Brooks Lawrence to the Rescue (60 Years Ago, Sept. 3, 1956)

To those who might have said that Brooks Lawrence's failure to win any of his six starts in August may have cost the Cincinnati Reds the 1956 pennant: if it was not for his gutsy performance against the Milwaukee Braves on September 3rd, the Reds' pennant chances could well have ended right then and there, and it would have been a two-team Milwaukee vs. Brooklyn race to the end, instead of a three-team duel also involving Cincinnati.  

Brooks Lawrence to the Rescue
(60 Years Ago, September 3, 1956)

Trailing the Braves by 3½ games and tied with the Dodgers in second place, the Redlegs traveled to Milwaukee for a critical four-game series that would start with a doubleheader on September 3. This was their chance to cut into the Braves' lead, or it could have been the death knell to their season. That second scenario looked more plausible when their loss in the first game of their doubleheader on a walk-off win by the Braves dropped the Reds 4½ back, especially since they failed to hold onto a 2-0 lead because Hank Aaron hit home runs in the 4th and 7th innings to tie the game, then doubled and scored the winning run on Joe Adcock's single in the 9th. 

In the second game, the Reds held a 5-2 lead in the 3rd when the Braves loaded the bases with nobody out in the last half of the inning. Due up next were Aaron and Eddie Mathews, followed by Adcock. Aaron had 23 home runs, including his two in the first game, 78 runs batted in, and was batting .327. Mathews had 37 homers and 86 RBIs, and had been red-hot since the end of July, having belted 15 round trippers and driven in 38 runs in 39 games since August 1. Adcock had 34 homers, 93 RBIs, and was batting .305.

Did I mention the bases were loaded and there were no outs? Even with a 3-run lead, Cincinnati manager Birdie Tebbetts had no choice but to remove starting pitcher Larry Jansen from the proceedings, because that 3-run lead was looking very precarious. And the reality was: if the Reds hung on to win, they'd be back to a manageable 3½ games behind. But should they lose, they would be 5½ back. That potential two-game swing in the standings could make all the difference going forward. A 3½-game deficit with just 23 games left to play after this one was not too large to overcome, but 5½ games behind just might be.

So, who was he gonna call? Hersh Freeman was the Reds' relief ace, but Tebbetts probably thought it was too early in the game to call on him. Freeman rarely came into games before the 7th inning, and just once as early as the 5th. Art Fowler had often come into games in the early and middle innings and was rested, having last pitched four days ago, 6 innings of shutout ball to get a win against the Giants. There were a few other options, too, but—

—With the bases loaded, nobody out, Aaron and Mathews up next, Birdie Tebbetts wanted Brooks Lawrence, even though Lawrence had pitched a 9-inning complete-game victory just two days before. That was his 17th win of the year, but his first as a starting pitcher in more than a month (since July 29, to be precise).

In fact, Lawrence would not look back kindly on August 1956. He had won his first 13 decisions of the season, although four them were in games he came in to relieve. He ended the month of July on a high note with a complete-game victory in Pittsburgh in which he allowed just 4 hits. He was 15-2 at the time. His earned run average was 3.32. 

Then came August. Brooks Lawrence made 6 starts in August and lost them all. His earned run average for the month was a rather unsightly 5.89. Lawrence's one win was in relief, on August 9 against the Cubs; he entered a tie game in the top of the 9th with a runner at second and one out, retired Ernie Banks and Monte Irvin, pitched a scoreless 10th, and came out a winner on Gus Bell's walk-off homer. 

Two of Lawrence's August losses were against the Braves, the team out front in the National League. On August 12, pitching in Milwaukee where a victory would have cut the third-place Reds' deficit from two games behind to one, Lawrence gave up six runs before being sent to the showers in the third inning. Eight days after that, Lawrence gave up only 3 runs in 8 innings against the Braves, but was the losing pitcher because the Reds' offense was limited to a solo bottom-of-the-9th home run by Frank Robinson. All three runs Lawrence surrendered scored on homers—a two-run shot by Mathews, who was due up after Aaron in our game in question, and a solo shot by Adcock, due up after Mathews.

Lawrence's most recent engagements with the Braves didn't matter to Tebbetts. Neither did his very bad month of August. What mattered was that the bases were loaded, there were no outs, the Reds' 3-run lead was in jeopardy, the Braves three most dangerous hitters were next up, a loss could be devastating to Cincinnati's pennant chances, AND Brooks Lawrence, for all his August struggles, was his best pitcher.

Brooks Lawrence retired Aaron on a short fly to left and got Mathews to hit into a double play. End of inning. He left the mound with the Reds' 5-2 lead intact. Then he pitched the remaining 6 innings of the game. He gave up 3 runs, but not until after Cincinnati had taken a 5-run lead. And he pitched those 7 innings against the Braves in a must-win game on just one day of rest after pitching a 9-inning complete game. Lawrence was now 18-8, and the Reds were back to 3½ games behind the Braves.

Their season rescued by Lawrence, the Reds won the next two games against the Braves and left Milwaukee in second place, 1½ games behind and half-a-game up on the Dodgers. As of that date—September 5, 1956—there were 134 games down for the Cincinnati Reds and 20 to go. 

Pitching on the three days of rest that were typical for pitching aces back then, and assuming he would get them after this intrepid performance, Brooks Lawrence could still to make as many as 6 starts in those 20 games, not taking into account the times his manager might want to use him—as he did on September 3 in Milwaukee—to pitch critical innings as a reliever in a must-win game. 

Problem was, Lawrence had now pitched 204⅓ innings, and there were still maybe those 6 starts and some relief appearances to go. The most major league innings he had pitched before this was 158⅔ in his rookie season of 1954 with the Cardinals, a total he exceeded in the first week of August, explaining perhaps why August 1956 was not kind to Brooks Lawrence. 

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.

Opening Day 60 Years Ago: Status Report on Integration—The National League

Nine years into the Jackie Robinson era, there were 36 blacks on the 1955 opening day rosters of the sixteen major league teams—27 on seven of the eight National League teams. Fourteen were in the starting line-up in their team's first game of the year. This is the third of four articles on the state of integration in major league baseball as Robinson was nearing the end of his great and ground-breaking career. 

Opening Day 60 Years Ago: Status Report on Integration—The National League

The first article in this series focused on the National League's traditional season-opening game on April 11 at Cincinnati's Crosley Field, where the Chicago Cubs beat the Reds, 7-5, with all three of the black players—two of whom were in the starting line-up—on their roster playing a significant role in the victory. Both teams played again the next day, as the round of major league season-opening games continued.

The Cubs returned home to Wrigley Field to host the St. Louis Cardinals. The Cardinals, playing in the farthest south of big league cities at the time, had not integrated until the 1954 season—but this day they started Brooks Lawrence, who was a revelation in his rookie season after being called up the previous June, going 15-6, including 9-2 in 18 starts. In his first opening day start, Lawrence didn't have it. He gave up five runs while getting only two outs in the first inning before being relieved. This proved an unfortunate harbinger of his year to come. Lawrence was sent back to the minor leagues in August with a 3-7, 6.35 record in 45 games—mostly in relief.

Lawrence resurrected his career the following year, his 19-10 record with the Reds contributing to their pennant push that fell two games short of success in 1956. Of course, the real catalyst of Cincinnati's revival was the arrival of Frank Robinson, who became the first black player to start an opening-day game for the Reds on April 17, 1956. Robinson, batting seventh, got a double in his first big league at bat, a single in his second, went 2-for-3 in the Reds' loss to the Cardinals, and finished the 1956 season with 38 home runs—matching the then-record for the most by a rookie—and winning the NL Rookie of the Year.

The Reds traveled to Milwaukee on April 12 for the Braves' opening day. As in the opening game, neither of the Reds' two black players were in the starting line-up, although Bob Thurman reached as a pinch hitter and Chuck Harmon went in to run for him. 

The Braves were fully committed to integration, with seven black players on their opening day roster. Center fielder Bill Bruton (in his third season) and right fielder Hank Aaron (in his second), batting first and second, were key contributors to Milwaukee's 4-2 win in their first game of the year. Bruton led off the game with a single and scored the Braves' first run of the season, and with the Braves up by 3-2 in the eighth, singled and scored an insurance run on Aaron's triple. As a rookie in 1954, Aaron had given many indications he would be an elite player. Bruton was among the first black players to be a consistent regular over at least five successive seasons who was not an elite player.

Of the five other black players on Milwaukee's opening-day roster, the most significant was George Crowe, who had batted .334 with the team's Triple-A club in Toronto in 1954 after two relatively underachieving seasons with the Braves in 1952 and 1953, during which he started in only 55 of the 120 games he played. Crowe made the 1955 Braves as the back-up to Joe Adcock at first base and wound up as Milwaukee's regular first baseman the final two months of the season after Adcock suffered a broken arm when he was hit by a pitch on the last day of July. The next year, Crowe was in Cincinnati, the back-up to Ted Kluszewski, and so started only 25 games. The other four black players on the 1955 Braves' opening roster were sent down to the minors in June.

The Giants at Philadelphia and the Pirates at Brooklyn did not begin their 1955 seasons until April 13. While the Phillies were just as bad as the Red Sox, Tigers, and Yankees in their stance on integration and had no blacks on their opening-day roster—it would not be until two years later, at the start of the 1957 season, that they integrated at the major league level—the Giants not only had long been fully committed to integration, but had profited thereby. Hank Thompson had been a regular with the Giants since being called up in July 1949, Monte Irvin and Willie Mays were  instrumental to the Giants' epic come-from-behind pennant in 1951, and in 1954 they were joined by Ruben Gomez, who had a 17-9 record in helping New York derail Brooklyn in the National League, and then Cleveland in the World Series.

Mays in center, Irvin in left, and Thompson at third batted third, fourth, and fifth for Leo Durocher's Giants in their opening-day loss to the Phillies. Mays became the Giants' first base runner of the season when he walked, spoiling Philadelphia ace Robin Roberts' bid for a perfect game. Roberts carried a no-hit bid into the ninth, however, before it was broken up by Alvin Dark's one-out single following an error. After Roberts fanned Mays, Irvin doubled to drive home his team's first two runs of the 1955 season in their 4-2 loss.

Two of the three black players on the Pirates' opening-day roster were in the starting line-up in Pittsburgh's April 13, 6-1, loss in Brooklyn—second baseman Curt Roberts, batting second, and right fielder Roman Mejias, making his big league debut, batting third. Roberts had been the player to integrate the Pirates in 1954 and was their regular second baseman all season, but major league pitching proved challenging and his starting job at second rested on a thin reed. He went 1-for-4 in the game and 1-for-2 the next day against the Phillies, but by the end of April was sent packing to the minor leagues with a .118 batting average in six games and 19 plate appearances. Mejias was 1-for-3, his first major league hit coming in his second at bat against Brooklyn starter Carl Erskine. Mejias started in only 39 of the 71 games he played and batted only .216, earning him another year of seasoning in the minor leagues the next year.

Pittsburgh manager Fred Haney did not use the third black player on his team in any game until starting him in right field, in place of Mejias (who had only two hits in his first 11 at bats) in the fourth game of the year, on April 17, at home, against the Dodgers. Batting third and in right field, Roberto Clemente got an infield single in his first major league at bat and went 1-for-4. Once in the starting line-up, Clemente was there to stay in Pittsburgh—through 3,000 hits in his last at bat of the 1972 season—until his tragic fate on a personally-organized humanitarian mission to bring relief supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua late on New Year's Eve.  

The Dodgers' opening day line-up in their win against Pittsburgh featured Jim Gilliam at second, batting first; Sandy Amoros, batting fifth in left field; Jackie Robinson—beginning his ninth major league season—at third base, batting sixth; and Roy Campanella, batting eighth and catching. It was Gilliam's home run off Pirates' starter Max Surkont to lead off the bottom of the seventh that proved the ultimate winning run, breaking a 1-1 tie. But it was Jackie Robinson being Jackie Robinson whose at bat was decisive in breaking open the game. With the score still 2-1 on Gilliam's home run, and runners on first and third with two out, Jackie dragged a bunt past the pitcher's mound, where it was fielded by second baseman Roberts, who had no play. Pee Wee Reese scored from third to make the score 3-1 on Robinson's second hit of the day—he had doubled the previous inning—and Carl Furillo followed with a three-run home run to put the game out of Pittsburgh's reach.

Brooklyn's two other black players were both pitchers—reliever Joe Black, for whom there was no need in Carl Erskine's complete game victory—and Don Newcombe, the Dodgers' true ace who was reserved to start the second game of the season, against the hated, despised, and defending-champion New York Giants. Since the Pirates had been the worst team in the league in 1954, and would be again this year, the Giants' home opener at the Polo Grounds on April 14 would be the Dodgers' first true test of the 1955 season.

The fourth article of this series on the state of integration in major league baseball in 1955 will center on that game.