Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, The (23 page)

Another thing … the game of baseball changes, over time, much more extensively than most people realize. The way the game is played now is very different from the way it was played ten years ago, and very, very different from the way it was played thirty years ago.

Newspaper and television commentators, driven by old ballplayers, almost always interpret those changes in a negative way, arguing that the game isn’t as well played as it used to be. But in reality, new strategies and new ways of doing things sweep the game not because they
don’t
work, but because they do.

I’ll give you a simple example: catching a fly ball with two hands. Until about 1970, baseball players were taught to catch a fly ball with two hands. This was a universally accepted convention, notwithstanding the fact that it was a really stupid idea. You
don’t
catch a fly ball with two hands, never did and never could. You catch the fly ball with the glove hand. The other hand was there to protect you if the ball popped out.

Well, the ball doesn’t pop out that often, and if it does, you’re not going to catch it with the other hand, anyway. What it does, when you try to catch a ball with two hands, is to change a natural, instinctive action to a forced, unnatural action. It throws your whole body out of alignment, and it limits your range of motion. It slows you down, and it causes a great many more errors than it prevents.

Nonetheless, that was how it was taught for many years, dating back to the time when gloves were small and awkward, fielding percentages were low, and it probably made sense to do it this way. When ballplayers started catching the ball one-handed, old ballplayers and old media guys criticized them for not doing things the “right” way, meaning the way that they were taught to do it when they were kids.

The younger managers of that time, like Earl Weaver and Whitey Herzog, accepted the change immediately. Just make sure you catch the ball; that’s all we care about. The older managers continued to insist that outfielders make a show of catching the ball two-handed.

There are dozens of changes like that happening all the time. The older a manager is, the more likely he is to fight those changes. Older managers are trying to play the game the way it was played thirty years ago, usually without realizing it.

There are, of course, cases where old strategies work to the advantage of older managers. The most obvious example is Casey Stengel and platooning. Platooning was common when Casey was playing; by 1949, it was almost dead. Casey, an old manager, reached back for the old strategy, and it worked out great for him. But as a rule, I’m always going to bet on the younger manager.

There are long-term advantages to stability, of course. But few organizations can reach those long-term advantages, because few managers are able to do the job over a period of years. It’s easy to say that if Dusty Baker was a great manager in 1993 he must be a good manager now, but it’s just not true. It’s not the way the world works.

It isn’t
playing
managers who lose their ability when they stop playing. It’s a universal curse, from which only great managers are exempt.

Johnny Neun had a short major league career, filled with oddities. In the space of forty-five days in the summer of 1927, Neun turned an unassisted triple play, stole five bases in a game, and stole home in both ends of a double header. By 1932 he was back in the minors, playing for Newark, at which time the Newark franchise was purchased by the Yankees.

By this good fortune Neun became a part of the Yankee system, and so he would remain for many years. A college man, he was hired to manage a low-level farm team in 1935. He succeeded at that, and in 1938, after Ossie Vitt got the Indians job, Neun was assigned to manage the Newark franchise, Double A. From 1938 to 1943 he traded jobs with Billy Meyer, one of them managing at Newark, and the other running the Yankees’ other Double A powerhouse, the Kansas City Blues. In 1944 he returned to the major leagues as one of Joe McCarthy’s coaches, and in 1946, after it became apparent that Bill Dickey was unsuited to the task, Neun managed the Yankees in the closing weeks of the 1946 season.

Bucky Harris got the Yankee job, but Neun was hired to manage the Cincinnati Reds in 1947. Several things went right for him. One of his pitchers, Ewell Blackwell, had a sensational season, 22–8 with a 2.47 ERA; he would have won the Cy Young Award had there been such an award at the time. He finished second in the MVP voting.

Neun also had the best shortstop in the National League that year, Eddie Miller, and one of the best third basemen, Grady Hatton. Those two guys hit 35 homers and drove in 164 runs, more than you expect from the left side of your infield. Unfortunately, he had absolutely nothing in the outfield. His only outfielder who hit more than six homers was Eddie Lukon, who homered 11 times in 200 at bats, but averaged just .205.

The irony is, Neun had one of the best power hitters in National League history available to him—but had sent him to Syracuse. Like Neun, Hank Sauer had seen the inner workings of the Yankee machine. Signed by New York in 1938, Sauer had spent three years as a Yankee prospect before being liberated in the midwinter draft by Cincinnati.

Sauer got into a few major league games in late 1941. He did well, hitting .303 with 4 doubles in 9 games, but nonetheless was sent back to the minors in 1942. He earned another late-season callup in 1942, and again succeeded, hitting 2 homers in 7 games, a .550 slugging percentage.

Bill McKechnie, however, was convinced that Sauer couldn’t play. Sauer was slow and a pretty awful outfielder, but looking backward, the Reds outfield at the time consisted of guys who couldn’t field and couldn’t hit, either, and the team was slipping further away from the pennant every year.

Anyway, Sauer went back to the minors for the 1943 season, then spent 1944 and most of 1945 in the navy. He got out of the service earlier than some of the other guys, which gave him 31 games in the majors in 1945.

Again, he was outstanding. He hit .293 with 5 homers, 20 RBI in the 31 games, including three homers in one game. He had now had three cups of coffee in the major leagues, and had played well all three times.

McKechnie sent him back to Syracuse for 1946. The Reds played Al Libke, Dain Clay, and Bob Usher in the outfield. Libke hit .253 with 5 homers in 431 at bats. Clay hit .228 with 2 homers in 435 at bats. Usher hit .204 with 1 homer in 92 games. The Reds finished 67–87 and were last in the major leagues in runs scored. Sauer drove in 90 runs and scored 99—for Syracuse.

So McKechnie got fired, and Johnny Neun got the job.

And sent Hank Sauer back to Syracuse.

Where, finally, Sauer could no longer be ignored. He hit 50 homers in 1947, drove in 141 runs. He was the minor league player of the year. Johnny Neun announced that winter that Hank Sauer would be his left fielder in 1948.

It was too late to save Neun’s career. Blackwell was hurt, Miller was traded to Philadelphia for another outfielder, Hatton had an off season.

Hank Sauer had one of the most interesting careers of the 1950s. He was signed in 1938, remember. He got stuck in the Yankee system, got dumped on by McKechnie, had to go fight a war, got dumped on by Neun … by the time he got to play in the majors he was thirty-one years old.

He hit 288 major league homers, 281 of them after his thirty-first birthday. In his first season with the Reds he hit 35 homers, a Cincinnati record at the time. From his thirty-first birthday on he hit more home runs than Mike Schmidt or Jimmie Foxx or Frank Robinson or Reggie Jackson or Mickey Mantle or Ernie Banks or Harmon Killebrew. He won an MVP award at age thirty-five, driving in 121 runs for the Cubs. Two years after that he hit 41 homers, and three years after that, at age forty, he hit another 26 homers in 378 at bats.

Should Neun be faulted for failing to realize that Sauer could play?

Well, Sauer was a pretty bad outfielder. When he was young he had a good arm and near-average speed, but by the time he got to play in the majors the arm was gone and the speed was a problem.

There is a theory that managers will manage the way they played. Neun was a singles hitter, a lifetime .289 hitter and as fast as any infielder in baseball, but he couldn’t hold a job because he had zero power. When he got to manage, he filled up his outfield with speedy singles hitters. And by so doing, he proved again what Lee Fohl, a 1920s manager, had established twenty years earlier: You cannot oppose a power-hitting offense with a run-at-a-time offense. You’ll get beat.

One of the biggest surprises to me, when I ranked the managers, was how high up the lists Charlie Grimm was. My impression of Grimm, to be honest, was that he was a well-liked guy who hung around and managed a long time, like Jimmy Dykes or Chuck Tanner, but that was about as much as you could say for him.

When you look carefully at his record, though, he ranks about even with Al Lopez, Whitey Herzog, Tony LaRussa, Frank Chance, those kind of guys. Not the ten greatest managers in history, but the class right behind them. Grimm:

1) Won the National League pennant in his first season (1932),

2) Kept the team about twenty games over .500 the next two years,

3) Won the pennant again in 1935, with 100 wins,

4) Kept the team twenty games over for two more seasons,

5) Was dismissed in the middle of the 1938 season, with the team still over .500,

6) Returned to the Cubs in midseason, 1944, at which point a losing team immediately began winning,

7) Won the National League pennant again in 1945,

8) Struggled for three and a half years after that, but

9) Got his next chance with the Braves in 1952, and won 85 to 92 games with them three straight years.

He had to go to the minors two or three times in midcareer to reestablish himself, but he did that very well, too, winning
The Sporting News
Minor League Manager of the Year Award in 1951.

I read his autobiography,
Jolly Cholly’s Story
, which is a fun book but didn’t do anything to alert me to the fact that he knew what he was doing as a manager. I gathered that, the nickname aside, he wasn’t any jollier than any other manager when a player didn’t run out a ground ball or missed the cutoff man, but his book doesn’t impress upon you, as Leo Durocher would or Earl Weaver, that this was a man who was fully engaged with the issues of when you pull the infield in and when you play for the double play or how long you can afford to go with a first baseman who is hitting .180.

One of his pennants was registered during the war years, and there is a tendency to automatically discount whatever happened during the war because the game wasn’t normal. While this discount is appropriate for players, a manager’s job certainly didn’t get easier during the war. If anything, wartime performance for managers probably should get extra credit, because wartime baseball was such a fluid situation, with players coming and going all the time, that it created opportunities for innovation and creativity. That kind of baseball is probably a truer test of the manager’s skills than regular 1936- or 1976-style baseball, in which some teams just had the horses, and there wasn’t much the other teams could do about it.

I can’t tell you, in all honesty, what made Grimm a successful manager. I suspect that two key elements of his managerial style were

a) common sense, and

b) a positive outlook.

To my mind, Boudreau was not the ideal manager for a big league organization operating under the new methods.

Each new player delivered in the spring to a big league manager under this farm system method represents upward of $100,000 of corporate spending … most of (which) is spent before the manager sees the boy under big league pressure. Extension of the front office operation, then, comes as the manager tests the new player under big league conditions. A single look, a few innings of competition in a game already lost will not suffice…

If a big league manager’s pride and ego thrive upon his unique ability to detect talent or lack of it when others can’t, he’ll never get along with the front office.