EARLE COMBS
THEY GOT THE BEES-NESS"Earle Combs, who this season has rejoined his old Yankee boss, Joe McCarthy, on the coaching staff of the Red Sox, adds further proof that anything can, and usually does, happen in a ball game.
'I was playing center field for Louisville one day when I heard this noise behind me,' Combs said. 'Turning around I saw a cloud of bees swarming toward me. I shouted 'Time!' and ran for the clubhouse. When the other players saw what was happening, they all started running after me.
'The fans were getting a big laugh out of it until the bees headed for the grandstand,' Earle said. 'Then they began running for the exits, too. Not until the bees had disappeared over the top of the grandstand did we all return to the ball game.'"
-Ed Rumill in the Christian Science Monitor (Baseball Digest, July 1948)
JOE MCCARTHY
HE'S EYEING HIS EIGHTH WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP
"A one-time $6.50 a week 'head tender' in a Philadelphia woolen mill- a stoutish, sedate Irishman with gimlet brown eyes, an aggressive jaw and a usually-distressed look- Joseph Vincent McCarthy- is taking over the Boston Red Sox this spring to refurbish his reputation as baseball's most successful manager.
Though he never even got a chance to try on a major league uniform as a player, he has won seven World Series- a record, two more than Connie Mack, more than twice as many as John McGraw.
He is the only manager to win pennants in both leagues.
In twenty-eight years of piloting, twenty of them in the majors, he has finished out of the first division only once. He has wound up lower than third only three other times. He has won eleven pennants, nine of them in the majors. His big league teams have won .614 of their games.
He has weathered, with gentlemanly grace and dignity, dramatic showdowns with three of the game's greatest stars- Grover Alexander, Rogers Hornsby and Babe Ruth- winning two outright, gaining a moral triumph on the other occasion.
What, then, has the guy got on the ball?
To be sure, he has been fortunate in tying up with two- and now a third one- of baseball's wealthiest organizations. Certainly his task usually was somewhat less complex than that faced, say, by Zack Taylor with the Browns. The William Wrigley, Jr. millions gave him wide purchasing power with the Cubs, though he didn't make use of it as much as is generally believed. The Ruppert millions gave him the best scouting and perhaps the most intelligently operated farm system in the business. But millions long failed the Red Sox; the farm system wasn't a consistent winner for the Cardinals.
Diffident, even shy at times, McCarthy attributes his success to a self-effacing 'I've been pretty lucky all my life.' It's much more than that, of course. Primarily, it's that he knows how to pick men. He knows how to handle them. He instills in them a hustling, fighting spirit, preserves harmony, insists on team work in preference to individual honors. He is an astute handler of pitchers. He is a stickler for discipline, yet he knows when it is advisable to ease up on the reins in training matters.
As yet, some aren't quite ready to accept him as a great strategist, on a plane with Miller Huggins, for example. Yet he plays a sound game. He hasn't the flair for personal showmanship like a John McGraw or a Leo Durocher. He prefers the background. The credo of simplicity, which he inherited as a poor half-orphaned boy in Philadelphia's Germantown, has stuck with him.
He lets results speak for themselves. He took over the Cubs in the cellar and in four seasons not only led them to a championship, but made them the best Cub team in more than thirty years.
He took over the Yankees in 1931 and the next year they won the pennant. True, he did have Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Bill Dickey up there slugging for him, BUT- and get this- none of them was as individually effective in 1932, when they won under McCarthy, as in 1930, when they didn't win without him.
Don't believe it? Here's the proof. In 1932, Ruth hit eight fewer homers and batted eighteen percentage points less than he did in 1930. In 1932, too, Gehrig made seven fewer homers, hit thirty points lower and drove in twenty-three fewer runs than in 1930. And Dickey hit twenty-nine points less in 1932 than in 1930. Yet the Yankees, who finished only a few games above the second division without McCarthy in 1930, won the pennant under him in 1932 with 107 victories, three more than the runner up- and then swept through the Cubs in four straight in the World Series.
And he has been doing things like that ever since, interrupted only by his temporary retirement after quitting the Yanks the summer before last.
'I get a lot of letters saying I'm ruining baseball,' McCarthy remarked during his tenure with the Yanks. 'I'm ruining the league, they say. What kind of guy am I? Do I think I have to win 'em all and not give anybody a chance? Do I want to win them all?'
In a quiet voice, McCarthy answered himself.
'Well, who doesn't want to win them all?'
It was 'tough sledding,' both literally and figuratively, for Joe McCarthy, the boy. He not only had humble beginnings, but an accident as a tot in Philadelphia's Germantown almost stopped his baseball career before it had begun.
His left kneecap was badly broken as his sled careened against a rock zooming down a steep hill in Germantown, where he was born April 21, 1887. It left him with a loose cartilage that slowed him up considerably. And, he allows, 'like most of us swaybacks, I wasn't very fast to start with.'
His contracting father was killed in a cave-in when Joe was only three, forcing him as a youth to help with odd jobs, such as carrying ice. The family situation prevented his attending high school. Instead, he worked in the cotton and woolen mills. His extra qualities were recognized early, however. Most of the boys in the mill got $5 a week. As a 'head-tender,' Joe got all of $6.50.
'In between jobs, I started playing sandlot ball, as almost all kids do,' he recalls, 'but it wasn't until I was fifteen that I played with my first regular team. That was the Chew A.A. It was named that because we played in a little park in Chew Woods, named after the famous Germantown family, whose mansion was Washington's headquarters during the revolution. I played the outfield and often got as much as a couple bucks a game.'
McCarthy was far from a natural ball player, the sort that is born with fast feet and big hands, who makes plays gracefully and instinctively. Instead, he belonged to the much larger class of built-up players who must develop the hard way by training and coaching.
However, he was good enough to catch on with the Germantown semipro team. Then his baseball ability won a scholarship at Niagara University. 'At that time Niagara was more of a preparatory school,' McCarthy explains, 'and so a high school education wasn't a requisite.' He played one spring with the Purple Eagles, outfield and shortstop, in 1906.
'Then I get a trial with Wilmington in the Class-B Tri-State League,' he recalls. 'I played exactly twelve games. I hit .175. In three weeks I was released. The next season- 1907- I went back with Franklin, which had in the meantime entered organized ball in the Inter-State League. I played the infield and hit .314- incidentally, one of two years of my fifteen as a player in which I hit over .300- and was sold to Toledo.
'In one of my first games with Toledo I struck out four times and thought surely I'd be released that night. I managed to last three full seasons and part of a fourth, however, though I never hit more than .250. I played third and the outfield.'
In the middle of the 1911 season, Toledo traded McCarthy to Indianapolis, where Jim Burke, who later was to become McCarthy's loyal lieutenant with the Cubs and Yankees, was manager. Burke released him to Wilkes-Barre at the end of the season- and inadvertently started McCarthy on his managing career.
When Darby Bill Clymer, Wilkes-Barre manager and half owner, signed to manage Buffalo in 1913, he asked McCarthy to succeed him as pilot of the Wilkes-Barre club. And thus, at the somewhat precocious age of twenty-five, McCarthy's managerial career was under way.
The closest Joe McCarthy, second baseman, ever came to the major leagues was the day the Yankees- yes, the same Yankees he later led to seven world titles- refused to pay $3,000 for him and the time the Federal League disbanded shortly after he jumped to the Brooklyn club.
Both incidents occurred during the winter of 1915-1916. Prior to that, in 1913, McCarthy led Wilkes-Barre to second in his first chance as a manager. He moved himself from third to second base and hit his lifetime high of .325, an average that caused Memphis to draft him that winter and Buffalo to buy him immediately from Memphis.
He played two seasons with the strong Bison team that included such familiar baseball stars as Joe Judge, Charley Jamieson, Fred Beebe, Frank Gilhooley and Jack Onslow. They won the International League pennant in '15.
That was the period of the Federal League turmoil. Ed Barrow, then president of the International League and later, by a curious turn of fate, president of those same Yankees McCarthy managed, endeavored to help his I.L. clubs sell some of their stars in an effort to get a war chest to fight Federal invasion of some of their cities.
He went to New York to try to sell outfielder Gilhooley and McCarthy to the Yanks for $16,000. The Yanks offered him $11,000 for the pair, then decided McCarthy wasn't worth $3,000 and purchased Gilhooley alone for $8,000.
Discouraged, McCarthy, who was getting only $2,000 a year at Buffalo, went for Federal League bait that winter. When the circuit broke up before the season opened, he was assigned to Louisville. In 1916, as a member of the famous infield that had Jay Kirke at first, Roxy Roach at short and Johnny (Red) Corriden at third, he helped win the American Association pennant. No member of that infield missed as much as a single time at bat in the full 168 game schedule.
McCarthy was to remain with Louisville for ten years. In 1919, when Pat Flaherty resigned as Pilot, owner Bill Knabelkamp made McCarthy playing-manager. He led the Colonels to pennants in 1921 and 1925 and in the former defeated the supposedly unbeatable Baltimore Orioles in the Little World Series.
Even at Louisville, his leadership caused him to be discussed in the New York office. Once when Paul Krichell, Yankee scout, and Barrow were discussing Miller Huggins' health, Krichell remarked: 'Keep that man McCarthy in mind. If anything should ever happen to Hug, he would make a good manager for the Yankees.'
He did.
The late Mordecai Brown was being asked about that famous Merkle game on a radio program a few years ago and Joe McCarthy, waiting to be interviewed next, couldn't resist. 'Don't forget to tell them, Brownie,' he broke in, 'that the only player who did any hitting for you that day was Frank Chance- and he got three.'
Brownie's bushy eyebrows jumped an inch at that. Even he, who had been very much there that day in 1908, couldn't recall that. But it was just another proof of the amazing memory that has helped McCarthy become the master of seven world champions.
He is a close student not only of the game, but dozens of box scores daily, mentally storing away a fact here and a fact there that will be of value next week, next year or next decade.
Disclaiming any master-minding, McCarthy just plays sound, orthodox baseball for the most part. His older players are allowed to do their own thinking, with either he or his coaches signaling the rookies until they have established themselves.
His chief variation in orthodoxy comes in his hunches. His brown eyes twinkle as he says it may be that he is psychic, that he gets messages from out of the air in the early hours of the morning, like the time he started the injured Monte Pearson in the 1936 World Series- and Pearson beat the Giants, 5 to 2.
'A message from thin air,' he explained the hunch.
'But how,' persisted a reporter, 'do you get them?'
'Prepaid,' laughed McCarthy, 'and that's the best part of them.'
Besides loyalty, his chief requisite in a player is hustle. He, himself, never lets up. The Cubs had the pennant assured in 1929 and were running wild in Boston when Judge Fuchs, then bench manager of the Braves, pleaded with McCarthy.
'Have a heart, Joe, you're killing baseball in Boston. Haven't you scored enough runs- why demand more runs from your players?'
'I'll let you know sometime,' McCarthy shrugged.
The next time McCarthy saw Judge Fuchs was when the latter went to the dressing room to offer his condolences after the Cubs blew the 8 to 0 lead to the Athletics in the 1929 World Series.
'Well you got it today, Judge,' yelled McCarthy over the heads of the crowd, 'the answer to that riddle you were asking me in Boston.'
One who never pops off, McCarthy never alibis, either. Injuries? 'Those things make no difference. A manager is supposed to win even if he has fifteen injured players.' Bad weather in the spring? 'Our team trained at Brockton, Mass. and Portland, Maine in 1915- and won the pennant.'
Cynics sometimes scoff that he prefers 'ready-made' players from the high minors instead of developing his own. He admits the charge, if a charge it is. 'You can get a team from B and C players,' he says, 'but not a championship team. When you have to replace a major leaguer, it is logical to get the man nearly matured, those who have a half dozen years of experience and played regularly in AA ball. Of course, you can occasionally pick up a Cobb or a Wilcy Moore from the low minors, but the percentages are all against you.'
He admits he is a worrier. 'I've never met anybody in this business who isn't,' he says. 'It's a mental strain- trying to win a pennant. And just as soon as you do win one, there's always next season to worry about.'
A visit to a McCarthy bench is not at all like a visit to the bench of many big league clubs, where hoopla, gaiety and repartee is the order of the day. Silence stifles the atmosphere. A McCarthy player comes out, picks up a bat, goes up to the plate for preliminary swings, with seldom as much as a howdy or a nod to his mates and the barest nod to visiting newspapermen.
'We do our talking with base hits, pitching and fielding,' explained Coach Art Fletcher, when he was with McCarthy and the Yankees. 'Business-like, I guess you'd call it.'
And so it's business-like that Joseph Vincent McCarthy this month starts his quest for an eighth world title in seventeen years- and you wouldn't want to bet he doesn't get it, would you?"
-Herbert Simons, Baseball Digest (April 1948)
HIS FIRST THOUGHT
"When Joe McCarthy took over the managerial reins of the Red Sox, his first official move was to call Collinsville, Illinois, the home of his famous right-hand man and third base coach, Art Fletcher.
The latter's health has not been good the past several years and he was out of baseball even before McCarthy left the Yankees. But Mac called him, and asked if Fletch wanted to rejoin him in Boston.
'I appreciate the offer,' Fletch said, 'but my health won't permit it.'
'I was afraid that would be your answer,' McCarthy responded, 'but I just wanted you to know that I thought of you first when I needed a coach.'"
-Robert L. Burnes in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat (Baseball Digest, May 1948)
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