Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, The (14 page)

Alva Bradley was the president of the Cleveland Indians for many years. The Indians were purchased for $1 million in 1927 by a consortium of local businessmen. Bradley was apparently the big money; anyway, he was delegated to act for the group. He hired Billy Evans, an old umpire, to be the general manager, incidentally the first man in baseball to be called the general manager. Evans, in turn, hired Cy Slapnicka to be his chief scout. Along with Barrow and Krichell in New York, they represented the most professional front office of the time.

Bradley told the team to spend whatever it took to contend. Evans was aggressive, and Slapnicka had a great eye for talent. They brought in Earl Averill, Wes Ferrell, Mel Harder, Johnny Allen, Odell Hale, Joe Vosmik, Hal Trosky, and Bob Feller, among many others. Lou Boudreau, Ken Keltner, Jeff Heath. The team, unfortunately, developed a habit of finishing third. They finished third or fourth in 1929, 1930, 1931, ’32, ’33, ’34, ’35, and ’37. In 1936 they finished fifth, but that was a fluke, with four teams huddled between 80 and 83 wins. They were 3 games out of second place.

The Indians were managed for years by very nice men—first by Roger Peckinpaugh, who was well liked, and then by Walter Johnson, who was even a nicer guy, and then by Steve O’Neill, who was, if anything, even nicer. By the late 1930s they were getting tired of this. The feeling around town was that the Indians were as good, on paper, as anybody in baseball, and maybe the manager just wasn’t getting enough out of the boys. Joe McCarthy, after all, had never been accused of being excessively pleasant.

Oscar Vitt had faced that accusation, but it had been a few years. Born in San Francisco in 1890, Vitt was headed for a career as an architect, but first he wanted to play a little baseball. He had enough ability to draw offers, but his father refused to give permission. The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 moved his father’s opinion, and Vitt signed with Oakland in the California State League.

In ten years in the majors, Vitt rubbed shoulders with Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth. Cobb once threatened to blow his frigging head off, but then, that was just Ty’s way of making you feel welcome. Vitt was a character—a fighter, a practical joker, a storyteller, known for his perpetual smile. Ronald Mayer’s book,
The 1937 Newark Bears
, contains a marvelous profile of Vitt, and is the source of much of my information here. After dropping out of the majors Vitt had several good years at Salt Lake City and was hired to manage the Salt Lake City team.

As a manager he was more intense, and more successful. He managed for eleven years in the Pacific Coast League, with Salt Lake City, Hollywood, and Oakland. At Salt Lake City he signed Tony Lazzeri, tutored him for a couple of years, and eventually sold him for $50,000 to his old friend Ed Barrow, for whom he had played in Boston.

He managed nine years in Hollywood, winning 100 games almost every year, and was repeatedly within inches of landing a major league job. In 1934, when Bucky Harris was dismissed in Detroit, Vitt was certain that he had the ticket. It went instead to Mickey Cochrane. Vitt, irritated to the point of unreasonableness, demanded a big raise from his owner in Hollywood, and the owner fired him.

He managed a year in Oakland and then was hired by Ed Barrow to take over the Newark Bears. The 1937 Newark Bears are believed by many people to be the best minor league team in history, mostly because they played in the New York area, and the New York media can’t stand not to have the best of everything. They were a good team, anyway, won 109 games, two rounds of playoffs, and the Junior World Series.

The Indians were looking for a manager, and Oscar by this time had long since worn out the nice-guy label. “I don’t want any lazy players on my club,” Vitt said at the press conference annoucing his selection. “If the boys won’t hustle, out they go.”

They finished third—third in 1938, third again in 1939. The team was marginally better under Vitt than they had been under the nice guys. They won 86 games in 1938, the most they had won since 1932, and 87 games in 1939. Nobody was sending flowers.

The team that Vitt inherited had more than its share of talent, and more than its share of characters. His catcher was Rollie Hemsley. On a train ride in early 1939, Rollie and a couple of friends raised such a commotion, marching up and down the aisles with a trumpet stolen from the luggage of a
New York Times
reporter, that the traveling secretary stuck his head out of an upper berth to complain. The next time down the aisle Rollie opened the gentleman’s berth and tossed in a handful of lighted matches, and on the subsequent journey, a few cups of water.

Cy Slapnicka by this time was the general manager. When the train got to Cleveland, Slapnicka brought two large strangers to meet the train. The group took command of Hemsley, and marched him off to a meeting of Alchoholics Anonymous; it was what we would now call an “intervention.”

Well, Hemsley got to like A.A., became an enthusiastic spokesmen for them, and reportedly convinced several of his teammates to attend with him. One who wouldn’t go along was Johnny Allen. Allen was among the most talented pitchers in baseball. Jimmie Foxx said that Johnny Allen was by far the toughest pitcher he ever faced. By the spring of 1939 he had been in the league for six years, with a career record of 99–38.

But Allen, in the words of Franklin Lewis, “had the temper of seventeen wildcats.” Allen was probably the model for Gil Gamesh, the hot-tempered pitcher in Philip Roth’s
The Great American Novel
. It was known that he could lose his composure on the mound, and the other teams had ideas on how to nurture Johnny’s temper. In 1937 the heckling became so pervasive that Slapnicka wrote a letter to the league president, protesting the poor sportsmanship of Allen’s tormentors and asking the league to direct the umpires to help control it. This backfired, of course, and the razzing intensified. Allen littered the 1930s with famous tantrums, smashing up barrooms and hotel lobbies, and once attacked the other team’s third-base coach in mid-inning.

On June 7, 1938, Allen was pitching in Boston, pitching well. Red Sox hitters complained that a thread dangling from Allen’s uniform was distracting them, and home plate umpire Bill McGowan ordered Allen to cut the thread. Allen flew into a rage and refused to remove the offending string. McGowan told him to cut the thread or leave the mound. Allen left the mound. Vitt ordered him to return; Allen still refused. Vitt fined him $250.

Now the confrontation was between Allen and Vitt. Allen thought the manager should have stood up for him. They exchanged insults for a couple of days, and Allen was suspended. Alva Bradley eventually defused the situation by having his brother, who ran a department store, purchase the sweatshirt for $250 and display it in a glass showcase. The sweatshirt today is the property of the Hall of Fame.

Then there was Bob Feller, the phenomenal young talent whose high school graduation ceremony had been broadcast on national radio, and who had the self-image one would expect of a twenty-year-old kid whose high school graduation ceremony was national news.

The team never warmed up to Vitt. Perhaps this is inevitable, as Vitt had been brought in to whip a collection of talented losers into shape. Vitt, the players alleged, was a nasty little man who would sit on the bench while the team was in the field, bitching about the pitch selection, the mechanics, the glove work, the umpiring, everything and anything. When the players came back to the bench, he wouldn’t say anything about it. The players lost respect for him.

Vitt criticized his players in the press; he also criticized his front office. Once, when Slapnicka asked Vitt to cooperate in a promotion, Vitt refused, saying “You run the front office, and I’ll run the ball club.” By the end of 1938, Vitt and Slapnicka were almost in open warfare.

On June 11, 1940, Mel Harder was hit hard in Boston. The team had had a difficult road trip, dropping out of first place. Harder was a hardworking, soft-spoken player who had been with the team more than ten years. Vitt had to go to the mound and get him. “When are you going to start earning your salary?” he asked Harder sarcastically.

“I always gave you the best I had,” said Harder softly.

When the Indians returned to town, a delegation of twelve veteran players requested a meeting with Alva Bradley. They were led by Bob Feller, Al Milnar, Mel Harder, Hal Trosky, and Rollie Hemsley, although Trosky’s mother died that morning, and he left for home before the sit-down. The players gave Bradley a litany of complaints about the manager. He had ridiculed his players to the newsmen, the fans, to opposing players and managers. He was sarcastic. He was insincere. He was a “wild man” on the bench, running up and down, making caustic comments on players’ mistakes. He made everybody nervous. He had made the team a laughingstock among other teams. He constantly compared the Indians to the 1937 Newark Bears, who, he insisted, never made these kind of mistakes.

Alva Bradley stared somberly at the players. “Who else knows about this?” he asked the men. The players shifted and stared at their feet.

“If word of this gets out,” said Bradley, “you will be ridiculed for the rest of your lives.”

The Indians went into full retreat, but the Cleveland
Plain Dealer
already had the story. They ran it as a front page, eight-column headline, followed by foot after foot of type detailing the conflicts between Vitt and his players. The players got all the worst of it. According to
The Cleveland Indians
, by Franklin Lewis (Putnam, 1949), “There never had been a story like it. The tag ‘Cry Babies’ was attached to the Indians immediately.”

Alva Bradley, placed in an impossible position, decided to publicly support his manager. Bradley was well liked by the players. He met with the team and asked them to withdraw their allegations. All but three men agreed to go along, and signed a petition attempting to cancel out the earlier action.

The press, fans, and players from other teams, however, were not ready to let sleeping papooses lie. For the rest of the year the Cry Babies were taunted in opposing parks by fans waving baby bottles, sucking their thumbs and wearing white bonnets, waving crying towels and diapers and oversize diaper pins. It was a team that, for two years, didn’t dare complain about
anything
. Opposing players would wipe their eyes in mock sympathy; umpires would dismiss them with icy silence.

The standard interpretation of the Cry Babies is that this incident cost the team dearly as they struggled to win their first American League pennant in twenty years. As Dick Bartell said in
Rowdy Richard
, “Blaming your failure to win a pennant on the manager before the season was even half over was the tactic of a bunch of losers. It backfired on them so bad it probably cost them that pennant.”

But as I see it, the Cry Babies incident almost certainly worked to the advantage of the team in the 1940 race. If any team had something to play for, this team had. Goaded and defamed, the Indians fought bravely to clear their names. A hot streak in late June propelled them into first place, and they held first into September. It was one of the wildest pennant races ever. Fans in each town would greet the train at the station or the opposing team at their hotel and welcome them with truckloads of ripe tomatoes and rotten eggs.

The Indians pulled together, not including Vitt. In early September the Tigers surged even, then ahead. Johnny Allen and Rollie Hemsley called a team meeting one night in Allen’s hotel room. Vitt wasn’t using the hit and run enough, said one player. He didn’t know when to call a pitchout.

The players made up their own signals, unknown to Vitt, and began to call their own plays. On September 19, Vitt pulled Mel Harder out of a game after seven and two-thirds innings, leading 4–1. Vitt wanted to switch to Bob Feller, although Feller had pitched two days before, and had told Vitt his arm was tired. Feller surrendered the lead. The newspapers roasted Vitt.

One of the greatest pennant races ever ended on the last day of the season, when a rookie named Floyd Giebell, who won a total of 3 major league games, beat Bob Feller 2–0. Cleveland’s 89–65 record was the team’s best mark between 1921 and 1947—but one game short of Detroit.

Vitt was fired after the season. Johnny Allen was sold to St. Louis, for the waiver price. The Indians went back to Roger Peckinpaugh, the first of the three nice guys who had managed them at the beginning of the Bradley administration. The team collapsed, winning only 75 games for Peckinpaugh, 75 the year after that for Lou Boudreau.

The story of Ossie Vitt is a syllable-for-syllable match for the story of Vern Rapp, 1977–1978. Both men were tremendously successful minor league managers who narrowly missed several shots at a major league job. Each man was forty-eight years old when his chance finally came—Vitt, after winning a minor league manager of the year award with the Newark Bears, and Rapp, after winning the same award with the Denver Bears. Both men replaced popular, low-pressure managers and attempted to discipline veteran ball clubs. Both men were confronted by clubhouse revolts, but both men were objectively successful, doing better with their teams than the teams had done in the previous years. In both cases, the fact of the team’s success was obscured by the controversy surrounding the players’ resistance.

Both men were accused by their players of being sarcastic and negative, yet both men had been extremely well liked by those who had played for them in the minor leagues. In both cases, the team essentially collapsed after the manager was fired and was replaced by a more popular manager.

Vitt tended to blame Bob Feller for his problems. I have some sympathy for anybody who had to manage the twenty-two-year-old Bob Feller, but Vitt was a teammate of Babe Ruth when Ruth was twenty-one, and Ty Cobb when Cobb was twenty-six, so he should have known a little bit about the Leviathan egos of young superstars.