QUICK AS A MINK
"This is the story of Tommy Holmes, his wife and a mink coat. When Holmes was given a chance to open a managerial career this past spring with Hartford, he promised his wife a mink coat when he reached the status of a major league pilot.
Two months after leaving the Braves to handle their Hartford team, Holmes was asked to come back and take over the parent Boston Braves. When Tommy phoned his wife to tell her the good news, she almost swooned. The first thing she thought of was the mink coat.
Holmes grinned when asked about it recently. 'That's right,' he said. 'I promised her the mink coat when I became a big league manager but I had no idea the move would come so quickly. She's having one made now and my, oh my, aren't those mink coats expensive?!' "
-Les Biederman in the Pittsburgh Press (Baseball Digest, January 1952)
KNOW WHERE YOU'RE HITTING
Hitting With Pitch Only For Few
"Tommy Holmes sat in the Boston dugout and devoted time, in between warnings to his Braves against popping baseballs into the faces of paying customers, to his favorite topic of conversation.
'These pepper games have some value,' he temporized as he watched his athletes in baseball's time-honored pastime of taking turns slapping sharp grounders at one another. 'But sooner or later some guy with a bat gets too energetic, and then somebody gets hurt. Look at them now- hitting right toward those people in the box seats. Hey!
'But talking about hitting,' the youngest manager in the major leagues got back on his trolley,' I was saying that the good batter always knows where he is going to hit the ball- or at least where's he's trying to hit it. That business of hitting the pitch where it is? Uh, uh.
'Maybe it's okay for the one man in fifty who knows he can hit twenty or thirty home runs a season. If you have that much power, go ahead and swing. Otherwise, you should have a plan when you are up at the plate, especially when there men on bases.'
But, Tommy, what about the pitch? Suppose you have a runner on first base and you want to hit to right field so that you can move him around to third? And the pitcher comes in with a ball inside to a right-handed hitter- how are you going to hit that to right?
The holder of the National League record for hitting in consecutive games (thirty-seven) gave one of his famous high-pitched laughs.
'That's the toughest thing to teach a kid,' he agreed. 'You have to take the pitch, unless, of course, you have the hit-and-run on- then you have to swing at anything. But you give the pitcher that much of the plate, maybe just about the width of the ball itself, on the inside. You see, that's the only ball that is really hard to hit to the cross field, a ball that is really on the inside. If it's more than a width of the ball out to the middle of the plate, then you can hit it anywhere you want.'
Young Mr. Holmes has been occupied with teaching the largest crop of rookies in the National League this detail. How were they taking it?
'I just tell them one thing,' he grinned. 'There are doggone few pitchers in this league, or the other, who can put the ball in exactly the same place every time. Maybe they'll get the ball right where you can't hit it the way you want- the first time. The second time, if the guy is human, it will slip a little. That's the one to belt!'
This discussion started, probably, because of the constant stress on perfecting the hit-and-run that has been a part of the Brooklyn Dodgers' campaign this year. These operations have been under the specific direction of Billy Herman, the one-time Cub second baseman who is generally recognized as having been one of the fine right-field hitters of the game. Herman has been working on all of the Brooks to impart this knack, and every once in a while they show signs of it.
'I used to take two strikes, sometimes,' he admitted when tested on the Holmes theory. 'If the pitcher wasn't so fast that he could throw the ball by me, that is. If you had one of those really quick fellows out there, you just didn't dare take twice. But that's right, you just have to give the pitcher that one piece of the plate, and if he can thread the needle, he's ahead of you.'
Then he paused, and a grin came over his face.
'Of course, sometimes you get a real good hit-and-run man up there, and then it's not just hitting the ball to right field. Everything depends on the situation, who the pitcher is, whether you can guess who's going to cover the base when the runner starts to go- all those things. You used to figure when the shortstop was going to cover, and then when he'd already broken for the bag and left a hole behind him, you'd slap that ball through the spot he just left.
'That used to be fun- out-smarting 'em, and making it hurt, besides getting the runner to third, too.' A shrug of the Herman head, a shrug of the shoulders. 'Well, you don't see much of that anymore. It used to be that a kid coming up for a tryout in the majors couldn't do that sort of thing. Why they'd just send him right back down for another year in the minors until he learned. Nobody spent dough for instructors and special coaches to teach the kid stuff like that in the big leagues. You were supposed to know how when you got here!' "
-Bill Dougherty, condensed from the Newark News (Baseball Digest, July 1952)
"Tommy took over the managership of the Braves in the middle of the 1951 season and led them to a first division spot. On May 31, 1952, he was succeeded by Charlie Grimm. Tom is still in the Braves organization.
He played for the Braves from 1942 through 1950 and started '51 as manager at Hartford. In pro ball since 1937, Tommy was a consistent .300 hitter. As a Brave outfielder, he hit .309 in 1944, .352 in '45, .310 in '46, .309 in '47, .325 in '48 and .298 in '50."
-1952 Topps No. 289
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