TOPS AND BOTTOMS IN THE SERIES
"Highlights of the World Series of 1951:
Biggest Thrill: Joe DiMaggio's home run in the fourth game. It was like an old actor putting a plaid coat and playing a dashing juvenile so well you couldn't tell the difference.
Most Underrated Player: Wes Westrum, the New York Giants' catcher, who drew raves from Bill Dickey, New York Yankee coach and backstopping great.
Best Pitcher: Ed Lopat, who allowed only one earned run in eighteen innings. The second run off Lopat was 'unearned' mentally. It stemmed from a rock-head throw by Gene Woodling to the wrong base in the fifth game.
Most Consistent Performer: Gil McDougald of the Yankees, who played second base or third base with equal skill and who developed into the most feared Yankee batsman.
Bust of the Series: Willie Mays, the Giants' young center fielder. He contributed nothing in the way of offense, grounding into three double plays in the fourth game.
Worst Fielder: Bobby Thomson, the Giants' third baseman. A reformed outfielder, the slugging Scot threw wild, manhandled ground balls, was a better hitter than historian [sic].
Best Fielder: Phil Rizzuto, Yankee shortstop, despite his nonchalant tag of Eddie Stanky at second base in the second game. Stanky kicked the ball out of Rizzuto's hand on a slide. With that exception, Rizzuto was terrific.
Best Game: The last, or sixth. The Giants were never really out of competition [sic]. They were so close in the ninth you could have given odds they would square the Series. They hit three tremendous blows off Bob Kuzava. Two were long, but easy outs. The third was a sensational catch by Hank Bauer.
Best All-Around Performance: Alvin Dark, shortstop and captain of the Giants, played a heroic game in the field and at the plate, with his straddle stance and his guardianship of the platter glaringly apparent.
Goat: Monte Irvin, despite his deeds with the willow, played a silly outfield. The Giants' ace man with the stick set up the Yankee triumph in the fifth game because he was against the bleacher wall in the Polo Grounds when Joe DiMaggio hit a pop fly to left that went for a single and paved the way for Gil McDougald's grand-slam homer. Irvin also played Hank Bauer's triple poorly in the sixth game.
Most Dangerous Batter: Monte Irvin, who, according to Allie Reynolds, 'guards the plate every minute.'
Best Strategy: That of Manager Casey Stengel of the Yankees in the daily juggling of the lineup. This must have been the best strategy. Casey won with it.
Worst Strategy: Stengel's decision to let Bauer hit, instead of Johnny Mize, in the eighth inning of the second game. The Yankees were five runs down. Bauer, notorious for his failures against right-handed curve ball pitchers, was to face Sheldon Jones. With Mize on the bench, Stengel went along with Bauer, who tapped out to the pitcher.
Best Prat Fall: By Hank Bauer as he caught Sal Yvars' liner for the final out of the sixth game.
Second Best Prat Fall: By the Giants, period.
Most Glaring Weakness in the Series: The Giants' bench, or array of substitutes.
Best Umpiring: No other World Series ever was marked by as few beefs. Bill Summers and Joe Paparella of the American League and Lee Ballanfant and Al Barlick of the National League were all remarkable. To them ... huzzahs!
Best Fielding Play: Gene Woodling's one-handed of Monte Irvin's long drive to left center in the fifth game."
-Franklin Lewis, condensed from the Cleveland Press (Baseball Digest, January 1952)
"Biggest Break: That Sunday rainout that gave Allie Reynolds the extra day's rest he needed to come back at the Giants after his defeat in the opener. If Sunday's weather had been fair, Reynolds wouldn't have pitched- and maybe the Giants would be world champs today.
Best Footwork: Eddie Stanky's field goal with Scooter Rizzuto holding, in the third game.
Biggest Gamble: Casey Stengel's snap decision to call on Bob Kuzava, a southpaw, to face three dangerous right-handed batters in the final inning of the deciding game by which he saved the day and possibly the Series.
Toughest Break: The Giants' loss of right fielder Don Mueller in the playoffs. His hitting might have aided the club materially, although the Yankees also lost power when Mickey Mantle was injured in the second game.
Best Managerial Job: Casey Stengel, although Durocher left little to be desired. Leo's choice of Ray Noble, who looked at a third strike with three on and two out in the eighth inning of the final game was roundly booed by Giant fans, but who was left except Sal Yvars?"
-Dan Parker in the New York Mirror (Baseball Digest, January 1952)
Wednesday, November 28, 2018
Wednesday, November 21, 2018
1952 Yankee of the Past: Muddy Ruel
PITCHER'S WARM-UP NO TIPOFF
"Muddy Ruel, who has warmed up more starting pitchers, from Walter Johnson to Bob Feller, than any other catcher, says no one can determine a moundsman's probable effectiveness from his pre-game exercises.
'There's something about throwing from that hill, against real opponents, which makes all the difference,' Ruel, now Cleveland's farm director, explains. 'I've seen pitchers who knocked my glove off with their warm-up speed get belted out of the game in the first inning. I've seen pitchers who threw before the game as if they had sore arms go out and turn in no-hitters. There's just no way of telling in advance.'"
-Ed McAuley in the Cleveland Daily News (Baseball Digest, November 1951)
TIGERS UNDER NEW FARM RUEL
Muddy Moves On from Cleveland
"Herold Ruel, who has been 'Muddy' since early boyhood and who has been white-maned almost as long, has removed his quaint double talk, his delightful humor and his mortal class from Cleveland's Wigwam, and I find the operation thoroughly distressing. I wish he would have stuck around, if not as the ringmaster of the Indians' farm system, then in some other equally vital capacity, and I am not picking a spot. Instead, he has moved on to Detroit to supervise the Tigers' farm operation.
Of all the gentlemen I have met in sports, Ruel is as completely natural and companionable as you could desire. He is a complex individual, however. The most incongruous sight of all time in baseball was that of Muddy Ruel, licensed to practice law before the United States Supreme Court, warming up some ironheaded pitcher in a bullpen in Chicago or Cleveland while serving as a coach.
Certainly no other baseball personality has run a gamut of jobs in Ruel's distinctive lope. His new employment is just one more stop on the trail of the slight, sensitive St. Louis native who began professional baseball in 1915 at the age of nineteen. While catching for the St. Louis Browns, Memphis, the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, Washington, Detroit and the Chicago White Sox, he studied law as well as curves. In each labor he achieved a high level of proficiency.
When he quit catching he went to coaching for the White Sox from 1935 through 1945, and then he became executive assistant to the recent commissioner, Happy Chandler. He returned to the pits as manager of the Browns in 1947 and, after one inglorious semester as such, he stepped over to the Indians as a coach under Louie Boudreau at a time Willie Veeck was hiring brains by the yard.
It seems strange that Ruel hasn't been able to light. Ruel has been a wandering character most of his life, even when he came upon his everlasting nickname. The owner professes an ignorance of its origin, but his late father said it stemmed from an incident of Herold's comparative infancy when he fell into a mud puddle of considerable depth. The submerged youngster was yanked to dry dirt as his father said, 'Look at Muddy over there.' And Muddy it has been.
No yardstick can be placed on Ruel's eleven-month term as boss the Tribe's farms. At best, a man requires five to eight years to build a system for juvenile ball players, and it may take double that long for the results to become apparent to the unpracticed eye.
Take the Yankees. It is no accident that they have been winning championships over the years with Rizzuto, Gordon, Raschi, McDougald, Bauer, Berra, et al. These are products of a Yankee farm system that was constructed over a long period, even as the chain gang of the St. Louis Cardinals was based upon years of patient shuffling of Branch Rickey's minor league talent. So we may never be able to tell much about Ruel's agricultural accomplishments in Cleveland, and this piece makes no attempt to evaluate Muddy on the basis of genius.
It took Ruel only ten years in the majors to catch 1,000 games despite his 145-pounds and banty bat. It took him only eleven months to leave Happy Chandler and only one year as a big-league manager to get fired. It took him less than one year as director of the Tribe farm system to leave an organization that didn't want him to go.
His new job with the Tigers is the same job he had with the Indians, which leads to speculation, to wit: the Tigers came up with more money, he was unhappy with the Indians, the future in Cleveland seemed dark, he didn't get along with fellow front-officers, the Tigers promised him something better to come, etc.
One thing sure it that Muddy's new job does not consist of squatting in the bullpen, carefully receiving the slants of wild-armed hurlers, while some of us in the sanctity of the stands get to wondering again what the United States Supreme Court would think of all this.
Maybe it would think that if a man loves his work, it's nobody's business."
-Franklin Lewis, condensed from the Cleveland Press (Baseball Digest, January 1952)
"Muddy Ruel, who has warmed up more starting pitchers, from Walter Johnson to Bob Feller, than any other catcher, says no one can determine a moundsman's probable effectiveness from his pre-game exercises.
'There's something about throwing from that hill, against real opponents, which makes all the difference,' Ruel, now Cleveland's farm director, explains. 'I've seen pitchers who knocked my glove off with their warm-up speed get belted out of the game in the first inning. I've seen pitchers who threw before the game as if they had sore arms go out and turn in no-hitters. There's just no way of telling in advance.'"
-Ed McAuley in the Cleveland Daily News (Baseball Digest, November 1951)
TIGERS UNDER NEW FARM RUEL
Muddy Moves On from Cleveland
"Herold Ruel, who has been 'Muddy' since early boyhood and who has been white-maned almost as long, has removed his quaint double talk, his delightful humor and his mortal class from Cleveland's Wigwam, and I find the operation thoroughly distressing. I wish he would have stuck around, if not as the ringmaster of the Indians' farm system, then in some other equally vital capacity, and I am not picking a spot. Instead, he has moved on to Detroit to supervise the Tigers' farm operation.
Of all the gentlemen I have met in sports, Ruel is as completely natural and companionable as you could desire. He is a complex individual, however. The most incongruous sight of all time in baseball was that of Muddy Ruel, licensed to practice law before the United States Supreme Court, warming up some ironheaded pitcher in a bullpen in Chicago or Cleveland while serving as a coach.
Certainly no other baseball personality has run a gamut of jobs in Ruel's distinctive lope. His new employment is just one more stop on the trail of the slight, sensitive St. Louis native who began professional baseball in 1915 at the age of nineteen. While catching for the St. Louis Browns, Memphis, the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, Washington, Detroit and the Chicago White Sox, he studied law as well as curves. In each labor he achieved a high level of proficiency.
When he quit catching he went to coaching for the White Sox from 1935 through 1945, and then he became executive assistant to the recent commissioner, Happy Chandler. He returned to the pits as manager of the Browns in 1947 and, after one inglorious semester as such, he stepped over to the Indians as a coach under Louie Boudreau at a time Willie Veeck was hiring brains by the yard.
It seems strange that Ruel hasn't been able to light. Ruel has been a wandering character most of his life, even when he came upon his everlasting nickname. The owner professes an ignorance of its origin, but his late father said it stemmed from an incident of Herold's comparative infancy when he fell into a mud puddle of considerable depth. The submerged youngster was yanked to dry dirt as his father said, 'Look at Muddy over there.' And Muddy it has been.
No yardstick can be placed on Ruel's eleven-month term as boss the Tribe's farms. At best, a man requires five to eight years to build a system for juvenile ball players, and it may take double that long for the results to become apparent to the unpracticed eye.
Take the Yankees. It is no accident that they have been winning championships over the years with Rizzuto, Gordon, Raschi, McDougald, Bauer, Berra, et al. These are products of a Yankee farm system that was constructed over a long period, even as the chain gang of the St. Louis Cardinals was based upon years of patient shuffling of Branch Rickey's minor league talent. So we may never be able to tell much about Ruel's agricultural accomplishments in Cleveland, and this piece makes no attempt to evaluate Muddy on the basis of genius.
It took Ruel only ten years in the majors to catch 1,000 games despite his 145-pounds and banty bat. It took him only eleven months to leave Happy Chandler and only one year as a big-league manager to get fired. It took him less than one year as director of the Tribe farm system to leave an organization that didn't want him to go.
His new job with the Tigers is the same job he had with the Indians, which leads to speculation, to wit: the Tigers came up with more money, he was unhappy with the Indians, the future in Cleveland seemed dark, he didn't get along with fellow front-officers, the Tigers promised him something better to come, etc.
One thing sure it that Muddy's new job does not consist of squatting in the bullpen, carefully receiving the slants of wild-armed hurlers, while some of us in the sanctity of the stands get to wondering again what the United States Supreme Court would think of all this.
Maybe it would think that if a man loves his work, it's nobody's business."
-Franklin Lewis, condensed from the Cleveland Press (Baseball Digest, January 1952)
Monday, November 12, 2018
1952 Yankee of the Past: Red Rolfe
ROLFE'S ONE SHORTCOMING
He Was A Yankee Perfectionist
"Once it was an exciting experience to watch Red Rolfe play third base for the New York Yankees. There may have been better third basemen than the solemn, studious New Englander but it is difficult to see how there could have been. The ball field was a laboratory to Rolfe. He could explain every move that was made and most of Red's were right. He could hit and run, bunt, slap the ball to every field and pull for the stands. It was a virtual impossibility to catch him flat-footed on a bunt when he was in the field and few opponents ever outsmarted him.
He played in a time when the Yankees terrorized the league and Red was their pennant-winning third baseman on six victorious teams during his nine active seasons. The last two of them were agony for Rolfe and he finally had to step out because a chronic colitis sapped his strength and made him a ball player forced to exist on a selective diet, while his teammates maintained themselves on steak. He might have gone on drawing a salary as a player but his sharpness as a performer was gone and he had been such a purist on the field that he could not abide mediocrity even in himself.
It is this same inability to accept anything but the best that made Rolfe a poor manager with the Detroit Tigers and consequently he was sacked, as Tommy Holmes, Rogers Hornsby and Eddie Sawyer were before him this season.
This had been the source of Red's difficulties in Detroit and explains the compulsion that forced him openly to criticize the ability of his players and nag them meanly for not being the kind of players they did not have it in them to be. It is at once the answer to Detroit's dissension this year and a reflection of the Tigers' cellar position under Rolfe which must have seared Rolfe's stomach with pain. It is explained and reflected in the quote of one Tiger, who said:
'He's just a damn Yankee perfectionist.' And another who said, 'DiMaggio, Gehrig, Rizzuto and Keller played at the Yankee Stadium, not in Briggs Stadium, but in his heart Red never left New York.'
There is an analogy to Frankie Frisch's thwarted managerial career and the reputation as a clown that Casey Stengel built for himself in his second division days at Brooklyn and Boston. Only, where Frisch and Rolfe could not change, Stengel realized the futility of trying to fill a size 10 shoe with a size four foot, shrugged and tried for a laugh, instead of insisting it had to be done the way John McGraw did it.
Like Frisch and Stengel, Mel Ott was one of McGraw's products and I vividly recall a conversation with Ottey in a dining car leaving Greenville, Miss., on the spring trip north in 1942.
I had broken in as a baseball writer for the Yankees, a team that did everything right. After several seasons marveling at the mastery of DiMag, Tommy Henrich, Joe Gordon, and the others, the office suggested I see how the other half lived. In the middle of spring training I switched to the Giants. Mickey Witek was the Giant's second baseman then. He was a sincere, bear-down mediocrity. It struck me the Giants couldn't open the season with a second baseman who could not pivot and throw properly on the double play. I said as much to Ott.
'I know what Witek can do and can not do,' replied Ott, 'but your trouble is you've been looking at Joe Gordon too long.'
It was not only I who suffered from this perfectionist view but also such as Joe McCarthy, who must be considered among the best managers, although he had a personality that led one to assume he was a constant sufferer from gastritis.
A disconsolate, lonely [sic] man with small grace for conversation, the whimsies or vagaries of life, Joe regarded it as a personal affront when things went badly with his ball club. He'd take refuge in insolence or insulting remarks. When World War II dried up the Yankee talent, Joe took a powder.
In 1946, before the war-returned Yankee veterans could untangle themselves and still played like ordinary mortals, defeat and dyspepsia got Joe down, the dugout became as clammy as the cold ground for Marse Joe's men and many a time he spent riding them viciously.
A murky day in Cleveland, which was to be McCarthy's last actually directing the Yankees, was one of the worst and it is revealing in the fate that befell Bill Zuber because of his manager's aversion to anything less than the best.
Zuber threw a home run ball that lost the game to the Indians in the ninth that day. Because of it, Bill became the last pitcher to be employed by McCarthy with the Yankees and the first to be fired by Joe when he joined the Boston Red Sox as their manager.
Rolfe grew up under McCarthy in baseball. The things he knows, McCarthy taught him. The apple rarely falls far from the bough."
-Milton Gross, condensed from the New York Post (Baseball Digest, September 1952)
"Between his last active year as the Yankees' third baseman (1942) and becoming manager of the Tigers in 1949, Red was baseball and basketball coach at Yale (1943-45), a Yankee coach (1946) and farm team director of the Tigers (1947-48).
In professional ball since 1931, when he graduated from Dartmouth, he was a Yankee nine years (1934-42). The Major League Team All-Star Third Baseman [Sporting News] in 1937-38-39, Red hit .300 (1935), .319 (1946), .311 (1938) and .329 (1939). He was tops at third base in fielding in 1935 and '36."
-1952 Topps No. 296
He Was A Yankee Perfectionist
"Once it was an exciting experience to watch Red Rolfe play third base for the New York Yankees. There may have been better third basemen than the solemn, studious New Englander but it is difficult to see how there could have been. The ball field was a laboratory to Rolfe. He could explain every move that was made and most of Red's were right. He could hit and run, bunt, slap the ball to every field and pull for the stands. It was a virtual impossibility to catch him flat-footed on a bunt when he was in the field and few opponents ever outsmarted him.
He played in a time when the Yankees terrorized the league and Red was their pennant-winning third baseman on six victorious teams during his nine active seasons. The last two of them were agony for Rolfe and he finally had to step out because a chronic colitis sapped his strength and made him a ball player forced to exist on a selective diet, while his teammates maintained themselves on steak. He might have gone on drawing a salary as a player but his sharpness as a performer was gone and he had been such a purist on the field that he could not abide mediocrity even in himself.
It is this same inability to accept anything but the best that made Rolfe a poor manager with the Detroit Tigers and consequently he was sacked, as Tommy Holmes, Rogers Hornsby and Eddie Sawyer were before him this season.
This had been the source of Red's difficulties in Detroit and explains the compulsion that forced him openly to criticize the ability of his players and nag them meanly for not being the kind of players they did not have it in them to be. It is at once the answer to Detroit's dissension this year and a reflection of the Tigers' cellar position under Rolfe which must have seared Rolfe's stomach with pain. It is explained and reflected in the quote of one Tiger, who said:
'He's just a damn Yankee perfectionist.' And another who said, 'DiMaggio, Gehrig, Rizzuto and Keller played at the Yankee Stadium, not in Briggs Stadium, but in his heart Red never left New York.'
There is an analogy to Frankie Frisch's thwarted managerial career and the reputation as a clown that Casey Stengel built for himself in his second division days at Brooklyn and Boston. Only, where Frisch and Rolfe could not change, Stengel realized the futility of trying to fill a size 10 shoe with a size four foot, shrugged and tried for a laugh, instead of insisting it had to be done the way John McGraw did it.
Like Frisch and Stengel, Mel Ott was one of McGraw's products and I vividly recall a conversation with Ottey in a dining car leaving Greenville, Miss., on the spring trip north in 1942.
I had broken in as a baseball writer for the Yankees, a team that did everything right. After several seasons marveling at the mastery of DiMag, Tommy Henrich, Joe Gordon, and the others, the office suggested I see how the other half lived. In the middle of spring training I switched to the Giants. Mickey Witek was the Giant's second baseman then. He was a sincere, bear-down mediocrity. It struck me the Giants couldn't open the season with a second baseman who could not pivot and throw properly on the double play. I said as much to Ott.
'I know what Witek can do and can not do,' replied Ott, 'but your trouble is you've been looking at Joe Gordon too long.'
It was not only I who suffered from this perfectionist view but also such as Joe McCarthy, who must be considered among the best managers, although he had a personality that led one to assume he was a constant sufferer from gastritis.
A disconsolate, lonely [sic] man with small grace for conversation, the whimsies or vagaries of life, Joe regarded it as a personal affront when things went badly with his ball club. He'd take refuge in insolence or insulting remarks. When World War II dried up the Yankee talent, Joe took a powder.
In 1946, before the war-returned Yankee veterans could untangle themselves and still played like ordinary mortals, defeat and dyspepsia got Joe down, the dugout became as clammy as the cold ground for Marse Joe's men and many a time he spent riding them viciously.
A murky day in Cleveland, which was to be McCarthy's last actually directing the Yankees, was one of the worst and it is revealing in the fate that befell Bill Zuber because of his manager's aversion to anything less than the best.
Zuber threw a home run ball that lost the game to the Indians in the ninth that day. Because of it, Bill became the last pitcher to be employed by McCarthy with the Yankees and the first to be fired by Joe when he joined the Boston Red Sox as their manager.
Rolfe grew up under McCarthy in baseball. The things he knows, McCarthy taught him. The apple rarely falls far from the bough."
-Milton Gross, condensed from the New York Post (Baseball Digest, September 1952)
"Between his last active year as the Yankees' third baseman (1942) and becoming manager of the Tigers in 1949, Red was baseball and basketball coach at Yale (1943-45), a Yankee coach (1946) and farm team director of the Tigers (1947-48).
In professional ball since 1931, when he graduated from Dartmouth, he was a Yankee nine years (1934-42). The Major League Team All-Star Third Baseman [Sporting News] in 1937-38-39, Red hit .300 (1935), .319 (1946), .311 (1938) and .329 (1939). He was tops at third base in fielding in 1935 and '36."
-1952 Topps No. 296
Thursday, November 1, 2018
1952 Yankee of the Past: Steve O'Neill
IT'D PUT FIGHTING LIFE IN HIM
"There was the famous evening when Cleveland's Larry Doby tried to steal home with the bases filled and Joe Page, of the New York Yankees, was well on his way to walking the hitter. Manager Steve O'Neill, coaching at third, took a terrific and unjustified booing.
'I never forget the way Steve looked that night,' said Lou Boudreau. 'Bill McKechnie and I made him sit between us on the bench for a few minutes after the game was over. Even then, when we went into the clubhouse, I asked George Susce to keep an eye on him. He was simply bursting to slug the first man who asked him why he sent Doby home. Believe it or not, I know a couple of fellows who did ask him. As if any coach in the game would do a trick like that.'
'I was in Dayton that night,' recalled [Ski] Melillo, 'but I heard the game by radio. I said to the guys who were with me: 'After that one, Steve O'Neill will never die. Just so somebody at his bedside, when it looks as if he's all washed up, remembers to whisper: 'Steve, did you tell Doby to steal home?' If I know Steve, he'll start swinging every time he hears that question.' "
-Ed McAuley in the Cleveland News (Baseball Digest, July 1952)
"There was the famous evening when Cleveland's Larry Doby tried to steal home with the bases filled and Joe Page, of the New York Yankees, was well on his way to walking the hitter. Manager Steve O'Neill, coaching at third, took a terrific and unjustified booing.
'I never forget the way Steve looked that night,' said Lou Boudreau. 'Bill McKechnie and I made him sit between us on the bench for a few minutes after the game was over. Even then, when we went into the clubhouse, I asked George Susce to keep an eye on him. He was simply bursting to slug the first man who asked him why he sent Doby home. Believe it or not, I know a couple of fellows who did ask him. As if any coach in the game would do a trick like that.'
'I was in Dayton that night,' recalled [Ski] Melillo, 'but I heard the game by radio. I said to the guys who were with me: 'After that one, Steve O'Neill will never die. Just so somebody at his bedside, when it looks as if he's all washed up, remembers to whisper: 'Steve, did you tell Doby to steal home?' If I know Steve, he'll start swinging every time he hears that question.' "
-Ed McAuley in the Cleveland News (Baseball Digest, July 1952)
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