Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, The (26 page)

The incident described by Daley occurred on May 15, 1951, in Fenway Park. Paul Richards also wrote about this incident in his 1955 book,
Modern Baseball Strategy
. Daley’s account of it is exactly correct except for one detail: The White Sox won the game in eleven innings, not thirteen. It was a rather remarkable game. It was old-timers day in Fenway, so the game was attended by Cy Young and twenty-eight other players who had played in the American League in 1901. Nellie Fox hit his first major league home run, and Ted Williams hit his 300th. Fox’s home run won the game.

Richards wrote that this strategy was “familiar to all of us on the sandlots,” and Daley also wrote that the move was “strictly of sandlot derivation.” The sandlots these gentlemen played on must have been considerably different than the sand-lots in my neighborhood. I have to confess that in my neighborhood, we never really worried too much about the lefty/righty percentages.

Anyway, whatever its ancestry, this was apparently the first time this maneuver had been used in a major league game. It is still done once in a while. Whitey Herzog used this trick at least five times in the late 1980s, usually with Todd Worrell.

It has, however, never become a common strategy. What I was wondering is, why? If it’s a good strategy, why isn’t it used more often? Let’s think about it.

The essential trade-off of the maneuver is that it gives the team in the field the platoon advantage for one hitter, at the cost of having a misaligned defense for that one hitter. The value of the platoon edge for one hitter is about .025 hits. Ted Williams would probably hit about .350 against a right-handed pitcher, but more like .325 against a lefty. The difference is the gain.

Of course, the left-handed pitcher could be a better pitcher than the right-hander, but that has really nothing to do with the subject. If you wanted the left-hander in the game because he was a better pitcher, you wouldn’t distort your defense to bring him in for one hitter. You’d leave him in there to pitch.

What is the cost of having an out-of-position fielder, for one hitter? That’s much harder to gauge, but my best guess is that it is in the same range. Richards put Dorish at third base. A key here is that it’s Ted Williams at bat. Williams, of course, rarely hit the ball to third base; he was famous for pulling everything to the right side. Thus, one might argue, there is minimal defensive cost, because the third baseman is effectively out of the action with Williams at the plate.

Williams, however,
might
hit the ball to third. Did Ted Williams
ever
hit hard smashes to third base? Of course he did. Second, remember Murphy’s Law. Third, remember that there was a runner on first base. In generalizing the situation, there would
always
be a runner on base, because you would probably never do something like this with the bases empty.

And if there’s a runner on first base, and Williams rips a single to right field, what happens? There’s a play at third base. The pitcher, playing third base, might have to make the catch and apply a tag to an oncoming runner—a routine play for an experienced third baseman, but far from an easy thing to do. What is the chance that an error will occur?

I don’t know, but it seems to me that it’s pretty good. Let’s assume there is a one-in-eight chance that the pitcher will have to make a play of some kind during his stint at third base. A good major league third baseman normally fields about .950. A bad one may field about .900. This is worse than a bad third baseman; this is an experiment. He’s going to field, let us guess, about .850.

If there is a one-in-eight chance that the pitcher will have to make a play at third base, and a 15% chance that he’ll make an error if he does, then the chance that the out-of-position fielder will make an error on any one hitter is probably between .015 and .020. You’re not gaining an awful lot by making the switch.

There is, however, something else which has happened here. You’ve taken your third baseman out of the game. In the original game, the Paul Richards maneuver, he had Minnie Minoso playing third base. When Dorish went back to the mound, Minoso couldn’t go back to third base. Floyd Baker took his place.

Minnie Minoso was a .326 hitter. Floyd Baker was a .263 hitter.

So in order to gain 25 points on Ted Williams, Richards replaced a .326 hitter with a .263 hitter. The game went 11 innings, and Baker went to bat twice.

Um … I think we’ve figured out why this move never became common.

Charlie Dressen got a reputation as a smart guy due to an incident which occurred in the fourth game of the 1933 World Series. A young left-handed hitter named Cliff Bolton had come up to the Senators midway in the 1933 season and had made quite a reputation for himself as a pinch hitter, hitting .410 for the season (16-for-39), mostly as a pinch hitter.

The Giants, already up two games to one, scored in the top of the eleventh inning of Game Four, grabbing a 2–1 lead. With the bases loaded and one out, Washington sent Bolton up to pinch-hit. Bill Terry convened a meeting on the mound and decided that they had no option but to pull the infield in.

Dressen bolted from the bench, uninvited, and joined the conference. “No,” he told Terry. “Don’t bring them in. I know this guy from the Southern League. He’s slow as hell, and if you throw him a fastball on the outside corner, he’ll hit a ground ball to short. You can get out of this with a double play.”

Terry stared hard at Dressen. Terry was the same age as Dressen, and he knew that Dressen had been managing in the Southern League most of the season. An injury to Johnny Vergez had left Terry short a third baseman down the stretch, and he had opted for a veteran, Dressen, who was hitting .332 at Nashville. Terry decided that Dressen knew what he was talking about. “Okay,” he told the gathering. “Pitch him outside and play for two.”

Cliff Bolton hit a ground ball to short, and the Giants were up three games to one. This incident became famous, and Dressen was hired to manage the Cincinnati Reds midway through the next season.

Charlie Dressen was born and raised in Decatur, Illinois. As a youth, he played quarterback on the team organized by George Halas, the Decatur Staleys, who later became the Chicago Bears. He would have liked to continue in football, and he would have liked to be a jockey, but he was at that awkward size: 5–5½, 146 pounds. A little too big to be a jockey, way too small to be a football player. He settled on baseball.

He was a consistent .300 hitter in the minor leagues and made the majors after a big season at St. Paul (American Association) in 1924, where he hit .347 with 18 homers and 151 RBI. He was purchased by Cincinnati that winter, played regularly for four years, hit okay, and was regarded as the best defensive third baseman in the National League other than Pie Traynor.

His bat betrayed him, and he bombed out of the National League by 1930, and then out of the top minor leagues (the International League and the American Association) by 1931. From his home in Decatur he ran around the Midwest all winter, trying to catch on as a minor league manager, but didn’t find anything. By midsummer 1932 he had signed up to join the Decatur police force.

But then he heard that Fay Murray, owner of the Nashville team in the Southern Association, was considering a change of managers. Dressen borrowed money from a friend to get train fare to Nashville.

“Listen,” he told Murray. “If I don’t win more games than I lose here, you won’t owe me a cent. I’ll manage this team for the meal money until the end of the year, and then if we win more than we lose you can pay me my salary then.”

Murray agreed to the deal. As Dressen told the story, they came down to the last day of the season with a .500 record under Dressen, so his whole salary for those two months was riding on the last game. They won the game, and Dressen got his money. Murray always said that he would have paid Dressen off anyway, but he wouldn’t have rehired him for 1933.

Dressen’s bat came back to life in 1933, and he wound up back in the major leagues, filling in for the World Championship team. Larry MacPhail was in the stands when the Cliff Bolton episode occurred, and hired him to manage the Reds a few months later.

MacPhail would be his biggest booster for many years. Dressen and MacPhail did a good job in Cincinnati. The Reds, who had finished last in 1931, last in 1932, last in 1933, and last in 1934, edged up to sixth place in 1935, their first full year under Charlie, and to fifth place in 1936. Larry MacPhail left the Reds after the 1936 season, and the Reds relapsed in 1937. Dressen was fired afer the season.

MacPhail landed the job as general manager in Brooklyn in 1938. He fired his manager after the 1938 season and hired Leo Durocher. A few days later, apparently without asking Leo, he hired Dressen as a coach.

Dressen became Leo Durocher’s right-hand man, third base coach, drinking buddy, card-playing companion, researcher, horse race handicapper, and occasional rival. “Some doubt existed as to which of them was the true brains of the team,” John Lardner wrote. “It depended on which of them you asked—Dressen or Durocher.” Dressen had a fatal flaw: He couldn’t shut up. This sometimes caused people to overlook the fact that he was, in truth, an extremely smart man. Durocher said that Dressen “could find out anything about anybody.” Whenever there was a new player in the league who was causing the Dodgers some grief, Dressen was assigned to find out everything about him, most particularly what his weaknesses were. Dressen would check the new guy’s record to see where he had played, figure out who he knew that could help him, get on the phone, and by the next day he’d give Durocher a full report.

He could steal signs, and he could call the pitches when the pitcher was in middelivery. There is a story told that later, when he was coaching with the Yankees, he worked out a set of signs to tip off the hitters about what the pitcher was throwing. Joe DiMaggio said that he didn’t want to know, but Dressen said, well, he might as well give the signal, and DiMaggio could ignore it if he wanted to.

DiMaggio tried to ignore it, but one time Dressen signaled a curve, and DiMaggio picked up the signal. A fastball almost skulled him. “That’s it,” DiMaggio barked. “Knock it off before you get me killed.”

Dressen relented. His chance to manage again was a long time coming, and before it came he was put out of baseball twice, by two different commissioners, both of whom were of the opinion that Charlie spent entirely too much time and too much money at the racetrack. After the 1942 season the aging Judge Landis leaned on Branch Rickey, the new power in Brooklyn, to break up “that nest of horse players and card sharks.” He meant Durocher and Dressen and their show business buddies, many of whom circled like flies around the Dodgers clubhouse. Rickey fired Dressen to appease Landis, but when the team stumbled out of the gate in 1943, Durocher begged to have him back. Rickey relented, and rehired Dressen with a pledge to Landis that he would monitor their behavior.

MacPhail moved to the Yankees in 1945 and in 1947 offered Dressen $20,000 a year to come coach for the Yankees. It was an unheard salary for a coach, almost double what Dressen was making with Brooklyn, and he had been the highest-paid coach in the history of baseball with Brooklyn. Dressen accepted the assignment to coach third base for Bucky Harris. It wasn’t the job he wanted, but the salary was right. He second-guessed Harris, as he had for years second-guessed Durocher, but Durocher had been his friend; Harris was not, and Dressen’s late-arriving advice was not always well received. In 1947, when the new commissioner kicked Durocher out of baseball for a year, he also suspended Dressen for a month, for no apparent reason except that he was Durocher’s friend and spent a lot of time at the racetrack.

By the late 1940s Dressen had been coaching in the New York area for a full decade. He was a New York personality—a raconteur, as they used to say. A storyteller and an urban adventurer, a friend to the barkeepers and the restaurateurs. He was tremendously popular with the older New York writers, and when Bucky Harris failed to solidify his grip on the managerial reigns, Dressen appeared to be the number-one candidate for the job.

Why he didn’t get it is still a subject of some discussion. What it came down to was Charlie’s ego. Dressen just couldn’t resist telling you, pretty much on a daily basis, how smart he was. Walker Cooper once said that Charlie Dressen wrote a book on managing; on every page it just said “I.” There is a story told, probably true, that one time in Cincinnati, when the Reds were dropping behind in the early innings, Charlie clapped his hands as his team took the field. “Hang in there, boys,” he yelled to the departing players. “I’ll think of something.” Charlie was one of the few managers in baseball history who truly believed that
he
was the key to his team’s success.

By the end of the 1948 season, Larry MacPhail was out of baseball. The Yankees were in the hands of George Weiss, a protégé of Ed Barrow, who had built the Yankees into the Gray Matron of the sports world. Barrow and Weiss loved players like Lou Gehrig, Tony Lazzeri, and Joe DiMaggio, who simply did their job and kept their mouths shut.

And so, in the famous fall of 1948, Dressen and Stengel traded jobs. Stengel came east to manage the Yankees, the job about which Dressen had dreamed for many years. Dressen went to Oakland, taking over for Casey as the manager of the Oakland Oaks.

Stengel and Dressen had as much in common as Stengel and Billy Southworth, maybe more. Stengel was born in Kansas City in 1890; Southworth, in Nebraska in 1893; Dressen, in Illinois in 1898. Both Stengel and Dressen listed their ancestry as “Irish-German.” Dressen was smaller than Stengel and Southworth and he was an infielder, while they were outfielders, but he had the same kind of playing career—a serviceable National League player, a regular for a few years, but certainly not a star. His first major league managerial opportunity came to him in the National League in 1934, exactly as it did for Stengel, and both of them took over down-and-out National League teams. Dressen was a little more successful than Stengel in that first opportunity, and lasted a half-season longer.

Dressen was, in Oakland, as successful as Casey had been. The team, which had gone 111–72, 96–90, and 114–74 in three years under Stengel (1946–1948), was 104–83 and 118–82 under Dressen in 1949–1950. It was not a Yankee farm team, but Billy Martin was there under Casey in 1948, and under Dressen in 1949. Until the mid-1950s, when Billy Martin was asked about managers he had played for, he would discuss Dressen and Stengel more or less on the same level. Dressen treated him well, and Martin for many years always talked about how much he had learned from Charlie Dressen.

The Leo Durocher era had run its course in Brooklyn. Burt Shotton, although winning the pennant in 1949, had failed to replace Durocher just as Bucky Harris had failed to replace Joe McCarthy despite winning the pennant in 1947. The parallel is precise. Joe McCarthy left the Yankees in June 1946. The team struggled through the rest of the season, but won the pennant in 1947 and finished just 2 games back in 1948.

Leo Durocher left the Dodgers in July 1948. The team struggled through the rest of the 1948 season, won the pennant in 1949, and lost by 2 games in 1950. That wasn’t good enough, and, in both cases, the new manager was perceived as being too nice, too soft. Both teams (the Yankees in 1948, the Dodgers in 1950) then fired their manager and brought back to the majors the colorful skipper of the Oakland Oaks. In October 1950, Charlie Dressen was hired to manage the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Oh, what a team it was, Jackie Robinson’s Dodgers. Between 1947 and 1956 they would win six pennants, for three different managers. In 1951, Dressen’s first year in Brooklyn, his team won 97 games, and, as you all know, finished second, blowing a 13½ game lead over the last seven weeks. Walter O’Malley, amazingly enough, didn’t fire Dressen, took responsibility for the defeat within the organization, and the Dodgers won the pennant in 1952.

In 1953 they won 105 games. The 1953 Dodgers, immortalized in Roger Kahn’s classic
The Boys of Summer
, were one of the greatest teams of all time, despite falling to the Yankees in a six-game World Series tainted by an umpire’s blown call. Four regulars are in the Hall of Fame (Roy Campanella, Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, and Duke Snider) and three others were of almost the same quality (Gil Hodges, Junior Gilliam, and Carl Furillo).

Charlie Dressen, at that moment, had one foot in the Hall of Fame, and the other on a banana peel. Unfortunately, all of his weight went on the banana peel.

Like Stengel, Dressen was enormously popular with the press, but not universally liked by his players. Casey’s players, because the team enjoyed
so much
success, eventually had no choice but to buy into the lovable old coot image. Dressen bailed out before his success reached a comparable standard, which allowed his ex-players to cut him to ribbons with barbed wit. This, in turn, undermined his popularity with the press—but in 1953, the New York press coverage of Dressen and Stengel was more or less on a par.

For many years, it had been traditional to express one’s appreciation for a successful season by giving the manager a multiyear contract. If things didn’t go well you could fire the manager and pay off his contract. Walter O’Malley had, for some reason, developed a strong dislike for this policy and was determined that he would never again find himself in the position of paying somebody
not
to manage his ballclub.

Perhaps, on his own, Charlie Dressen could have lived with this. His wife was not prepared to. There were managers all around baseball who were getting three-year and four-year contracts, and Ruth Dressen was certain that her husband was every bit as good as any of them. She wrote a letter to the team expressing this opinion and absolutely demanding a multiyear contract. O’Malley refused. The Dressens insisted, refusing to sign a one-year agreement. O’Malley fired him.

The sudden firing of Charlie Dressen was among the biggest baseball stories of the 1950s. For many years, sportswriters liked to tell the “inside” story of the event, what was
really
going on in this small comic passion play. In retrospect, it seems obvious that what was “really” going on was exactly what O’Malley and Dressen
said
was going on. The Dodgers announced first that they wanted to rehire Charlie Dressen if they could. When they couldn’t agree on a contract and gave the job to Walter Alston, they said publicly that the door was still open for Dressen to return, if he would agree to accept a one-year deal. For two months after that, almost until the beginning of spring training, they continued to insist that Dressen was welcome to return, if he would agree to the terms which had been offered.