.

But by the time Landis stepped in and attempted to straighten it out, their jobs were gone. Cobb was probably near the end of the line as a manager, anyway. His players didn’t like him, and his team was slipping backward by two games a year. Speaker was coming off a good year—and two bad years before that.

Pie Traynor’s record, as a manager, is as good as Cobb’s or Speaker’s, yet when he was fired by Pittsburgh in 1939, he never managed again. Is that strange? Walter Johnson’s record is as good as Cobb’s or Speaker’s, maybe a little better, but his career was just as brief. Is that strange? Nap Lajoie’s winning percentage as a manager was .550, the same as Johnson’s, better than Cobb or Speaker’s. He managed the Naps from 1905 to 1909, was fired in 1909, and never managed again. Is this strange?

There is a pattern, I think, of underrating the managerial performance of outstanding players. The record, to me, is clear. Cobb and Speaker left the game on the same terms as Pie Traynor and Walter Johnson and Nap Lajoie. If somebody had wanted to hire them to manage, Landis would not have stood in the way.

Miller Huggins was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, May 27, 1880, and he got his major league start there with the Reds after he had been purchased from St. Paul in 1903. He played second base for the Reds until 1910, when he was sold to the Cards. When Roger Bresnahan was released as manager of the St. Louis club in 1913, Huggins was made manager and met with only fair success. When Colonels Ruppert and Huston bought the Yankees they started on the quest for a manager and they went after Huggins, with the result that he was transferred out of the National League and became the pilot of the Yankees. Huggins is not quite popular in New York, and is the constant subject of adverse, and often unjust, criticism.

With the team chock full of prima donnas, Huggins has had the worst managerial task in the major leagues. The players dislike him and the fans ignore him. Regardless of adverse sentiment, Huggins deserves a lot of credit for the victory of the Yanks. It is his ball club. Helped by a willing pair of owners, he opened wide the pursestrings.

Huggins built up the Yankees from nothing. He has had them consistently near the top and has now won two successive pennants, where they used to be a second division club. Much of his unpopularity is due to his retiring nature and partly to poor health. He does not mix with the fans off the field and keeps in the background. Huggins is one of the smartest men in base ball and just about the wisest trader in the big leagues. Huggins is in the unfortunate position of having every one analyze his work to find faults. The bugs never criticise McGraw, because they don’t look at him critically.

—Joseph Vila,
New York Evening Sun
,
quoted from the
1923 Reach Guide

Lopez tells this same story, through William Mead, in
Two Spectacular Seasons
. The point of his story is that he believes this incident led rather directly to the ball being made less lively in 1931. McGraw threw up his hands in the dugout when Wright’s soft fly slipped into the seats, and he said, “What kind of baseball is this?” As Lopez remembers, “The way I understand it, that was the beginning of softening the ball up a bit.”

In fact, however, Glenn Wright never hit a home run off of Roy Parmelee, either in the Polo Grounds or in some other park, either with the bases full or with them empty, either in 1930 or in some other season.

The incident that Lopez remembers, or half-remembers, very distinctly may have contained elements of two events. On August 28, 1930, Glenn Wright did hit a home run at the Polo Grounds, not off of Parmelee but off of Carl Hubbell. If you think about it, Hubbell’s famous screwball broke away from a right-handed hitter, exactly as Lopez describes the pitch, and Wright might very well have been fooled by a pitch, got a poor swing as Lopez describes, and still hit the ball over the short left-field fence in the Polo Grounds. It was a two-run homer, not a grand slam, but it was an important hit, giving Brooklyn a 5–4 lead, in a game they won 8–7. The game story the next day specifies that Wright’s homer was hit to left field, as Lopez remembers, and the New York Times reported that the ball “lofted” into the left-field stands, implying that it was not well hit.

By August 28, however, McGraw had been yelling about the lively ball making a farce out of the game for at least four months, so that incident could not have been the beginning of any movement to silence the lively ball. The other game that may have contributed to Lopez’s memory was the game of April 28, 1930, in which Brooklyn beat the Giants, at the Polo Grounds, by the remarkable score of 19–15. Parmelee did pitch in that game, and in fact was the most effective pitcher in the game, giving up six runs in seven innings of relief work. He also gave up a home run, and it was hit into the left field stands at the Polo Grounds, but it was hit by a left-handed hitter, Babe Herman.

This was also a big hit. Brooklyn had jumped to a 13–0 lead, knocking out four New York pitchers in the first two innings and bringing Roy Parmelee into the game. Parmelee was the last man on the Giants’ bench, just a wild kid who McGraw realized might be a pitcher sometime later on. He never pitched when it meant anything.

Parmelee was effective this day, however, and the Giants scrambled back into the game, trailing 16–12 in the fifth. Babe Herman’s home run, with Al Lopez and another guy on base, put the Giants back in a deep hole, at 19–12. Lopez was on thud base when this home run was hit, and thus would have been looking into the Giants’ dugout, perfectly positioned to see McGraw’s reaction.

Within days of the 19–15 farce there were stories in the newspaper about McGraw being upset with the liveliness of the baseball. Whether McGraw had any impact on the subsequent decision of the National League is an open question. Al Lopez, a twenty-one-year-old rookie at the time, may have regarded John McGraw as a powerful, near-mythic figure whose opinion carried great weight. The National League owners may have regarded him as a cranky old bastard who was always bitching about something. In any case, the National League did act after the season to make the balls a little bit less “lively,” and National League batting statistics were much more normal for the rest of the decade.