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
No comments:
Post a Comment