A LESSON FROM DRESSEN
"A cocky little fellow is Charlie Dressen. Most of the time the Brooklyn manager has been able to make his cockiness stand up.
Years ago, when he was playing third base with St. Paul, a big raw-boned pitcher, John Saladna, joined Kansas City and started a winning streak. He appeared to be invincible. He won ten straight games, all low-hitters and several of them shutouts, before the Saints had a look at him.
'We'll beat him when he comes our way,' said Dressen. 'I know how.'
'You know how?' he was asked. 'Why you haven't seen the fellow. You don't know anything about him excepting that he wins.'
'But we'll beat him,' said Dressen.
When Kansas City got to St. Paul, the big hay-shaker was still unbeaten, and he and Long Tom Sheehan hooked up in a game that had a heavy bearing on the American Association pennant race.
Before the game, Dressen was asked what his plan was and how he arrived at it.
'I've been studying the box scores,' he replied. 'I've noticed that he hardly ever walks anybody and has a lot of strikeouts. Now a pitcher with enough stuff to strike out a good many batters but who does not issue an average number of walks must be getting the batters into the hole.
'That means he is putting his first pitch in there and too many batters are taking it.
'When the time comes to put on a rally, we'll hit that first pitch. It will work perfectly against this fellow. He won't know where to go from there.'
Well, the game dragged along for a while. Sheehan held the Blues and it was scoreless until the late innings. Then Kansas City got two runs.
In the home half of that inning, the Saints decided it was time to go to work. They swung on the first pitch- no new stratagem, of course, but one for which this fellow was a setup- and they got a nice little rally going. They put the game on ice.
Dressen's whole career has been a busy, daily succession of such sound maneuvers. That is why he wins the close ones."
-Dick Cullum in the Minneapolis Tribune (Baseball Digest, October 1951)
BROOKLYN'S LITTLE NAPOLEON
Look! A Modest Dressen!
"Midnight strikes at Ebbets Field. Deep under the left field stands is a door labeled PRIVATE. That's portly Wilbert Robinson peering over his spectacles at bewildering Babe Herman, who's just socked two homers but has lost the ball game by letting a fly hit his chest instead of his glove. There's a younger Casey Stengel wise-cracking to his Daffiness Boys of the mid-30s. And a noisier, brasher Lippy Leo Durocher playing 'gin' ten minutes before the game begins in his championship year of 1941, or wrangling with striking ball players during the famous Bobo Newsom rebellion of 1943.
The manager now is Charlie Dressen, a little man with keen blue eyes, who first wore a Dodger uniform in 1939 when he became the Lip's sign-stealing, barbering third base coach. Chuck is seldom around the clubhouse at midnight- unless the Dodgers are kept up late in a game. He is no ghost, although the living memory of him did haunt the place from 1947 to 1951 when he was absent coaching the New York Yankees or piloting the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League.
Today, Chuck ought to be a most important man, the master mind of a pennant-winning team. In fact, he is nothing of the sort, as he modestly admits. He merely stepped out of minor league obscurity into the circus atmosphere of Ebbets Field last winter to lead a ball team that needed no leadership whatsoever. And, by an ironic twist of inscrutable fate, all that he has and owns today in baseball treasures was deeded him by a man he quit in 1947, Branch Rickey.
The Dodger regulars- with the one exception of Andy Pafko- are hand-picked, hand-trained in superlative Rickey way. They not only play Rickey baseball but look, act and think in the Rickey pattern. The coaches, including Cookie Lavagetto, have been steeped in the Rickey tactical Rickey brew. Even the club trainer treats his patients patiently with linament, bubble baths and Rickey psychology.
Mornings when the team is at home, Chuck Dressen arrives at the clubhouse, dons his uniform, sits in the office which Rickey built for Leo Durocher. He opens his mail, chats with his old coaching side-kick, and how his advance scout, Red Corriden, tries to balance his checkbook and fails, wanders through the dirt path to the dugout.
'I didn't even get to know the boys until after spring training,' Chuck says. 'The toughest break I had all season was that sickness of mine last spring. There I was flat on my back and my team was working out at Vero Beach and Miami. I wanted to know more about the boys' dispositions, and what we needed. Of course, I had wonderful coaches and they brought me reports, but I started the season without any spring skull practice of my own.'
It wasn't quite true, of course, that Charlie knew nothing about his Dodgers or that 1951 marked his debut as a major league manager. He had led the Cincinnati Reds for four seasons, beginning in 1934. And when the 1946 season ended with Charlie still a Dodger coach the roster included Pee Wee Reese, Eddie Miksis, Carl Furillo, Gene Hermanski, Bruce Edwards, Rex Barney, Joe Hatten and Ralph Branca of last spring's squad.
It is perhaps significant that, except for Branca, Reese and Furillo, the other 1946 Dodgers were not to be found on the eligible list for the 1951 World Series. 'I knew the fellows I traded, with the exception of Miksis, who never got a chance to show what he could do,' Charlie says. 'I knew Hermanski had only been batting against right-handers, that Hatten hadn't finished many games and that Edwards had been having arm trouble. The man I wanted was Andy Pafko- and I got him without spending a cent.'
This a frank admission that the famous Dodger-Chicago Cub trade of last June is Charlie's most important contribution to the success of the 1951 [Dodgers]. Various ailments prevented Pafko from adding much momentum to the team's drive, but a healthy 31-year-old Andy is still a threat at bat and a nimble fly-snatcher afield, a player who has rounded out the almost perfect Rickey lineup.
And what a lineup! 'I used to have to give a lot more signs than I do today,' admits Charlie. 'When you've got fellows like Jackie Robinson, Reese, Gil Hodges, Roy Campanella and Duke Snider out there, you don't have to tell them what to do. They are crazy about baseball. They like to play it. They like to hit and run the bases and set up squeeze plays. They're always thinking up tricks, the way I like to do.'
Between 1939 and 1946 Charlie became famous for his complex system of signs. Some were club signs, such as the hit-and-run, the take or the hit. Others were personal signs, known only to Chuck and the player who happened to be at bat and were designed to utilize that player's specialty. Others called in advance the kind of pitch the enemy was hurling.
'I still use signs for special players,' Charlie says. 'But I don't try to steal pitchers' deliveries the way I once did. With hitters like I've got, it isn't necessary. Besides, we play more night games now and it's hard to see what the pitcher is doing to the ball under the lights.
'And I've had few worries. This has been a very lucky year for the team- no one has been seriously injured. The only time I've had to look sharp was when we've been playing the New York Giants or St. Louis Cardinals. They've given us some trouble.'
And Charlie, for the first time in his major league career as manager and coach, has not been forced to labor under the shadow of a titan. Back in 1934, when he came up to Cincinnati to reform the disorganized Reds, it was Larry MacPhail who filled the titanic role. In Brooklyn from 1939 to 1942, he carried out his duties amid the huzzahs not only of Larry the Red but also of Leo the Lip. Between 1943 and 1946 none other than Branch Rickey was his leader, and when he joined the Yankees in 1947 he was working for the mercurial MacPhail once more.
Now Chuck's boss is sociable Walter O'Malley. Now the front office is led by the sociable and quiet Buzzy Bavasi, with an assist from Fresco Thompson. 'They never say 'Do this,' in our front office,' chuckles Charlie. 'They make changes, yes, but they listen to me. I wanted Pafko and they got him. I wanted Howie Pollet, too, but Rickey got him for Pittsburgh before we could get going.'
Even Dodger clubhouse meetings before games require little direction. 'Sure, we hold meetings and we talk over the lineups of the other fellows. You've got to do that. We talk about our own weaknesses of the last game. And if there's some batter on the other team who's been on a tear we talk about how to stop him. But what's the use of discussing how to pitch to another team when you've got pitchers around like Preacher Roe, Don Newcombe and Branca? They know what the other batters can do. They each have their own special ideas on how to stop them.'
Even on defensive play, Chuck relaxes. 'Who knows better how to play defense than Robby and Pee Wee?' he asks.
Yet, with all these gifts from the gods at his disposal, Chuck Dressen has had his troubles. There was that unfortunate Palica episode.
Erv Palica was seventeen years old when he reported to the Dodgers in 1945. After a turn in the minors, he made the club as a regular in 1948, appearing in 133 games during the three succeeding seasons. A fastball pitcher, he was used chiefly in relief until the last half of the 1950 campaign, when he won eight straight games. He ended the season with a 13-8 record.
Last spring, Erv was drafted by the Army but was released without reporting because his wife was pregnant. Returning to the Dodgers, he was started as a regular by Charlie. Erv was hit hard in several tries, then began to complain about a mysterious ache.
Nothing might have become of the unhappy young man's situation if Charlie had not publicly charged that Palica as malingering. (Some newspapermen insist he said 'gutless.') In defense he says: 'I did not know what was the matter with him. My coaches told me that he said he couldn't throw, but that the docs couldn't find anything the matter with him. Look at him now ...'
At that moment Palica was pitching batting practice.
'Nothing the matter with him, is there?' Charlie asked. Palica was tossing knuckleballs. 'He just won't cut loose on the fast ones.'
The Palica cloud receded over the horizon after a burst of publicity unfavorable to Dressen. His next problem was umpires. Under Burt Shotton, the Dodgers had played quiet, gentlemanly baseball, and because Burt wore green slacks and an old white shirt on the bench he was not permitted to sally on field for a typical managerial bawling-out of the men in blue. Besides, warring with umpires is not the Rickey-Shotton way.
Charlie has waged battle with umpires, even more, when his team, as in July, was more than ten games in the lead. Ousted from games he sat in a field box or in Ebbets Field's presidential box to direct Dodger traffic. On each occasion games were halted as Chuck was ousted a second time.
When this tactic drew a ruling from League President Ford C. Frick, Charlie devised a new way of combatting the arbiters. If a couple of players were sent to the showers for arguing, he ordered all his reserves to the clubhouse, a gesture of defiance overlooked by such seasoned umpire-baiters as Leo Durocher and Frank Frisch. On one occasion the game was delayed for several minutes as Charlie summoned pinch hitters from the Polo Grounds locker room, some 500 feet from home plate.
'I'm not trying to slow up games,' Charlie rebuts to charges made by newspapermen. 'I only wish they'd find some way of speeding games faster and faster. But a lot of funny things happened. One time Don Newcombe squawked from the bench, and the umpire put me and Cookie Lavagetto out of the game. Another time he put Branca out when Ralph hadn't said a word. I was afraid the whole bench would be thrown out. I did not want to find myself in the ninth inning without a pinch hitter. So I put my reserves out of reach of the umpires. I hope Ford Frick does work up some rule that'll stop a hot-headed umpire from breaking up a team when there's no cause for it.'
On the other hand, there are those who declare that Charlie Dressen had no reason for complaints against umpires' decisions. The 1951 Dodgers were the classiest club in the older league since the Cardinals of 1942, and perhaps even stronger. They have been favorably compared to the artistic Yankees of 1936-39. Charlie Dressen, some say, has no intention of being called a 'push-button manager,' comparable to the Yankees' silent Joe McCarthy. Fans might forget the Little Napoleon is around, even if he didn't evolve some way of getting his name into the newspapers.
Charlie has the last word: 'You haven't heard any squawks about how the team plays, have you? We win, don't we?'
Not even the man's severest critic can find a comeback to that last rhetorical question. Dressen's Dodgers, whatever their origin, whatever their style, have what it takes to win."
-Charles Dexter (Baseball Digest, November 1951)
"Chuck, who once was a Dodger coach, returns as their manager in 1951.
His playing days- which were mostly with the Reds- began with Moline in the Three-I League in 1919 and wound up with the Giants in 1933.
Chuck managed at Cincinnati from July 1934 to the end of the 1937 campaign. He coached for Brooklyn from 1939-46 and for the Yankees, 1947-48. He managed Oakland in the Pacific Coast League in 1949 and 1950."
-1951 Bowman No. 259 (Bowman Gum, Inc.)
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