Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, The (30 page)

As I see it, the National League had one great team and some other good teams up until 1955. By 1962 the National League really had three championship teams—the Dodgers, the Giants, and the Reds. Between 1956 and 1961, they had the Braves, and that’s it. The Braves should have been winning 100 games a year.

Was Fred Haney the worst major league manager ever? Well, he was better at the job than all of us who never did it. The question of who was the worst manager is like the question of who was the worst player: They’re all better players than those of us who couldn’t play. The
very
worst manager was probably somebody who kept the job only a few games, or somebody who kept the job only a half-season, like Maury Wills.

Haney had some good years. But when he had a bad one, it was a beauty.

It is common for people to believe that something begins at the time that they first become aware of it; this is one of the limitations of oral history. I should hasten to add that I hold both Mr. Kubek and Mr. Will in high esteem, and am loath to offend either man, but the idea that advance scouting began in 1957 is so misguided as to be comical.

References to advance scouting in baseball history go back almost a hundred years, if not more, and are commonplace throughout the century. Christy Mathewson, in
Pitching in a Pinch
(1912; actually written by Jack Wheeler) blamed the defeat of the Giants in the 1911 World Series on poor advance scouting:

Frank Baker hit two crucial home runs in the series, one off of Matty, to become “Home Run” Baker.

Babe Ruth’s Own Book of Baseball
(1928; actually written by Ford Frick) contains several references to what would now be called advance scouting. In 1929, when Howard Ehmke stayed behind to watch the Cubs play in Brooklyn, New York, and Philadelphia, what was he doing? Advance scouting.

I have a copy of a book-length series of reports filed by Wid Mathews, scout for the Dodgers, during the 1947 season. It contains pages and pages of stuff like this:

I don’t know what you’d call it, other than advance scouting.

Advance scouts, in fact, probably predate coaches as a part of baseball. As I explained somewhere in this book, up until about 1925, managers were largely responsible for bringing young players to the team. The top managers (Mack, McGraw, Clark Griffith, Pat Moran, and others) used scouts to help do this. Those guys had a cadre of old buddies that hung around the team, retired players like Rudy York, not quite employees, but picking up a little extra money doing odd jobs.

Managers were besieged by reports of young ballplayers. When they had some reason to believe that maybe a kid could be a good one, the manager would sometimes send a scout out to watch him for a couple of days, and see what he thought. This practice goes back at least to the turn of the century. Those scouts were also used sometimes to gather information about new players coming into the league.

There is a related practice here, however, which ends (or seems to end) at about the same time Kubek thought advance scouting was beginning. Kubek tells another famous story—you’ve probably heard it—about the Yankees hiring a private detective to shadow Kubek and his roommate, Bobby Richardson. It was the shortest such report in history: Kubek and Richardson had milk shakes, and were in bed by 9:00.

When did teams begin using private detectives to make reports on their players? Probably sometime in the 1890s. From 1900 to 1940, the practice was quite common. These men were hired by the manager, and reported to the manager. Joe McCarthy, for example, used a private detective to keep track of his drinking men, from Hack Wilson to Vern Stephens. He was effective with it. When the man started to drink too much and stay out too late, McCarthy knew it was time to have a talk with him.

McGraw and McCarthy weren’t ashamed of using detectives, and they weren’t particularly secretive about it. The detective would hang out in the hotel bar or in other night spots favored by the ballplayers, and check his watch when players came and went. The players often or usually knew who the detective was. Sometimes the detective was assigned to shadow a player. Babe Ruth reportedly spent some seasons under almost constant surveillance.

By 1950 this practice had acquired a bad odor, and it appears to have been on the way out well before 1960. The private detective who trailed Kubek and Richardson almost certainly did not report to Stengel, but to someone in the front office. In its time, though, it was just part of the culture. Before World War II, every “good” hotel hired a hotel dick. His job was to walk the halls, chase away anybody who didn’t belong there, tell people who were making too much noise to quiet down, and, perhaps most importantly, to prevent unmarried couples from using the hotel rooms.

Banks hired bank dicks; trains used detectives, much like hotel detectives, to supervise the behavior of people riding the trains. It was intended to protect the patrons of the train or the hotel from thieves or from obnoxious behavior. The practice assumed, when you stop to think about it, that private businesses may have a right to police the behavior of private citizens. After the war, the culture became uncomfortable with this idea.

Of course, private detectives make a living by keeping secrets, and I wouldn’t be shocked if I were to learn that baseball teams sometimes hire private detectives to watch their players, even now. But if they do, they sure as hell don’t report to the manager.

The Dodgers of Branch Rickey’s era were an incredible organization, with a tremendous impact even today. They had two Triple-A teams, Montreal in the International League and St. Paul in the American Association, and they used Ft. Worth in the Texas League, although technically Double-A, almost in the same way as the other two teams.

There were sixteen major league teams then and twenty-four Triple-A teams, plus the Senators didn’t have their farm system organized yet, and didn’t have a Triple-A team. The Dodger farm system was so strong that if the Dodger team plane had crashed, the Dodgers could have put together a contending team from the players trapped at Triple-A.

Not
some
or
many
, but
most
of the dominant field managers in baseball since 1960 were products of that extraordinary St. Paul-Montreal-Brooklyn-Fort Worth axis.

• Tommy Lasorda, of course, played for Walt Alston at Montreal and in Brooklyn, and coached for him for years.
  
• Don Zimmer played for St. Paul in 1953 and 1954 and came to the majors under Walt Alston in 1954.
  
• Dick Williams played years for Fort Worth, and played for St. Paul and Montreal, although he missed Alston in the minors (he played for him in the majors).
  
• Sparky Anderson came from the Dodger farms in the 1950s.
  
• Gene Mauch played for Brooklyn, Montreal, and St. Paul in the 1940s.
  
• Preston Gomez, who managed three teams in the National League, was an Alston lieutenant.
  
• Clyde King, who managed the Giants, Braves, and Yankees, spent almost his entire playing career in the Dodger system and played for Alston at Montreal.
  
• Danny Ozark, who managed the Phillies’ first divisional champion, played for Alston at St. Paul and coached for him for years.
  
• Larry Shepard, in the majors forever as a pitching coach and manager of the Pirates for two seasons, pitched for Alston in the low minors in 1946 and 1947.
  
• Roger Craig came out of the Dodger farm system in 1955.
  
• Gil Hodges, of course, became the master of the Miracle Mets.
  
• Frank Howard managed a couple of teams; Dodger system, 1959.
  
• Roy Hartsfield, first manager of Toronto, had been Alston’s coach.
  
• Bobby Bragan and Cookie Lavagetto were Dodgers of the 1940s, long-term Dodgers.
  

All of those guys, when they managed, brought their coaches with them. Who do you think their coaches were? Dodger-system instruction has pervaded the major leagues.

Branch Rickey took instruction seriously. He had a strong belief in education, in keeping with his generation, a generation which gave America a marvelous educational system. Rickey thought there was a right way and a wrong way to do everything. He wanted intelligent people in his system, top to bottom. The minor leagues were baseball education.