Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, The (32 page)

It may be that no manager in baseball history was ever more second-guessed for losing a pennant race than was Walter Alston in 1962. The Dodgers were heavy favorites to win the pennant before the season opened, being picked by almost 50% of sportswriters surveyed in the spring by
The Sporting News
.

They played marvelous baseball for four-plus months. Maury Wills stole 104 bases, breaking Ty Cobb’s record. Tommy Davis won the batting title at .346 and drove in 153 runs, the most of any major league player since 1950. Don Drysdale was 21–4 in early August, on pace for thirty wins. On August 10 they were 80–36, 5½ games in front.

John Leonard, writing about the team almost twenty years later in
The Ultimate Baseball Book
, wrote that “the Giants caught the Dodgers on the last day of the season and beat them, of course, in a three game play-off, because Alston wouldn’t use Drysdale and Stan Williams couldn’t get my grandmother out.” Leonard described Alston as a “dour ex-farm boy.”

One of Alston’s coaches, Leo Durocher, was overheard in a restaurant, saying that the team would never have collapsed if he had been managing. A National League umpire, Chris Pelekoudas, said that Maury Wills had cost the Dodgers the pennant by his effort to break Cobb’s record. Junior Gilliam, he said, had taken a lot of hittable fastballs to allow Wills to steal.

What strikes me about this, in retrospect, is that no one should have to apologize for losing to the 1962 San Francisco Giants. Who were those guys? Look at this team:

Willie Mays
had one of his best seasons, driving in a career high 141 RBI.

Orlando Cepeda
at first base hit .306 with 35 homers, 114 RBI.

Felipe Alou
in right field hit .316 with 25 homers, 98 RBI.

Jim Davenport
was at third base, hitting .297 with 14 homers and a shortstop’s range.

Willie McCovey
couldn’t break the lineup because of Cepeda, but he hit .293 off the bench with a .593 slugging percentage, 20 homers in 229 at bats.

Juan Marichal
was the third starter, 18–11 with a 3.35 ERA.

Jack Sanford
won 16 straight games, and finished 24–7.

Billy O’Dell
won 19 games.

Billy Pierce
was old, but he went 16–6.

The catchers were
Tom Haller
and
Ed Bailey
, who had the disadvantage of both being left-handed hitters, so they couldn’t platoon. On the other hand, they were probably the two best catchers in the National League at that time. Between them they hit 35 homers in 526 at bats, drove in 100 runs, drew 93 walks. And they were both good defensive catchers.

The third catcher was
Johnny Orsino
, who hardly ever got to play, but he was a good player, too.

Harvey Kuenn
was in left field; he was the same age as Willie Mays (thirty-one) and hit for the same average (.304). He’d been the American League batting champion in 1959 (.353), and was a career .303 hitter, with 2,000-plus hits.

This is an amazing team. The fourth and fifth outfielders were
Willie McCovey
and
Matty Alou
. Matty was a career .307 hitter, hit .292 that year. The fifth and sixth starting pitchers were
Mike McCormick
and
Gaylord Perry
. Between them they won 448 major league games, and three Cy Young Awards.
Stu Miller
was the top reliever; he was one of the best relievers of his era. The number-two reliever was
Don Larsen
.

This team scored fifty runs more than the 1961 Yankees. They scored more runs than any other major league team between 1950 and 1982. Their starting rotation was far better than the ’61 Yanks, although their defense was nowhere near as good.
Manny Mota
, another career .300 hitter, was buried on the bench.
Bob Niemann
was the top right-handed pinch hitter; he was a career .295 hitter, with power. The team had four Hall of Famers (Mays, McCovey, Marichal, and Gaylord Perry), one other guy who probably should be in the Hall of Fame (Cepeda), and four other players who had what you might call near Hall of Fame careers (Harvey Kuenn, Billy Pierce, and the two Alous.) At least nine other players on the team were good major league players for a long time.

Their weaknesses?
Chuck Hiller
was at second base, and he couldn’t really play second. On the other hand, he hit .276 and scored 94 runs. Shortstop
Jose Pagan
was just average. McCormick and Perry and Miller, although outstanding pitchers, didn’t have outstanding years. The team didn’t win the World Series.

The Dodgers got ahead, and then they lost. In the mind of the typical sportswriter, when you get ahead you’re supposed to win. This is particularly true if you represent a media center, New York or Los Angeles, because to a large segment of the media, the story of any season is either going to be the story of how the Dodgers won, or the story of how the Dodgers lost.

The story in 1962 was about how the Dodgers lost. The 1962 Dodgers were also a great team, but the 1962 Dodgers didn’t have five Hall of Famers. The Dodgers had two Hall of Famers (Koufax and Drysdale), and one other guy who might be a Hall of Famer (Wills). They had many outstanding players, but they had no third baseman, and the bench was full of guys like Tim Harkness and Larry Burright.

The Dodgers got them in ’63. The Giants spent the rest of the decade 2 games out of first place. Their manager, Alvin Dark, got a reputation as a racist, and after 1962 the team never seemed to reach down deep enough to pull out a big game. But nobody should have to apologize for losing a split decision to Joe Louis or Muhammad Ali. And nobody should have to apologize for finishing one game behind the 1962 Giants.

Bill Adair’s real name was Marion, but, like John Wayne, he thought better of it. Adair was a minor league infielder who would have had a major league career had it not been for World War II. At Montgomery in 1940 he hit .329 with 20 homers and led the Southeastern League in runs scored and RBI. After a good season at Memphis in 1942 he went off to the war, and by the time the war was over he was too old to be a prospect.

As a minor league manager, Adair was almost phenomenally successful, laying claim to nine pennants in his first twelve seasons. As a rookie manager in 1949, Adair led Owensboro to the Kitty League championship with an 82–40 record, also hitting .356 and driving in 120 runs for that team. In the next few years he would win pennants or postseason series at Bluefield (with a record or 80–40), Eau Claire (77–44), El Dorado (79–39), Panama City (73–47), Valdosta (94–45), Augusta (98–56), and Charleston (89–62). It seemed as if he could take any collection of unknown players into almost any league, and win two-thirds of his games, but Charleston had an off year in 1959 (77–84), and, amazingly enough, Adair opened the 1960 season without a job.

He returned to the American Association in May 1960 as manager of Louisville, the Triple-A franchise of the Milwaukee Braves. He led them to a second-place finish, then won both rounds of the playoffs, his ninth championship in twelve years.

Adair was Henry Aaron’s first minor league manager. Aaron wrote twenty years later that “a guy couldn’t have asked to break in under a better manager than Bill Adair. He was from Montgomery, Alabama, and I think that because he was a Southerner he was even a little more understanding of the little black kid he had playing beside him. He was a lot more than a manager to me.” Actually, Adair was born in Mobile, Alabama, as was Aaron.

Adair coached for the Braves in 1962, under Birdie Tebbetts, but went back to the minors when Birdie lost the job. He managed Triple-A franchises in various leagues over the next decade—Toronto in 1963, Denver in 1964, Atlanta in 1965, Richmond in 1966. All of these teams finished over .500, although none won the pennant.

In the winter of 1966–1967, Adair was reported to be a candidate for the managerial opening in Cleveland. This was old news; he had been a candidate for several positions by that time, and, as before, he didn’t get the job. It went instead to Joe Adcock.

Adcock, like Adair, had spent many years in the Milwaukee Braves’ organization. Both men could have used the same references—Henry Aaron, Birdie Tebbetts.

Joe Adcock at the end of 1966 was winding up a distinguished major league career. He hit 336 major league home runs, and he was a better hitter than that number would suggest. He reached the majors in Cincinnati two years after another outstanding first baseman, Ted Kluszewski, and had to battle for playing time for several seasons. He had at least six major injuries in his career, was recommitted to a platoon role for three seasons in midcareer by a manager with an overgrown stubborn streak, and he played almost his entire career in very poor home runs parks. He hit more home runs in road games than Mel Ott. Had his luck been as good as it was bad, he would have hit twice as many home runs as he did. In the nine years that Adcock was a teammate of Henry Aaron, Adcock homered 8% more often, per at bat, than did Henry Aaron.

But having said that, Cleveland’s decision to hire Adcock, rather than Adair, is mind-boggling. Adcock had
no
managerial experience, not even a winter league team somewhere. Cleveland’s general manager, Gabe Paul, had known Adcock for many years. He liked Adcock, and when Adcock was ready to retire, Gabe thought he was ready to manage.

Adcock was the strong, stable type of individual who commanded the respect of his teammates, and Paul no doubt saw him as being in the mold of Walt Alston. He was intelligent, he had worked hard to learn the game, he was well liked; what else was there? Alston, of course, was a schoolteacher who had spent ten years in the minor leagues learning how to manage.

Adcock knew what he thought and didn’t hide it. In his relationships with his peers, Adcock’s tendency to sound off when he was unhappy was kept in context; Adcock was a friendly, open, basically likable guy who would complain a bit when things didn’t go his way. In the manager’s chair, the trait affected people in an entirely different way: Adcock was never satisfied. Like Rogers Hornsby, with whom Adcock had quarreled as a player, Adcock expected his players to work as hard at the game as he himself had worked. “Joe loves to correct faults,” said Leon Wagner, “and that left me out. I’ve been trying to find a flaw that Joe could work on so that I could play more.”

Popular with the press as a player, Adcock was touchy when criticized, and was perceived by both the press and his players as a grump. He lasted only one year as a manager, winning 75 games with a team that was well over .500 in 1965–1966, under Birdie Tebbetts, and well over .500 in 1968, under Alvin Dark.

This is a story about the manifest unfairness of the world. Adair, who was cheated out of his chance to play in the majors by World War II, was cheated out of his chance to manage because he lacked connections in major league circles. Adcock was a major leaguer, known to the men who ran the teams. Adair was a bush leaguer. In a baseball world that was often run by the whims of half-educated little czars, this was a defining distinction.

Adair eventually did get to manage in the majors, 10 games as an interim manager with the Chicago White Sox in 1970, and thus, in an alphabetical register of all the men who have managed in the majors, the first two men listed are Bill Adair and Joe Adcock. Adair continued to work in baseball for more than twenty years. He coached with Atlanta in 1967, with the White Sox in 1970. In the early 1990s he was still listed as a scout for the Philadelphia Phillies. He would be in his eighties now, and I assume he has retired.

By the method I established to measure these things, Walt Alston was the most successful manager of the 1960s, the third most successful manager of the 1950s, the sixth most successful manager of the 1970s, and the fifth most successful manager of all time.

It never got him a whole lot of respect.

Walter Emmons Alston was born in Venice, Ohio, in 1911. In grade school he was given the nickname “Smokey” after Smokey Joe Wood. Smokey started at Miami of Ohio in 1929, but quit after his freshman year to get married. The depression hit, and no good job could be found. The local Methodist church offered to help financially if he’d go back to college, so Alston returned to Miami, earned his degree, and wound up as the captain of both the college basketball team and the baseball team.

The day after he graduated in 1935, Alston was standing on a ladder helping his dad paint the house when a man drove up asking for him. The man was Frank Rickey, Branch Rickey’s brother. He offered Walter no bonus, but a chance to play in the Cardinal farm system for $125 a month.

He was in the majors in less than two years. Alston hit .326 in the East Dixie league in 1935, fielding well enough at third base to earn a transfer across the infield, and hit exactly the same (.326) with a league-leading 35 homers in the Middle Atlantic League in 1936. The Cardinals had a rookie Hall of Earner at first base, Johnny Mize, but decided to call Alston up for a look. He pitched a lot of batting practice, and on the last day Mize was ejected after the other first baseman had been used as a pinch hitter. Alston got to play a few innings and bat once; he struck out. At the time, no one would have suspected that would be his only major league at bat.

Everything went wrong for him, as a player. Apart from being locked behind Mize, Alston was buried in the immense Cardinal system. Because he taught school in the off-season, he was unable to attend spring training. He began to have trouble with his knees. Although he had many good years left in the minors, by 1939 he was twenty-seven years old, and finished as a prospect.

In the spring of 1940 the Portsmouth team, for which Alston was laboring, started slowly. Mel Jones, Dodger road secretary, asked Alston if he had ever considered managing. Alston jumped at the chance; he knew, he said later, that managing was his only chance to stay in the game. He almost played himself out of his destiny. He managed in the Middle Atlantic League from 1940 to 1942 without much success, but as a hitter he led the league all three times in home runs and twice in RBI. When the war began to create shortages of talent, Alston was sent back to the International League—as a player. He didn’t hit in the International League and was released early in the 1944 season.

Depressed, Alston went back to Ohio and tried to reconcile himself to life as a small-town school teacher. Alston’s release, however, was noted by Branch Rickey, who was then building up the Dodger farm system. Rickey tried to call Alston, but the Alston farm had no phone. Rickey left messages with people all around town. Finally a grocer from Darrtown drove out to his farm to tell him, “Walt, there’s this fellow named Rickey that’s been trying to get in touch with you for about a week.”

In 1946, when Rickey was ready for his great experiment, Alston was one of two managers chosen to lead the teams with black players. Managing in the New England League, Alston had Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe. “There was one guy, a manager, who used to ride me from the bench,” recalled Alston in
The Man in the Dugout
, “asking me if I’m sleeping with Campanella. One day I met him outside the clubhouse between games of a doubleheader and I stopped him.

“‘Listen,’ I said, ‘You’ve been wondering if I sleep with Campanella. Well, the answer is no. The Dodgers go first class, we all get to sleep in separate rooms. But if you gave me my choice of sleeping with Campanella or with you, I’d sure as hell take Campanella.’” The team won the playoffs, his first championship as a manager, and Alston in 1947 moved up to the Western League. He won the playoffs there, too, and in 1948—Rickey was as methodical as he was creative—reached the Triple-A level, managing St. Paul.

The Dodgers at this time had two Triple-A teams, St. Paul in the American Association, and Montreal in the International League. Still laboring in perfect obscurity, Alston managed St. Paul for two years, Montreal for four. The Dodgers won the pennant in 1953 under Charlie Dressen, while Alston, with Montreal, won the Triple-A World Series. When Dressen shot his managerial career in the kneecap (see “
Dressen and Stengel
”), Alston did not apply for the major league job. “I figured,” Alston told Tom Meany in
The Artful Dodgers
, “that I had been in the organization long enough for them to know all about me and that if they felt I was qualified, they could get in touch.”

To the absolute astonishment of the New York press, they did.

On November 23, 1953, Alston received a message from Buzzie Bavasi, instructing him to come to New York right away. The next day a New York paper had a front-page picture of a hand-lettered sign in a store window. The sign said “Walt Who?”

Alston was given a one-year contract, wrote Tom Meany, with no time off for good behavior. If it was surprising that Alston got the job, it was incredible that he kept it. With Casey Stengel managing the Yankees and Leo Durocher the Giants, reporters thought that a colorful personality was a necessity for a New York manager. O’Malley’s thinking was exactly the opposite: that it was time for a
professional
manager.

The newspapers treated him with barely disguised contempt. “If Alston doesn’t win the pennant and beat the Yankees in the World Series,” wrote John Lardner, “there’s a clause in his contract which requires him to refund his entire salary and report immediately to the nearest Federal penitentiary.”

Although most of the 1954 Dodgers accepted Alston’s leadership because they had played for him in the minor leagues, Alston had serious conflicts with Jackie Robinson. Serving as his own third base coach exposed him to more criticism not only for taking on a tough job, but simply because he was
there
for the fans when they wanted to object to his strategy. Early in the season Duke Snider hit a ball into the left field stands and back out, the umpire ruling it a double. Jackie raced out of the dugout to argue—but Alston, coaching at third, didn’t join in. Talking about the incident after the game, Alston referred to it as “Jackie’s temper tantrum.”

“The team might be moving somewhere,” Robinson replied, “if Alston had not been standing at third base like a wooden Indian.” Alston and Robinson had words several times. Alston’s strategy came under fire. On May 1, 1954, Alston ordered Ted Kluszewski intentionally walked with the bases empty and the score tied in the bottom of the ninth. It didn’t cost them the game, but led to predictable second-guessing.

Worse than arguing with your superstar is not winning, and the Dodgers didn’t win, either. The Dodgers, winners of 105 games in 1953, came out in 1954 in a gang slump. Roy Campanella, MVP in two of the previous three seasons, had a hand injury, and hit .207. The 1954 Dodgers finished 5 games behind the Giants, their poorest season in six years.

Alston, against all odds, was given another chance. In the spring of 1955, Jackie Robinson found himself without a position; Alston’s plans for him were vague. Robinson talked to the reporters, asking if any of them knew what Alston had in mind for him. Alston, thinking that Robinson was using the media to show him up, flew into a rage. There was a team meeting; Alston denounced “players who went to the press with questions about the team.” He claimed that those players were cowards and detrimental to the club’s spirit. Robinson erupted, saying that if Alston would talk to the players they wouldn’t need to try to ask the reporters those things. The two headed for each other; Gil Hodges stepped between them.

On May 5, 1955, Don Newcombe refused to pitch batting practice. Alston told him to turn in his uniform. The two met the next day and made peace.

Charlie Dressen, like most managers of his generation, would light into a player in public. If a player pulled a rock on the bases, for example, Dressen would scream at him across the field in full view of the fans and the press. Alston never did that, and in time his players came to appreciate the courtesy.

Jackie Robinson came around. “Maybe it wasn’t fair to keep comparing Walt to Dressen,” he told a reporter. “He had certain faults in my eyes. Of course, it could have been my eyesight.”

The Dodgers won 98 games in 1955, taking the pennant by 13
½
games. The Dodgers and Yankees met in the World Series; they had met five other times in the previous fifteen years, and the Yankees had won every time. The Yankees won the first game. The Yankees won the second game.

You could have gotten bets down, at that moment, at a billion to one. The Dodgers swept the three games in Ebbets Field, however, and so the series went seven. Alston decided to start Johnny Podres. Eleven pitchers started games for the Dodgers that summer, and Podres was the only one with a losing record, but the Dodgers held a 2–0 lead going to the bottom of the sixth. Alston made a defensive switch, putting Sandy Amoros into left field. Amoros made a game-saving catch, Podres finished the shutout, and the Dodgers, for the first time ever, were champions of the world.

For the first time in his life, Walter Alston was a star.

The Dodgers won the National again in 1956, but lost the series. They had an off season in 1957 as the team grew old and was disrupted by the impending move to LA. By 1958 the need to rebuild was obvious, but the Dodgers, perhaps wanting to keep marquee names for their new fans, stayed with the veterans. Roy Campanella was paralyzed in a car wreck before the season.

Charlie Dressen returned to the Dodgers as a coach, leading to speculation that he would soon be back in the manager’s chair. The Dodgers endured their worst year in memory, finishing seventh. The pressure on Alston grew more intense; Alston signed another one-year contract.

And in 1959, with a team that had every right to finish fifth, Walter Alston won the World Championship. Maury Wills and Larry Sherry came up in midseason; Sherry was the immediate star. In the World Series Sherry won two games and saved two, Charlie Neal played great, and a journeyman outfielder named Chuck Essegian hit two pinch-hit home runs. They were, in my opinion, the weakest World Championship team of all time.

Managing in the largest city in the nation and then in the glitziest, Alston began to earn a grudging respect. He never backed away from an unhappy player. He was very deliberate. John Roseboro described him as “slow-witted,” and Roseboro thought the world of him. For reporters, he had an extensive list of noncommittal responses … “It could be,” “It’s too early to tell,” “Let’s wait until we have a few more workouts.” He never gushed about a rookie, or even a superstar. To Alston, hyping a player and criticizing him in public were two sides of the same coin and could only cause a manager problems. He never took credit for a win. He never blamed a player or an umpire for a defeat.

Alston didn’t drink or play cards. He was, however, a big, powerful man, and tough. Once, managing St. Paul, he offered to take on a group of players who were cutting up on a train one at a time. In the spring of 1961 he caught Sandy Koufax and Larry Sherry out past curfew, and followed them to their room. When they locked him out, he splintered the door with his fist. In 1963, confronted by a busload of complaining players, Alston stopped the bus and told the entire team to stop bitching or step outside.

He was an amazing pool player, a better pool player than Leo Durocher, who virtually lived in pool halls. In college, Alston had a job racking balls at a pool hall. A carpenter, he built a pool room onto his house, and had his own table. He had a quiet wit and was a notorious practical joker. When the gargantuan Frank Howard came up, Alston told Pee Wee Reese, according to
The Man in the Dugout
, “Hey, I’d sure like to try some more of those kids out. Why don’t you get on that Howard and agitate him a little bit and see if I can’t get him back into the lineup.” Howard had been nursing a minor injury. Then he told Howard, “Frank, goddamn, you don’t have to take that from them.” Next thing you know, Howard had Reese in the air like a rag doll, instructing him on how to treat a 260-pound rookie.

“Fun?” asked Reese. “I think you’re trying to get me killed.”

In the off seasons he went back to Darrtown and spent three months with his many hobbies. He made furniture and cabinets. He was a photographer and had a darkroom built in his house. He kept horses and of course hunted and fished. He was, in short, awfully sane, able to deal with pressure better than almost anybody who ever managed.

And it was a good thing, because he had to.

Leo Durocher was a Los Angeles resident, a celebrity, and widely expected to become the manager of the expansion Los Angeles Angels in 1961. He didn’t, and in December 1960, Durocher alleged that he had been blackballed from baseball. Walter O’Malley offered Durocher a job as Alston’s coach. Alston, to create the illusion of control, was flown to LA to make the announcement.

Alston and Durocher were diametric opposites. Walter bought his suits off the rack; Durocher owned six handmade tuxedoes. The two men hated one another. Durocher, even more than Dressen had been, was a superstar coach, and was seen by the public as a manager-in-waiting.

“We have to face facts,” said Alston. “Leo is a colorful figure and a bold and amusing talker. I would be a damn fool if I tried to outdo him.”

“Walt’s idea is to carry over a beef until the next day, when heads are clear,” said Durocher. “As a manager, I never did this.”

The Dodgers of 1962 were a great team, locked in a breakneck race with another team just as good. In early August, during a long winning streak, a Dodger player missed a sign, and another ran into his own bunt for an automatic out. Durocher, in the dugout, said that fines should be levied. Alston turned on Durocher angrily and informed him that levying fines was the manager’s job, and that he didn’t believe in it. There followed a heated exchange.