Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, The (4 page)

That, of course, was the end for Anson. Remarkably, Anson had survived the ten years not only as a manager, but as a player. Forty-five years old in 1897, he still hit .302—a poor average for a first baseman in that era, but not the worst in the league.

There followed a period of intense politicking, as Anson attempted to find a way to save his job, and succeeded in entangling himself in a bitter feud with Albert Spalding. The short version is that Anson, part-owner of the Cubs, wanted to borrow money to buy more stock, thus hanging onto his job. When he was unable to raise the money, he accused Spalding of leaning on potential lenders, persuading them not to make the loans.

The public was on Anson’s side in this dispute. His tirades against his lazy players, however much they might damage the team, were well received. “Baseball as at present conducted is a gigantic monopoly intolerant of opposition,” Anson said, “and run on a grab-all-that-there-is-in-sight basis that is alienating its friends and disgusting the … public.”

Trying to patch things over, Spalding sponsored a fund which was to be collected for Anson as a token of esteem. The goal was to raise $50,000. Anson rejected the offer. “If I need help,” Anson said, “I’ll go to the county welfare office.” Spalding contacted the league office and offered Anson a position as National League Umpire-in-Chief. Anson refused that, too. He accused Spalding of using his name, without his permission, to promote a “Baseball School,” which was in reality a scheme to sell some of Spalding’s real estate.

Anson managed the New York Giants in 1898, but that lasted only a few weeks, as he couldn’t get along with their owners, either. He tried to buy a Chicago franchise for the Western League, but Spalding, who had franchise rights to the Chicago area, refused his consent. “Twenty-two years with that man,” Anson said, “and look how he treats me now.”

In the spring of 1899 something called the “New American Base-Ball Association” met in Detroit and planned to revive the old American Association. Anson was president of the League’s board; they announced plans to launch that summer, and when that failed retrenched and aimed for 1900. This was a different organization from that which founded the American League in 1900–1901, although many of the same people were involved. Anson was offered a chance to be involved with the effort which did result in the American League, but was not offered what he considered an appropriate position, and announced instead that he did not want to dishonor his twenty-plus years in the major leagues by being involved with a minor league team.

By 1900 Anson was slipping toward poverty. He had made a good deal of money, but lost it in bad investments. His father had been a businessman, and Anson, like most athletes, idolized his father, and then too there was the rivalry with Spalding, who parlayed his baseball career into a multimillion-dollar fortune. Anson figured he was just as smart as Spalding and if Spalding could do it he could, too. He invested in billiard parlors, ice rinks, toboggan slides. At one point he owned several bowling alleys. He invested in a golf course and a handball court. He invested in a company which bottled ginger beer, but the bottles kept exploding.

Some reports say that Anson did become chief of umpires in the National League for a while, although I’m not certain of this. He was elected city clerk of Chicago in 1905 and served in that capacity from 1905 to 1907.

He continued to search for ways to market his fame. In 1909–1910, Anson formed a touring team, which played spring exhibitions against major league teams and barnstormed through smaller towns in the summer. Nearing sixty, Anson played with the team.

The venture made no money, and Anson returned to the stage. He formed an act with his daughters, “Cap Anson and Daughters.” Years later, his daughter Dorothy recalled the performances:

Anson would set up in his stance, while members of the audience would toss the papier-mâché baseballs at him, and he would hit them back.

This didn’t bring in as much money as managing the Cubs, and Anson was forced into bankruptcy. He lost his house. Once again, an effort was launched to raise money for him, and once again he refused it. The National League attempted to establish a pension fund for him. Anson said more emphatically than ever that he could take care of himself, and wanted no charity.

In 1921, in the wreckage of the Black Sox scandal, baseball was looking for its first commissioner. Anson let it be known that he thought himself well qualified for the post.

Anson died suddenly on April 14, 1922, the victim of an apparent heart attack. He left no estate, only a request that his gravestone read “Here lies a man who batted .300.”

The league paid the funeral expenses and established a fund to create a “fitting memorial” for Anson. The body of Anson’s wife was removed from its resting place in Philadelphia and brought to lie in Chicago with that of the man who batted three hundred. “It has been meanly stated that this was a ‘belated appreciation of Captain Anson,’” wrote Francis Richter in the 1923
Reach Guide
. “In justice to the National League let it be stated that the body for many years stood ready to come to Anson’s assistance when necessary. That it was not necessary was due to the fact that the independent old man would not accept a pension, in default of which no position could be created that he could fill satisfactorily owing to his disposition which was self-opinionated and brooked neither advice or order.”

Now
that
should have been on his tombstone.

(This is an edited version of a much longer article by the author which was originally published several years ago. Sources for this article, in addition to Anson’s autobiography, include Anson’s obituaries in the 1923
Reach
and
Spalding
Guides, Robert Smith’s books
Baseball
and
The Hall of Fame
, Ira Smith’s
Baseball’s Famous First Basemen, The Strange Career of Jim Crow
, by C. Vann Woodward, and
They Gave Us Baseball
, by John M. Rosenberg, as well as many other articles, histories, and newspaper articles.)

Ned Hanlon and Frank Selee were exact contemporaries. Hanlon was born in 1857 and managed in the major leagues from 1889 to 1907. Selee was born in 1859 and managed in the major leagues from 1890 to 1905. Teams managed by one of them or the other won the National League pennant every year from 1891 to 1900—five pennants for Hanlon, five for Selee, granting that it is sometimes difficult to figure out who won what in the 1890s. Each man won about 1,300 games as a manager.

Selee’s record is significantly better than Hanlon’s, or vastly better, depending on how you rank them. By the scoring system I set up for managerial accomplishments (see “
Ranking Managers
”), Selee ranks as the twelfth greatest manager of all time, Hanlon as the seventeenth. Selee’s career winning percentage was .598; Hanlon’s was .530. Among managers who managed 1,000 or more major league games, Selee ranks fourth in winning percentage; Hanlon ranks thirty-third.

Selee’s teams won 422 games more than they lost (1,284–862); he also ranks fourth all-time in this regard. Hanlon’s teams were 149 games over .500 (1,313–1,164); he ranks thirty-first.

Despite this, Hanlon is much more famous than Selee. Hanlon was elected recently to the Hall of Fame; Selee hasn’t been, and won’t be. Hanlon played for the Detroit Wolverines in the 1880s and became the leader of the Baltimore Orioles in the 1890s.

The 1894 Orioles had six Hall of Famers in their everyday lineup—Dan Brouthers, Hughie Jennings, John McGraw, Willie Keeler, Joe Kelley, Wilbert Robinson. They were aggressive to the border of criminality:

But the 1894 Orioles were not the greatest team before the 1927 Yankees, nor even the greatest team of their own generation. The 1897 Boston Beaneaters were the greatest team of the nineteenth century, and the 1906 Chicago Cubs were the greatest team before the 1927 Yankees.

What those teams have in common is that both teams were built by Frank Selee. Selee’s Beaneaters battled Baltimore to a draw in the 1890s. He left Boston after a couple of .500 seasons and was hired to manage the Cubs, who had been floundering since the retirement of Cap Anson several years earlier. They had gone 53–86 in 1901.

Deciding to start at shortstop, Selee invited a dozen shortstops to come to camp with the Cubs in 1902. One of them was Joe Tinker. Later in the summer, Selee purchased the contract of another young shortstop, Johnny Evers, and put him at second base. He had two young catchers, Johnny Kling and Frank Chance. He moved Chance to first base, brought in Three Finger Brown and Ed Reulbach, and edged the team forward to 68–69 in 1902, just 6 games behind Hanlon’s men in Brooklyn. They improved to 82–56 in 1903 (11 games
ahead
of Hanlon’s team), and 93–60 in 1904 (37 games ahead of Hanlon’s last team in Brooklyn).

Early in 1905, however, the Cubs were sold. According to Bob Richardson in
Nineteenth Century Stars
(SABR, 1989), Selee retired at that time because he had developed tuberculosis. Other sources say that the new owner fired Selee because he wanted to bring in his own man. In any case, the magnificent team which Selee had spent three and a half years constructing was handed over to Frank Chance, who would do very well with it, indeed.

Frank Selee is one of my favorite men in baseball history. He was cheated out of the chance to manage his second great team in their greatest years, and the memory of his first great team, in Boston, was obscured by the legends spun by three members of the old Orioles, Wilbert Robinson, Hughie Jennings, and John McGraw, who spent a total of sixty-six years managing in the majors, most of them in New York City. McGraw and Robinson claimed credit for inventing everything except shoe leather, and the simple fact that it wasn’t true (many of the things they claimed the old Orioles invented existed before 1890, and others were clearly in use in Boston before they were invented in Baltimore) wasn’t going to prevent any sports-writer from making use of a good story.

Selee was a gentleman; Hanlon, a ruffian. Selee’s philosophy as a manager was “if I make things pleasant for the players, they reciprocate.” He expected his players to be temperate and responsible, and he wouldn’t take on players who were not. Nonetheless, while I like Selee a great deal more than Hanlon, Selee has no real legacy in the modern major leagues, while Ned Hanlon is the great-grandfather of most modern major league managers.

All major league managers, essentially, come from one of three families—the Connie Mack family, the Branch Rickey family, and the Ned Hanlon family. The Hanlon family is the largest of the three; most major league managers today can be traced back to Ned Hanlon. Let us take, for example, Lou Piniella.

Lou Piniella was probably most influenced, as a potential manager, by Billy Martin. Billy Martin was unquestionably most influenced by Casey Stengel. Stengel was probably most influenced by John McGraw, and John McGraw was the chief proponent of the legend of the old Orioles in the days of Ned Hanlon.

Stengel never actually
said
that he was most influenced by John McGraw. What Stengel actually said on the subject, in his autobiography
Casey at the Bat
, was this:

But if not McGraw, who else? Stengel came to the majors with Brooklyn in 1912, where he played for Bill Dahlen, who had played for Cap Anson—and Ned Hanlon. Dahlen was replaced by Wilbert Robinson, McGraw’s longtime teammate and erstwhile buddy, and the other major source of the legend of the old Orioles; Stengel played for him for four seasons.

After he left McGraw and the Giants, Stengel played for Dave Bancroft, who had been McGraw’s shortstop. So anyway you cut it, Stengel, as a manager, is the grandson of Ned Hanlon. Billy Martin is the great-grandson of Ned Hanlon, as a manager, and Lou Piniella is his great-great-grandson.

Or take Tony LaRussa. LaRussa was probably most influenced, as a manager, by his fellow Tampa native, Al Lopez. I don’t know that; that’s a guess. Anyway, Lopez has said many times that he learned more about baseball from Casey Stengel than from anyone else. Lopez played for Stengel in both Brooklyn and Boston, and managed against him for many years, with some success.

Apart from Stengel, the largest influence on Lopez as a manager was probably the man who brought him to the major leagues in 1930 and managed him his first couple of years: Wilbert Robinson.

But maybe LaRussa
wouldn’t
cite Lopez as his number one managerial influence. He might cite his own first major league manager. That would be Ed Lopat—who had his best years in the majors with the Yankees in the early fifties. For Casey Stengel. Or LaRussa might cite Bill Rigney, of whom, I know, he is also very fond. Rigney came to the major leagues in 1946, and played for three years for Mel Ott, who had been more or less adopted, as a seventeen-year-old, by John McGraw.

Rigney later played several years for Leo Durocher. The only major league managers Rigney played for were Ott and Durocher, and he eventually replaced Durocher as manager of the Giants. A December 1955 article in the
Baseball Digest
introduced Bill Rigney, new manager of the Giants, as “part Ottie, park Lip.”

Durocher is an interesting case. The largest influence on Durocher, as a manager, was unquestionably Miller Huggins:

So Durocher, as a manager, is the son of Miller Huggins. Miller Huggins came to the majors in 1904, where he played for Joe Kelley. Joe Kelley was the left fielder for the 1894 Baltimore Orioles. After two years, Kelley was replaced as manager—by Ned Hanlon himself. Huggins played two years for Hanlon.

In 1910, Huggins was traded to St. Louis, where he played for Roger Bresnahan. Bresnahan thought John McGraw was God. He had played several years for McGraw; he was McGraw’s favorite player.

So Miller Huggins unquestionably goes back to Ned Hanlon, one way or the other. Huggins’s best buddy and longtime coach was Art Fletcher—who had played virtually his entire career for John McGraw.

The other major influence on Durocher, as a manager, was Frankie Frisch, who managed the Gashouse Gang in St. Louis. Frisch also liked Durocher, and thought he was a very underrated player. Frisch said that Durocher could get rid of the ball quicker, as a shortstop, than anybody he ever saw. One time Shanty Hogan, a big fat catcher who was said by some to be slower than Ernie Lombardi, hit a ground ball to Durocher. Durocher rushed the throw to first and threw it into the seats. Frisch was livid. “What are you doing?” he yelled at Durocher. “You could autograph the damn ball and still throw out Hogan! The next throw like that will cost you three hundred dollars.”

“Three hundred dollars?” asked Durocher. “It ought to be five hundred.”

Anyway, Frisch, of course, never played in the minors. Like Mel Ott, he was signed as an amateur and brought straight to the majors by John McGraw, who taught him how to play baseball. So, again, anyway you look at it, Tony LaRussa’s lineage goes back to Ned Hanlon. You can do it this way:

Tony LaRussa

↓

Al Lopez

↓

Casey Stengel

↓

John McGraw

↓

Ned Hanlon

Or you can do it this way:

Tony LaRussa

↓

Ed Lopat

↓

Casey Stengel

↓

Wilbert Robinson

↓

Ned Hanlon

Or you can do it this way:

Tony LaRussa

↓

Bill Rigney

↓

Mel Ott

↓

John McGraw

↓

Ned Hanlon

Or you can do it this way:

Tony LaRussa

↓

Bill Rigney

↓

Leo Durocher

↓

Miller Huggins

↓

Ned Hanlon

But almost any way you do it, you’re going to wind up with Tony LaRussa as the great-great-grandson of Ned Hanlon. Lou Piniella’s fifth cousin.

Let’s do Davey Johnson. Dave Johnson was brought to the major leagues in 1965 by Hank Bauer. Bauer, of course, played almost his entire major league career for Casey Stengel, so we can see where that one is going.

Johnson, however, probably wouldn’t cite Hank Bauer as the largest influence on him, as a manager. My guess is that he would cite Earl Weaver, who replaced Bauer, and who also had managed Johnson in the minor leagues.

Weaver is hard to classify, because he never played in the majors, and had a peripatetic minor league career in which he played for almost everybody. Worse yet, if asked to cite his largest influence as a manager, Weaver might cite George Kissell, a longtime minor league manager who also never played in the majors.

Weaver, however, grew up in St. Louis and was an obsessive baseball fan at a young age. His father did the dry cleaning for the Gashouse Gang, also for the St. Louis Browns, and Weaver used to get to go into the Cardinals’ clubhouse, which was a big thrill for him as a young boy. When asked why he screamed at umpires the way he did, Weaver said that he didn’t really know, but his hero as a kid was Leo Durocher, and so when he got a chance to manage, he just kind of acted like Durocher.

So probably the most accurate way to classify Weaver, as a manager, is to describe him as a descendant of Leo Durocher and Frankie Frisch. That, of course, puts you back in the line to Ned Hanlon. Or if it doesn’t, consider this line, from Earl Weaver’s
It’s What You Learn After You Know It All That Counts
:

This is discussing the years when Weaver was a little older, in his teens; Billy Southworth managed the Cardinals from 1940 to 1945.

Southworth had played for John McGraw. Southworth, as I mentioned somewhere else in the book, didn’t much like McGraw, and in several ways tried to do things exactly the way McGraw
didn’t
do them. But who else did Southworth play for? He played for Hugo Bezdek, a football guy who didn’t know anything about baseball, but who was an effective leader, and who taught Southworth to communicate with his players. And he (Southworth) played for Fred Mitchell, a pitcher who had a short and undistinguished major league career in which he played for Frank Selee. And Ned Hanlon.