For the '56 Braves, Change Was Looking Good (Status of NL Race, July 26, 1956)

The Braves crushed the Giants, 11-0, on July 26, 1956, to take a 5½-game lead in the National League. Their lackluster beginning behind them, the 1956 Milwaukee Braves were now threatening to do to the National League what the Yankees were doing in the American—run away with the pennant. Led by a scorching hot Hank Aaron, the Braves had won 15 of their 17 games since the All-Star break, and they were now 32-10 (.762) since Fred Haney replaced Charlie Grimm as manager on June 17.

For the '56 Braves, Change Was Looking Good 
(NL Race, 60 Years Ago)

Sometimes change is good, even if—in the case of major league baseball, for example—there is no intrinsic evidence one way or the other that one manager (in this case, Fred Haney) is better than another (Charlie Grimm). In fact, neither man(ager) would go down in history as one of the game's top-flight managers. 

Although Grimm did win three pennants with the Cubs (1932, 1935, and 1945—since which the Cubs have not been back to the World Series), there was a sense that his mid-1930s Cubs could have been more successful than they were (and not just in the World Series). And although Haney would eventually lead the Braves to two pennants and win a World Series, his reputation has not lived down the widespread perception that he managed to manage the Braves out of a third straight pennant in 1959.

Even though they had been swamped by the Brooklyn juggernaut of 1955, the Braves were considered one of the best teams in baseball going into the 1956 season, and certain to give the Dodgers a run for their money. Whether Grimm's managerial talents or style were at fault, or not, the Braves' getting off to a 24-22 start was definitely disappointing for the quality team they had, and so he paid the price. More importantly, no sooner had Haney taken over than the Braves got hot, as in really hot, winning their first 11 games under their new manager. At the All-Star break, in what was developing into a very competitive National League pennant race, the Braves were second to the Reds, down by a game-and-a-half, and the Dodgers were third, half a game back of Milwaukee.

The Braves' first four games after the break were at home against the Dodgers. Since these were the two clubs everyone expected to battle it out for the right to play the Yankees in the World Series—which seemed safe to say, since the Yankees had command of the American League race—this series would be a marker of where the two clubs stood. By winning all four, the Braves sent a clear message they intended to be top dog, and if any other NL team was going to the World Series, they were going to have to go through Milwaukee first. 

Their fourth win in the series, on July 14, came in dramatic fashion. Joe Adcock erased a 2-0 Brooklyn lead by tagging Sal Maglie for a two-run homer in the seventh. (The Dodgers had acquired Maglie from Cleveland in mid-May. He may have been 39 years old, but Maglie was a tough-minded veteran who knew what he was doing on the mound. His first victory for the Dodgers was a three-hit shutout against the Braves in Milwaukee back on June 4.) Back to the July 14 game. The clubs battled into extra innings after Adcock's homer, whereupon Hank Aaron's one-out single with runners on first and second in the bottom of the 10th inning for a walk-off win completed the Braves' four-game sweep of the Dodgers.

Hank Aaron was just getting started. At the All-Star break, the Braves' young phenom was batting .309 with 9 homers and 40 runs batted in. After going 3-for-5, including his 15th home run of the year, and driving in 4 runs in Milwaukee's 11-0 clobbering of the last-place Giants on July 26, in the 17 games since the break, Aaron hit .452 with 18 RBIs. He had hit in all but one game since the break and had 12 multi-hit games.Twelve of his 33 hits were for extra bases, including 5 home runs. Aaron was now leading the league with a .340 batting average.

The Braves as a team were revving on all cylinders coming out of the All-Star break. In their 17 games after the season resumed, they scored 115 runs, whacked 29 home runs, and batted .292. On the pitching side, they gave up 58 runs and limited opposing batters to a .264 average. Warren Spahn, just 7-7 at the break, had complete-game victories in all three of his starts since then, giving up just 8 runs.

As they left New York City after their victory on July 26 for two games in Philadelphia with a record of 56-32, it was 88 games down for the 1956 Milwaukee Braves and 66 to go. Their lead was now 5½ games over the second-place Redlegs and 6 over the Dodgers. On Monday they would be returning to New York, this time to the borough of Brooklyn, for four games with the Dodgers.

The last time they were in Brooklyn, the Braves came to town having lost 10 of their last 15 games, and Charlie Grimm was the man(ager) in charge. After dropping the first two of four at Ebbets Field, they left with Fred Haney running the show. Change was good.  

Haney's Hot Hand (More on the 1956 Braves, 60 Years Ago)

Finally. They lost. On June 26, 1956, in Philadelphia, eleven days after the Milwaukee Braves fired Charlie Grimm and replaced him with Fred Haney, the Braves lost for the first time under their new manager. They had won 11 in a row. Sometimes, all it takes is a change in command for the troops to rally and be as good as . . . they were supposed to be.

Haney's Hot Hand (More on the 1956 Braves, 60 Years Ago)

For the most part, the best managers are inextricably linked to the very successful teams they managed. Managers of poor and mediocre teams are not only typically lost to history, but get few subsequent chances. This was particularly true in major league baseball's pre-expansion era.

When Fred Haney was axed by the Pirates after finishing dead last in the National League for the third time in his three years as their manager, it was not obvious that the 60-year-old Haney—so old, he was born in the nineteenth century (but so was the even older Casey Stengel)—would get another chance to manage. His first managerial opportunity was with the St. Louis Browns in 1939, a team that had finished last or next-to-last in each of the four previous years. They finished last in Haney's first year at the helm with 111 losses. He brought the Browns home in sixth place in 1940, but was fired early in the 1941 season with his team having won just 15 of 44 games. A terrible team. 

So too were the Pirates, although they lost fewer games than the year before in each year he was their manager—from 112 losses in 1952 without him to 104 in 1953, to 101 in 1954, to just 94 in 1955. Guess that wasn't improvement enough; his Pirates never winning more than 39 percent of their games doomed his chances to stay on.

Hired by the Braves to be Charlie Grimm's "first lieutenant," Haney for the first time in his managerial career was in position to take over a team that was expected to compete for the pennant, and perhaps even knock off the Brooklyn Dodgers. For all of Grimm's much vaunted "patience"—Sport's Illustration's positive characterization of him in the magazine's 1956 pre-season preview—the Braves' owner lost patience with Grimm because his team, at 24-22 when he was replaced by Haney, was very definitely underachieving.

Milwaukee was in Brooklyn in the middle of a four-game series with the Dodgers when Haney replaced Grimm. They had just lost the first two games to fall 3 back of the Dodgers, who were in 2nd place, a half-game behind, of all teams, the first-place Pirates. The Braves came through for their new manager by winning the Sunday double header at Ebbets Field. Then they won four straight in Pittsburgh. It was back to New York for four games at the Polo Grounds, and Milwaukee won all of those games too. Then back to Pennsylvania, this time to Philadelphia, where the Braves won the first of three before losing to Robin Roberts and the Phillies, 4-2.

What explains Haney's hot hand? The Braves' batters found their hitting shoes after a very lethargic first half of June. No National League club scored fewer runs than the Braves' 47 in the first sixteen days (and 17 games) of June, during which they gave up 68 runs. Outscored by a per-game-average of 4 runs to 2.8, Milwaukee not too surprisingly was only 5-12, costing Grimm his job. They had hit just 8 home runs with a batting average of only .231 in those 17 games. As a result, the Braves dropped from fourth in total runs scored at the end of May to seventh by the time Grimm was let go. Only the 20-31 Giants had scored fewer runs.

In the heart of the Braves' line-up so far in the month of June, Hank Aaron (batting 3rd) hit just .219 with one homer and 7 runs batted in to bring his average down to .303 from .351 at the end of May; Eddie Mathews (batting 4th) hit just .206 with 2 homers and 4 RBIs to bring his batting average down to .247 with a team-leading 10 homers; and Bobby Thomson (batting 5th) hit just .222 without a home run and 6 runs batted in, and was now batting .278 on the year. 

During their 11-game winning streak after Haney took charge, the Braves scored 56 runs—the most of any other NL team since June 16—and gave up only 25. Mathews hit 3 home runs and drove in 12 runs while batting .275, and Thomson had 2 homers and 7 RBIs. Aaron continued to struggle, although his .239 average was still better than in the first half of June. Milwaukee was now back up to third in scoring, trailing only Cincinnati and St. Louis.

After their 11-game winning-streak to begin the Haney regime ended on June 26, the Braves with a 35-23 record were in first place by 1½ games over the second-place Reds, and 2½ over the third-place Dodgers. As was predictable, the Cardinals (5 games behind) and the Pirates (5½ out) were dropping fast out of contention. It was 58 games down and 96 to go. The Milwaukee Braves were looking good.

A Grimm Ending (The 1956 Braves, 60 Years Ago)

After the Milwaukee Braves lost a second consecutive one-run game to the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field on June 16, 1956, veteran manager Charlie Grimm was out and Fred Haney was in. Grimm's fate was sealed by the Braves' desultory start to what was expected to be a great year. They were only 24-22 on the season, but worse—the Braves had won just 5 of the 17 games they had played so far in June.

A Grimm Ending--the Milwaukee Braves 60 Years Ago in 1956

The Braves were supposed to be better than this. They had begun the month of June in first place, at 19-10, having won nearly two-thirds of their games. But they were just one game ahead of the Cardinals at the time, two ahead of both the Pirates and Reds, and three up on the defending-champion Dodgers. 

After spending most of the last half of May on the road, the Braves were back at home for the first half of June, beginning with four games against the Pirates followed by four against the Dodgers. It went badly. They lost three of four to both Pittsburgh and Brooklyn, then four of their next seven. At the end of their 15-game home stand on June 14, the Braves were in fifth place. But they trailed by just a game-and-a-half, behind the Reds and Pirates—tied for first—and the Dodgers and Cardinals, who were half-a-game out of first.

As observed in a previous post, neither Pittsburgh nor St. Louis was expected to keep up the pace in a long marathon, roughly 50 games into the season, two-thirds of which was still to be run.  It still seemed the safe bet was on Brooklyn and Milwaukee being the two clubs most likely to be running neck and neck to the finish line, or that one or the other would break ahead of the pack—as the Yankees were doing in the American League—and run away with it. Either way, the Braves or the Dodgers.

Now the Braves were at Ebbets Field for a four-game series that might set the tone going forward.

In the first game on June 15, the Braves failed to hold onto a 4-1 lead they took into the last of the seventh. Carl Furillo tagged Braves' starter Lew Burdette for a home run that inning to make it 4-2 and then singled in the eighth off reliever Dave Jolly to drive in the tying run. In the ninth, it was a two-out walk-off bases-loaded single by Brooklyn backup catcher Rube Walker that won the game; Walker, batting .167 when he came to the plate, was in the game only because the Dodgers had pinch run earlier for Roy Campanella. 

It didn't go any better the next day. The Braves had just tied the score at 2-2 in the eighth when Duke Snider led off the bottom of the inning with his 15th home run of the year off reliever Ernie Johnson, which turned out to be the deciding run of the game. The day after that, the Milwaukee Braves had a new manager. 

Charlie Grimm had seen this scenario unfold up close and personal before. In 1932, he was a 32-year-old first baseman for the Chicago Cubs when he was called upon in early August to become manager of a club not doing as well as expected. He was replacing an icon—Rogers Hornsby, possibly the greatest right-handed batter of all-time, but as a manager, controversial to say the least; the Rajah alienated both his players and the front office he worked for. The Cubs were in second place, 5 games behind at the time, but treading water. Grimm was a lighter touch. The Cubs went on to win the pennant. 

In 1938, Grimm witnessed that scenario in reverse. This time it was mid-July, the Cubs were in third place, 5½ games behind, and they were nothing if not streaky. Grimm paid the price for his team playing less than their presumed best and was replaced by Chicago's star catcher, Gabby Hartnett, whose somewhat tougher approach helped the Cubs to another come-from-behind pennant.

Charlie Grimm's strong major league managerial resume was why he was named manager of the Braves about a quarter of the way into the 1952 season; he had won three pennants (1932, 1935, and 1945) in two stints as the Cubs' manager (1932-38 and 1944-49), and the Braves' owners, who would move their franchise from Boston to Milwaukee the next year, were counting on that experience being what was needed to lead an increasingly-talented team to the World Series in their new home town. With Grimm in charge, the Braves finished second in 1953—their first year in Milwaukee—then third, then second. The expectation in the Braves' front office was that 1956 was to be their year. But it wasn't working out.

There was now a sense, in 1956, that time had passed him by. Grimm had a reputation for being a players' manager, including participating in boys-will-be-boys clubhouse banter. By the 1950s, however, particularly after the societal and cultural changes in postwar America, ball players had become more sophisticated; the game a bigger business; and even managers popular with their players had to establish professional distance and honor boundaries. For example, in his case, although there is no indication he discriminated against black players when it came to baseball—he insisted, for example, that Hank Aaron be promoted to the Braves in 1954, a full year before the front office had planned—Grimm nonetheless joined in clubhouse razzing of the black players on his team, including the indisputably great Aaron. 

There had been speculation in the days leading up to Grimm's ouster, when the Braves' playing so poorly made it obvious he could not last much longer, that they might try to get Leo Durocher to come to Milwaukee and take charge. Durocher was without a job, having been let go by the Giants after the previous season. Instead it was Fred Haney, now a coach on the Braves, three years older than Grimm and without anywhere near the success of his predecessor in either of his two previous terms as a big-league manager with terrible teams—the 1939-41 St. Louis Browns and the 1953-55 Pittsburgh Pirates.

And if Haney had thought about it (which he probably did), it was no small irony that the Pirates—the team he had managed to three straight last-place finishes and which won just 35 percent of their games under his command until he was fired at the end of the 1955 season—that team was in first place in the National League on the day he took charge of the Braves. 

But Milwaukee was just 3½ games out of first place. And, with just 56 games down, there were still 98 to go. More than enough time.