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)
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