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.

The Babe's Ambitions and Superstar Players as Managers in the Roaring 'Twenties

Babe Ruth's now-97 year old daughter, Julia Ruth Stevens, reminds us that The Bambino was disappointed and embittered by not being given the opportunity to manage in the big leagues. With contemporary great players the likes of Speaker, Cobb, Sisler, Collins, and Hornsby all becoming player-managers, the Babe's aspiration to manage at the same time he was bashing home runs was not an unrealistic expectation.

The Babe's Ambitions and Superstar Players as Managers in The Roaring 'Twenties 

In a recent New York Times article on the Babe's daughter  participating in the century anniversary of St. Petersburg as the site of the first spring training by a major league team in Florida, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/11/sports/baseball/yankees-home-at-the-other-house-that-ruth-built.html?ref=baseball, she is quoted as saying, "He really thought he deserved to manage. Daddy knew baseball.  He always felt he would be a better manager than Joe McCarthy.  He always talked about that."

While still in the prime of his career, but with the end horizon in view, the Babe aspired to replace Yankee manager Miller Huggins as a player-manager, both well before as well as immediately after chronic ill health cost Huggins his life as the 1929 season came to a close.  Ruth, however, while certainly a blessing in the Yankee line-up, had been a cursed thorn in Huggins' butt. The defining celebrity of the Roaring 'Twenties, a star with unprecedented magnitude, Ruth had few inhibitions about doing whatever he wanted, team discipline be damned; was a constant challenge to manage; and persistently undermined Huggins' authority in the clubhouse, either deliberately or by the example of his actions.  His behavioral history undermined any prospect of his managing the Yankees in the Jacob Ruppert regime, although Ruppert was not prepared to part with the Babe's ruthian clouts.  Anyway, after one year with former Yankee pitching star Bob Shawkey at the helm, Ruppert turned to Joe McCarthy as manager, and it was McCarthy whose teams consolidated the greatness of the forever Yankee dynasty.  Ruth remained with the Bronx Bombers through the 1934 season, making little effort to hide his disdain for Marse Joe, the man who would arguably become the greatest manager in history.

By the time of Huggins' tragic death, Ruth had seen most of the biggest-name big-name players in baseball, besides himself, become player-managers:

• Tris Speaker, the Cleveland Indians' outstanding center fielder, was 31 and probably the best player in the game at the time he was named manager of the Tribe in mid-July 1919.  The next year, in his first full season in charge, Speaker guided the Indians to their first American League pennant, and the World Series to boot. Speaker was one of the earliest proponents of platooning, using a lefty-righty starting line-up split at both outfield positions he himself did not play (which was center field) when the Indians won their pennant in 1920, and during the World Series he used a platoon at first base.  Unproven accusations that he had conspired to fix the outcome of a baseball game in 1919 forced Speaker to step down as manager after the 1926 season.

• Ty Cobb, the Babe's rival at the time for the sobriquet, "best player in baseball history," and who fueled the fires of their "rivalry" by his disdain for the power game, became player-manager of the Detroit Tigers in 1921 at the age of 34.  With a weaker team, Cobb was less successful than Speaker as a player-manager; his Tigers were in realistic contention for a pennant only once--in 1924, when they were tied for first as late as August 10 before losing four of five to the eventual World Series champion Washington Nationals doomed their prospects.  Cobb was caught up in the same gambling investigation as Speaker and had to give up his managerial reins after the 1926 season.  Both Cobb and Speaker continued on as players for two more years, with different teams.

• The St. Louis Browns named their star first baseman, 31-year old George Sisler, player-manager in 1924.  Sisler managed the Browns for three years and continued on for another year as just a player after being relieved of his managerial responsibilities.  The Browns were a bad team, but Sisler acknowledged that he had not been ready to be a manager.

• Second baseman Eddie Collins, although 37 years old, was still one of the best players in the game and widely acclaimed as a brilliant baseball mind when he became player-manager of the Chicago White Sox toward the end of the 1924 season.  He managed a White Sox team desperately trying to recover from being torn apart by the Black Sox scandal for two full seasons before being let go as both manager and player.

• And then there was Rogers Hornsby, who deserves a paragraph (make that two) of his own.  

Hornsby was 29 and in the midst of his second Triple Crown season in four years, playing second base, when the St. Louis Cardinals made him player-manager early in the 1925 season, freeing up Branch Rickey to devote full time to his general manager responsibilities.  The next year, Hornsby managed the Cardinals to their first first-ever NL title in a tight pennant race decided by two games, and to a stunning World Series triumph over the Yankees in which "Rajah" got to tag out the Babe himself on an attempted steal for the final out of the Fall Classic.  Good feelings quickly dissipated, however, and rather than meet Hornsby's demands for a new three-year contract, the Cardinals traded him to the Giants for second baseman Frankie Frisch. After a year in New York playing for John McGraw, Hornsby was traded to the Boston Braves where he was player-manager  in 1928, but the next year found him in Chicago, where he replaced McCarthy as manager in the final days of the 1930 season.

An undeniably great player, Hornsby was an antagonistic man--definitely not a people person--who alienated his players (and bosses) everywhere he managed.  Hornsby wanted his players to emulate how he did things to prepare for games; he was easily frustrated and quick to anger when players didn't meet his expectations; he was unable to get players to buy into his leadership because he displayed no particular wisdom; he was insulting, crude, and disrespectful.  The Cubs' ownership should have been alert to Hornsby's leadership shortcomings, if for no other reason than because of how he did his deliberate best in 1930 to undermine McCarthy, who had managed the team to the NL pennant in 1929.  Rogers Hornsby within two years of being named player-manager was let go and replaced as manager by first baseman Charlie Grimm in the heat of the 1932 pennant race.  Grimm led the Cubs to the World Series, where they ran into . . . the Babe, and his famous "called shot" of a home run.  

Babe Ruth almost certainly would have regarded being named manager as a validation of his own greatness. To not be named manager when the opening presented itself--as it did with Huggins' death--might well have been perceived by the Babe as disrespectful of his place in the baseball pantheon.  He certainly believed he would have been a successful manager, perhaps even a great manager--especially if he got to manage a team as loaded with talent as the New York Yankees.  (Ironically, 1930 would have been a less than auspicious year for Ruth to break in as a manager, let alone a player-manager, because the Philadelphia Athletics were a much better team than the Yankees and in the midst of three straight pennants.)

As time ran out on Ruth's career in the 1930s, the Babe was certainly aware (and envious) of other star players becoming managers--Bill Terry (Giants, 1931), Grimm (Cubs,1932), Frisch (Cardinals, 1933), and Pie Traynor (Pirates, 1934) in the National League; Joe Cronin (Nationals, 1933) and Mickey Cochrane (Tigers, 1934) in the American League.  Ruth went to the Boston Braves in 1935 believing that he was in line to soon become their manager.  That was not to be.  Nor was it to be in Brooklyn, where he coached in 1938, but come 1939 the Dodgers' new manager was active shortstop Leo Durocher--a former Yankee teammate of the Babe's--not Ruth.  Said Mrs. Julia Ruth Stevens when explaining the sadness that overtook the Babe after he retired as a player: "Daddy really wanted to manage."

See also an earlier post, "Player-Managers in the 20th Century:  A Cursory History": http://brysholm.blogspot.com/2013/08/player-managers-in-20th-century-cursory.html