1955 Yankee of the Past: Gus Triandos

 "Because Hal Smith will be catching, Paul Richards plans to station burly Gus Triandos at first. Triandos, also secured by Baltimore in the Turley-Hunter-Larsen deal, caught for Kansas City last year and hit .296 with 18 homers and 65 RBIs."

-Herbert Simons (Baseball Digest, March 1955)

"Gus will be battling for the Orioles' regular first base job this season. He comes to Baltimore after a great record in the minors where he gained fame as a big league prospect.

At Twin Falls in 1948, Gus hit .323 and poled 18 homers. With Amsterdam in '50, he knocked the cover off the ball by hitting .363. He returned from military service in 1953 and hit .368 for Birmingham."

-1955 Topps No. 64

"One of the most talked about prospects in years, Gus will be battling for the regular Oriole first base job in '55. Playing for Amsterdam in '50, he batted .363."

-1955 Topps Doubleheader No. 82

1955 Yankee of the Past: Steve Souchock

 PICTURE VICTORY

"Steve Souchock, the veteran Detroit outfielder who admits to 36, and Billy Hunter, the young Yankee infielder, are old pals on a sort of father-son basis. Souchock and Hunter's father used to play a bit of semipro ball around Punxatawney, Pa., when Billy was just growing up.

One day the Tigers and Browns got involved in one of those things that brought the players of both clubs racing on the field and into a free-for-all. In every such happenstance, there is always one core of activity with a few players on the ground flailing away with others pushing and shoving half-heartedly; then there is the fringe element- the boys who, either out of curiosity or sheer loneliness, come out of the dugouts and just stand around.

On this particular day, Souchock was one of the stand-arounders when Hunter, always the clown, sneaked up behind him, yanked him around, grabbed the front of his uniform and feigned hauling off with a roundhouse right, all the while laughing to himself what a great joke this was on his old pal Steve.

Just then, as fate so often contrives, a wayward photographer who couldn't get close enough to the real action, snapped his shutter. What he got was an All-American picture of Hunter about to explode one on Souchock's surprised face. Naturally, the photographer played up the picture pretty big the next day.

Billy took one look, bought up an armful of papers and mailed them to members to members of his own family, Souchock's family and all over Western Pennsylvania with appended notes elaborating on how he had knocked old Steve on the seat of his flannels.

Souchock still hasn't forgiven him."

-Neal Eskridge, Baltimore News-Post (Baseball Digest, May 1955)

1955 Yankee Prospect of the Past: Vic Power

 KANSAS CITY'S LIVE POWER

He's A 'Wash Out' Who Isn't One

"Teammates call him 'Wash Out,' but it is no allusion to his baseball prowess. They are the first to tell you that next to moving to Kansas City, the 'arrival' of Vic Power is one of the better things that has happened to the Athletics.

The Power of '55 is not the same fellow who hit a weak .255 at Philadelphia last year and played, at various times, first base, third base, shortstop and the outfield. The new Power, firmly entrenched at the job he does best, first base, is the very picture of confidence. And while experts tab him a 'bad-ball hitter,' Vic totaled a hefty .415 batting average through the A's first 17 games. His fielding and base running, too, attracted attention around the league.

There are plenty of reasons for Power's transformation. Manager Lou Boudreau deserves much of the credit for helping Vic find himself. Then, too, the presence of a larger and more enthusiastic patronage at the ball park has served as a tonic to the young Puerto Rican who was growing sour on the game. When news came that the team had been sold to Arnold Johnson and would be transferred to Kansas City, Vic was one of the happiest men in baseball.

'Those Kansas City fans are the greatest,' said Power. 'I'll hit .300.'

Victor Pellott Power, one of six children, was born in Aricebo, Puerto Rico, 23 years ago. His father is dead, but mother Maximina is a baseball fan and follows Vic's career in the newspapers. One of Vic's brothers, 22-year-old Nelson, is serving in the Army. The other brother, Osbaldo, 18, is a freshman in high school in San Juan, P.R., and according to Vic, Osbaldo, too, will some day be a major league ball player.

Vic was only a sophomore at San Juan High when he inked his first professional contract to play first base for the home town team in the winter league. Scouts saw him and signed him to his first O.B. contract in 1950 with Drummondville, Canada, in the Provincial League. After hitting .334 and driving in 105 runs in 105 games, he was purchased by the Yankees and farmed out to Syracuse of the International League.

At Syracuse in 1951, Vic learned that it is not always wise to keep your eye on the ball. One day, with two runners aboard, Power socked a long home run over the left field fence. As he sped around the base paths, he watched the sphere until it disappeared. Crossing home plate, he was greeted by a roar of laughter rather than the expected thunderous ovation.

'I couldn't understand why the crowd was so hilarious,' says Vic, 'until someone told me I had been called out for passing the base runners.'

Power saw Kansas City for the first time when he was assigned to the Blues in the American Association in 1952. Under Manager George Selkirk, Vic hit .331 and knocked in 109 runs.

Reflecting on that season, Vic said, 'You know, I figured I'd get a trial with the Yankees. I was disappointed when they didn't give me a shot at major league ball. But I liked the fans in Kansas City and when they told me I was going to be with the Blues another year, I decided to bear down harder.'

Vic did bear down harder, too. The six-foot, 190-pound Puerto Rican gave the American Association pitchers a hard time in 1953, boosting his hickory mark to .349, which won him the league batting championship. That, says Vic, was his biggest thrill in baseball. Obviously, he was on his way. If not with the Yankees, then some other major league team.

At the close of the season, he was assigned to the Yankees' roster. But not for long. General Manager George Weiss had his eye on a first baseman at Philadelphia, Eddie Robinson. Power was part of the bait. He, Pitcher John Gray, Catcher Al Robertson, First Baseman Don Bollweg, Third Baseman Jim Finigan, Outfielder Bill Renna and $25,000 went to the Athletics in exchange for Robinson, Pitcher Harry Byrd plus the transfer of an assortment of minor league players to the Yanks' Kansas City farm club.

At Philadelphia Power ran into a flock of reverses- a city which showed a decided lack of interest in whether the A's remained there or found a new home; a front office burdened with financial woes, and a phlegmatic team so stricken with dry rot that it merely went through the motions day after day, hoping to get an unpropitious campaign over and done with.

Power was shifted around from position to position. He almost forgot how to play first base, his first love. On top of that, Manager Eddie Joost tried to change his hitting style.

Vic does have a peculiar stance. He addresses the plate in a low crouch, holding the tip of his bat down, about a foot from the ground, as though he were going to golf the ball. He still has that odd stance today, is still known as a 'bad-ball hitter.' In the Quaker City, however, where Joost tried to change him, Power wound up hitting .255.

When the A's donned their brand new uniforms to open spring training at West Palm Beach, Fla., representing a new city, under new ownership and a new manager, the transformation began for Power. Through not particularly impressive in spring training, for Vic is considered a slow starter, he is enough of a thespian to put out just a little more when he can hear the cheers of the crowd. Boudreau planned to platoon Vic at first base, using him only against left-handed pitchers. Once the season began, however, Vic took over first base as though he owned it. And he convinced his manager that he had no more regard for right-handed pitchers than he had for lefties.

Asked if Power has performed better than expected, Boudreau said, 'That's the understatement of the year.' Just how good is Power? 'Right now he is the best fielding right-handed first baseman in the league,' said Boudreau, 'and within the next two years, if he continues to show progress, I will take him over any first-baseman, right-handed or left.'

What is the secret of Power's comeback? 'Tremendous desire,' says Boudreau, 'and the ability to make the great play, the kind of play that inspires a team.'

When Boudreau took over the A's he said the team was bad fundamentally, that the players needed to think. That Power has taken Lou's advice was evidenced in a game against the Yankees, on April 29. With a Yankee runner, Andy Carey, on first, and one out, Mickey Mantle hit a foul fly about 100 feet behind first base. Power ran back to make the difficult catch and in one motion threw a perfect strike to second to double Carey. The Yankee runner knew Power would be out of position, so he tagged up and figured he had plenty of time to get to second. Vic said later that he knew Carey would figure it that way. There is no doubt that the team was inspired by Power's heads-up play, and  Bobby Shantz, making a comeback bid, went on to shut out the Yankees on three hits.

Power, himself, attributes his fine start this year to the fact that he is using the same batting stance as in the American Association. And he also gives credit to Quincy Troupe, an old Kansas City Monarch catcher who managed him in Puerto Rico, and to Harry Craft, for whom he played at Kansas City in 1953. Craft, now a coach for the A's, says Power has 'probably the greatest reflexes of any man in baseball.'

Not his hitting and fielding alone, but his spirit, too, has helped his teammates in their battle to put the American League cellar behind them. As Gus Zernial said, 'Wash Out keeps up laughing in the locker room and the dugout ... gives the team a lift.' The flamboyant Power is always laughing, appears almost cocky. But his demeanor is the reflection of a newly-won self-reliance- on and off the playing field. The young bachelor is a snappy dresser, loves good music.

Although Vic handles the English language adequately, there are some words that give him trouble. One of his favorite expressions is 'watch out!' However, with the Power treatment, it comes out, 'wash out.' That's how he got his nickname.

Officials of the club, in an effort to cure him of his bad-ball hitting, suggested that he have his eyes examined. 'I don't want to wear glasses,' Vic objected. 'Right now, when that ball's coming up to the plate, it looks like a big blur and I figure I can't miss it. If I could see better,' he reasons, 'I might just stand there.' It does look as though Power goes after almost everything a pitcher serves him. But as Vic says:

'I may be a bad-ball hitter- but I'm hittin.' "

-Sam Molen (Baseball Digest, July 1955)

"Vic joined the A's last season after being one of the most spectacular minor leaguers in years. A ballplayer since he was 15 in the Puerto Rican League, he broke into organized ball at Drummondville in 1950 with a .334 batting average.

At Kansas City [then a Yankee farm club] in 1952, Vic hit .331 and followed with a .349 mark in '53 to top American Association batters. He came to the A's via a trade."

-1955 Topps No. 30

"Vic has been a ballplayer since he was 15 years old! He hit .334 in his first minor league season and in '52 hit .331. Vic led the American Association in '53 with .349."

-1955 Topps Doubleheader No. 29

1955 Yankee of the Past: Frank Baker

 HOME RUN BAKER WAS ENTITLED

He Batted .367 In Six World Series

"Baseball was paying a tribute long overdue when, finally, it beckoned J. Franklin Baker into its Hall of Fame in Cooperstown a few weeks ago. It was a special committee, authorized to memorialize old-timers which crooked a finger in the direction of Trappe, Md., and advised that town's most distinguished citizen he was wanted.

They could have enshrined Frank Baker among Cooperstown's immortals more than a decade before when another committee was arbitrarily blanketing into the Hall of Fame some of the more important figures of baseball. Some who made it in that manner had claims that were pale compared to Baker's.

For four consecutive years, nobody hit as many home runs as Home Run Baker. You could add up his homers over that four-year span and still get a total of only 39, which is not impressive by latter-day standards; in fact, it wouldn't lead the league in any year. But conditions, of course, were different in Baker's time.

If it is startling to recall that Baker led the A.L. in homers with nine in 1911, and with a mere eight in 1914, it is well to recall also that he had no souped-up ball to swing at it, and like other hitters of his era often was a pigeon for the doctored deliveries like the shine ball, the spitter and the emery ball.

For four straight years, and he was playing in a league that also boasted such as Cobb and Speaker and Crawford, nobody could dethrone Baker as home run king. It is a bit intriguing to remember that last season Stan Musial accumulated five homers in one day (double-header), more than half of Baker's total for a season. Yet Baker in his time was more famed as a home run hitter than Musial in his.

Paradoxically, the young man from Maryland's Eastern Shore was labeled Home Run Baker not because he led the league in homers, but because of two very special home runs he hit in the World Series of 1911 against the Giants. He picked the National League's most famous pitchers to hit them against, Rube Marquard and Christy Mathewson, on consecutive days.

It was the setting of Baker's homers in a World Series atmosphere that won him the name Home Run Baker. Others had hit World Series homers before him, even as others before Patrick Henry had exclaimed 'Give me liberty or give me death.' But if Baker and Patrick Henry weren't doing it first, they were doing it best in the sense of timing, and wound up being identified with their specialties.

Home Run Baker was the cross the late Jack Dunn of the Baltimore Orioles bore during most of his career. Dunn, the great prospector for talent, who divined greatness in such youngsters as Lefty Grove, George Earnshaw, Joe Boley and Max Bishop, fluffed miserably the chance to sign a boy from the Eastern Shore name of J. Franklin Baker. A scout brought him in from Ridgley, Md., where he was pitching for a semipro team, and Dunn, unimpressed with the gawky country kid, sent him home.

That was in 1906, and three years later the boy whom Dunn had scorned was the regular third baseman of the Philadelphia Athletics, a .305 hitter, and soon to be a member of the famed '$100,000 infield.' Nobody else played third base for Connie Mack from the day Baker arrived in Philadelphia until Mr. Mack decided to sell off his stars at the end of the 1914 season.

Baker demonstrated that he was a rugged individualist when he refused to report to the Yankees, to whom Mack had sold him. He didn't like the idea of being sold by Philadelphia, didn't like the salary the Yankees offered him, and stayed out of organized ball for a full year during which he contented himself with playing semipro ball in Upland, Pa. In 1916, he changed his mind and reported to the Yanks.

Unlike such as Ralph Kiner, whose claims to the Hall of Fame begin and end with his home run hitting that led the National League for many years, Home Run Baker could advance other weighty reasons. When he quit the majors in 1922, he could show an average of .305 for his 15-year career, and he had stolen as many as 40 bases in a season.

His World Series record also was heavily in his favor as a candidate for Cooperstown. He played in six World Series that added up to 25 games, and had a Series batting average of .367.

Home Run Baker might have qualified for the Hall of Fame as a scout as well as a ball player. It was following his retirement that he noted the skill of a young farmer playing semipro ball in neighboring Sudlersville, Md. He took the young man by the hand, escorted him to Shibe Park and personally delivered Jimmie Foxx to Connie Mack with the suggestion, 'I think you'd better sign him, Mr. Mack. You won't find his likes anywhere else.' "

-Shirley Povich, condensed from the Washington Post and Times Herald (Baseball Digest, April 1955)

BAKER HOMERED WITH 52-OUNCER!

Used Bat Half Again As Heavy As Moderns

"All that the post village of Trappe, Md., rates in the U.S. Postal Gazetteer are three lines ending with the almost embarrassing fact that the population is 272.

It also states that there are four churches and a high school.

But future editors of the publication had better bear in mind another fact for inclusion in the context.

That is that in a large, comfortable, yellow house near the end of the main street- not Main St., just the main street- lives Trappe's most illustrious citizen. His home has been the chief point of interest in Trappe for the past few weeks, for the owner is John Franklin Baker, one of the 1955 additions to Baseball's Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., and Philadelphia's dynamic baseball hero.

It is almost incredible that a lad 17 years old could ever have been found in this charmingly remote spot of Maryland's Eastern Shore- a lad who now says at 68 that 'I dreamed of being a ball player even when I was ten years old working in the fields on my father's farm.

'I could see myself in a big league uniform,' he said. 'I dreamed of playing before big crowds. I dreamed of being a hero. But never, never, never did I dream that I would ever be in the Hall of Fame.'

This John Franklin Baker, who became famous as 'Home Run' Baker by winning two games in the 1911 World Series for the Athletics, has aged gracefully. His hair is gray and his hands show the scars and knots of baseball injuries that followed hard farm work.

But he has tastefully dressed in a brown suit, worn green wool socks and moccasin type brown shoes. He had a brown striped shirt and a brown wool tie upon which were embroidered dogs' heads.

The living room was typical of any well appointed room in which people of good humor lived. There were family portraits, etchings of wild ducks in flight, a collection of classic and modern books, a piano, an antique grandfather's clock and a fireplace that had known many roaring fires.

Baker sat back comfortably at the end of the sofa. 'Yes,' he said. 'My family has been in these parts for many years. My grandfather's great-grandfather came here to settle more than 200 years ago.

'Ours was a big family. Some of the early Bakers went to Virginia, others settled in Baltimore, one of my father's grandfathers went to Texas, but most of us have been around Maryland.

'Then there was my mother's family. Her name was Mary Catherine Fitzhugh. The Fitzhughs came from Virginia and were related to General Robert E. Lee. One strain is English on father's side and Scottish on mother's.'

'Were there any athletes among the Baker ancestors?'

'Let me tell you about my father,' the home run sensation of the early 1900's went on.

'He never saw a trick in the circus he couldn't perform. I saw him one day when he was in his 60's bend over and pick up a 120-pound sack of wheat in his teeth and lift it onto a table. When he was 68 he turned handsprings right out there in the street. He cartwheeled the length of the street in front of our house and finished off by landing on his feet in an upright position.'

'Maybe that's where the home run prowess came from,' it was suggested.

'I was pretty husky,' Frank allowed, 'but there was something else. When I swung at a ball I knew it was where I wanted it to be. I waited until the last split-second before I swung. I wasn't one of those fellows who was always 'way out in front of a ball.

'And I used a man's-sized bat. Up until I got too old to get around on good fast ball pitching I used a 52-ounce bat. Honest! You had to hit that ball fair and square and with some weight and power back of it to make it go over a fence.

'I won't take anything away from present-day players. They're fine boys and play good baseball. But the ball is different.

'Why you know I've swung with all my might at a good fast ball, hit it fair and square and was lucky if it bounced against the fence. I hit the fence in Shibe Park- it's not Connie Mack Stadium to Baker- 38 times in one year. Eddie Collins told me if I had been hitting the ball Babe Ruth hit, every one of them would have gone over the fence.

'One day when I was at the ball game I saw Joe DiMaggio, using a 35-ounce bat, take just an easy swing and hit the ball over the fence in right-center field.'

'Were you, a left-handed batter, ever taken out of a ball game because a left-handed pitcher worked?'

For a moment, Baker was non-plussed.

'Indeed I wasn't,' he said with some choler. 'And I never moved around in the batter's box because one was pitching. I always stood with my left foot against the back line of the batter's box. I didn't hit outside pitches to the opposite field very often unless Connie Mack told me to. I swung pretty much straight away.

'What left-hander would I get out of the game for? I hit against Rube Waddell and he was still mighty fast. I hit Vean Gregg, a really great curve ball pitcher. And Doc White with the White Sox. I hit that home in 1911 that beat the Giants in the World Series off Rube Marquard, another fine left-hander. Why I would have fought Connie Mack if he had tried to take me out because we had to bat against a southpaw.

'But we didn't play that kind of baseball, then. There were some pretty good pinch hitters and there were some really pert relief pitchers. But we started with nine men and usually ended the game with nine men.

'Just look at how Ed Walsh could pitch year in and year out and win 40 games a year. Same way with Cy Young. Do you know, I believe if those big strong fellows of those days had taken the proper rest the way the pitchers do today they'd still be pitching.

'There was Walsh with the White Sox; George Mullin and Bill Donovan with Detroit; Jim Bagby and Addie Joss at Cleveland; Walter Johnson at Washington; Carl Mays, Eddie Cicotte and that awful man with the emery ball- Russ Ford.'

Did he hit his first major league home run off any of those pitchers of legend?

'No, I didn't,' he said. 'My first home run in the majors was what they now call 'a grand slam.' It was in the opening game of the 1909 season in Boston. We got men on second and third and the Boston pitcher was a fellow by the name of Frank Arellanes. He walked Danny Murphy to get to me.

'When Murphy got down to first base, he said to Jake Stahl, 'That was a mistake walking me. That kid can hit the ball outta the park.'

'And on the first pitch to me, I hit it over the right field fence. When I got back to the bench Murphy said, 'Kid, you made Jake Stahl think I am the greatest prophet in baseball.' Then he told me what he had said.'

There are reams and reams of interesting recollections of the old A's in Baker's memory. How Doc Powers was his protecting guide; how he roomed with Stuffy McInnis; how Eddie Collins will always rate as the greatest of all second basemen in his mind even overshadowing Larry Lajoie; how he was almost scared to death as he took over third base from the great Jimmy Collins; how he was almost killed by a Walter Johnson pitch, and how Connie Mack wears more 'stars in his baseball crown than any man who ever lived.'

Ty Cobb, despite the famous spiking sprees, was never an enemy off the field; Eddie Plank was the finest left-hander he ever saw; Chief Bender, the 'dearest friend' anyone could ever have, and Christy Mathewson 'a wonderful pitcher and wonderful gentleman.'

Baker enjoyed chortling over a famous incident in the 1911 World Series. When Baker hit the home run off Marquard to win the second game, 3-1, Matty, writing a first-person narrative in a New York newspaper, took Rube to task for pitching Baker a high fast ball.

'Everyone knows Baker can't hit a low curve,' Matty pontificated.

'That's where I always got the laugh,' Frank recalled. 'It was the next day in New York Matty pitched against Jack Coombs. Matty had that wonderful fadeaway- the pitch they now throw a screwball. He got two strikes on me and instead of throwing the fadeaway he tried a low, outside curve ball. And I hit that one over the right field fence. The very pitch he said I couldn't hit and the pitch he thought Marquard should have thrown me.'

The day Baker received news of his election to the Hall of Fame was the happiest of his life, but the saddest was when he was sold to the Yankees.

'I've often thought of what Eddie Collins said when he was traded to the White Sox,' Baker recalled. 'Even though he became manager of the White Sox he said, 'They could take a lot of money off my contract if I could go back and play for Connie Mack.'

'And that's what I said when they told me I was being sent to New York.

' 'Just give me less money and let me play here,' was all I could think of saying.' "

-Frank Yuetter, Philadelphia Bulletin (Baseball Digest, May 1955)

1955 Yankee Farmhand of the Past: Mayo Smith

HERE'S WHO IS MAYO SMITH

He Wasn't Unkown To Phils' Brass

"This was in Baltimore's old Oriole Park, back in 1942, during the era of International League baseball in the Maryland city. The Buffalo Bisons were inflicting cruel punishment on the Orioles, and when the game reached the ho-hum stage the occupants of the press coop atop the rachitic grandstand began a fanning bee.

Present that day was Ben Sankey, once an infielder with Pittsburgh, who had just finished a long hitch in the International with Montreal. Ben remarked that he felt like an old fire horse that has been retired to pasture, and somebody asked him whether he'd like to return to the game as a manager.

'No,' Sankey replied. 'I don't have the touch. But down there,'- he pointed to a Buffalo player hefting a bat in the on-deck circle- 'is a fellow who has it. Some day he'll be managing in the majors.'

'You mean Mayo Smith?' a guy said. 'Migosh, Ben, he's a nice fellow and all that, and I guess he knows baseball. But manage in the majors? Why, he may not even get there as a player. He's been knocking around in this league for six years, and he's running out of time.'

Sankey was adamant. 'I don't care whether Mayo never plays a game in the majors,' he declared. 'He'll be managing up there, though. On a guess, I'd say in about ten years.'

As things turned out, Sankey was three years off with his forecast, but nevertheless qualified for a seat on the Delphic bandwagon. For Mayo Smith, after following a tortuous path through the boondocks, has arrived in the big time as manager of the Philadelphia Phillies.

At 40, the big (six feet, 180 pounds), ruggedly handsome Smith can look back on a succession of experiences that read like the story line of a soap opera. Mayo was 30 when given his one and only whirl in the majors as a player. 'I lasted,' he says, 'only long enough to have a cup of coffee.' He was stricken by the rheumatic fever which first threatened his life, then seemed certain to take him out of baseball for keeps. He nearly lost his family in a flood. But despite these and other vicissitudes, he kept bouncing back with a resiliency which may stand him in good stead as boss of the Phillies.

It is baring no secret to state that a man who parks the back of his lap in the manager's chair in the Philadelphia clubhouse is occupying one of the hottest seats in baseball. Smith is the fourth to perch there since the beginning of the 1952 season. Eddie Sawyer, who led the Phillies to their first pennant in 35 years, got the heave-ho in June, 1952; his successor, Steve  O'Neill, hung around until last July, and Terry Moore, the next in line, was unseated after the 1954 campaign. A story goes that when Moore took over, an unidentified member of the team declaimed: 'We got rid of Sawyer and O'Neill, and we'll get rid of this guy, too.'

Very likely, this quote is apocryphal, but there is no gainsaying that the Phillies present one of baseball's most enigmatic problems. Here's an outfit which, five years ago, was one of the National League's brightest young teams of recent memory. But instead of improving, as many a deep thinker figured it would, it faded. In almost any gathering place in Philadelphia, you can hear year-round discussions of the reasons for the team's recent decline; the one advanced most frequently is that the Phils are overpaid, overstuffed and have no respect for authority.

So you sit down with Mayo Smith and you put it to him. After all, he is a comparative unknown, stepping into a situation that stymied such former major league stars as O'Neill and Moore. In fact, when Smith's appointment was announced by the Phillies last October, practically every fan in Philadelphia asked the same question: 'Who's Mayo Smith?' You tell Smith these things, and you ask him how he intends to handle the club.

He makes no speech, recites no bromides. He simply looks you in the eye and says quietly: 'I'm going to run it.' He doesn't emphasize the first person pronoun, and his tone conveys no threat. But you come away with the impression that Smith, whose forte wherever he has gone as a player or manager has been his everlasting hustle, could be the man to restore the Phillies to the ranks of up-and-at-'em ball clubs.

The Phillies' top brass didn't just reach into a hat and come up with Smith. As long ago as 1949, Roy Hamey, who served in the New York Yankees' front office before his appointment as general of the Phils last spring, was impressed by Smith's work as a freshman manager in the Yankee farm system. Last season, when Mayo managed Birmingham of the Southern Association, Johnny Nee, the personnel director of the Phillies, observed him closely over a period of weeks. When the Phils decided not to renew Terry Moore's contract, Hamey, with the permission of George Weiss, the Yankee major domo, approached Smith.

'I had no idea that I was being considered for the job until Roy called me after the World Series,' Smith says. 'There wasn't anything particularly dramatic about it. Hamey asked me whether I'd consider managing the Phillies. I said yes. That's all there was to it.'

Mayo can't remember the time when he didn't want to be a ball player. But, despite the feelings of Ben Sankey and others who had played with or against him in the early phases of his minor league career that some day Smith would become a manager, Mayo himself gave little thought to piloting until he was nearing the end of the trail as a player.

'I was playing under Jim Turner (now the Yankee pitching coach) at Portland, in the Pacific Coast League, in 1947,' Smith recalls. 'One day Jim asked me whether I ever had thought of becoming a manager. I said no.

' 'Well,' Jim said, 'I think you ought to consider it.' I thought it over and decided that Jim had something there. From then on, I haunted Turner, trying to learn all I could about handling pitchers. Jim was a wonderful teacher. Also, he did more than teach me. When he left Portland after the 1948 season to go with the Yankees, he recommended me for a manager's job in the Yankee organization.'

By then, Smith was a veteran of 16 seasons in baseball, dating from the time when, as an 18-year-old, he signed with Toronto of the International League. Born Jan. 17, 1915, at New London, Mo., he was christened Edward Mayo Smith, but except for his signature on legal documents, never has used his first name.

The 'Mayo' derives from the fact that, just before his birth, his maternal grandparents had returned from undergoing checkups at the famous Mayo Brothers Clinic and were so high in its praises that it was decided the name be included in the new arrival's tag.

The only child of Frederick and Eva Lake Smith, Mayo lived his first 11 years in Missouri, and one of his earliest memories is that of playing baseball. Then Frederick Smith, a farmer, decided to move to Lake Worth, Fla., to become a butcher, and it was there that young Mayo began to blossom as an athlete. His father, who died a few years ago, encouraged him, and by the time Mayo entered high school he was a multi-sport performer.

At Lake Worth High he is remembered as a better than average student and an athlete good enough to have attracted several college scholarship offers. An end in football, a consistent scorer in basketball and a third baseman in baseball, Mayo reached the end of his high school career in 1933 with a problem.

Should he accept one of the scholarship offers and continue his education? Or should he sign a contract offered him by Toronto? Dan Howley, the former Cincinnati and St. Louis Browns' manager, who was skipper of the Maple Leafs, had been on Mayo's trail for nearly two years. Howley had been touted on Smith by a West Palm Beach resident named Jack Gorham, and when Dan himself dropped by for a look, he liked what he saw. Smith was a graceful 168-pounder who batted left-handed, threw right-handed and ran well.

Mayo talked the problem over with his parents, and out of the confab came the decision that, inasmuch as the youngster wanted more than anything else to be a major league ball player, he should lose no time setting out toward that goal. So Smith signed with Toronto.

'It was the day after my graduation,' he remembers. 'I was given a $500 bonus and a contract calling for $250 a month. By today's standards, that was peanuts. But, remember, this was in the heart of the depression. I considered myself a very fortunate young fellow.'

For the remainder of the season, Mayo gave the heat treatment to benches throughout the International League. It was Howley's contention that the boy would learn more from the Maple League dugout than by playing regularly in a league of lower classification. 'Next year,' he told Mayo, 'we'll send you out. But right now I want you to watch and learn. All told, Smith got into 13 games, mostly as a pinch hitter and a pinch runner, winding up with a batting average of .103.

The following spring Howley announced that thenceforth Smith would be an outfielder. The kid had trouble making the bunt play from third base, but he was fleet and could throw, and Howley decided that he should make capital of these assets. Dan turned Mayo over to Harry Rice, the veteran outfielder who had wound up his major league career at Cincinnati the previous season, and Mayo proved an apt pupil.

Farmed out to Wilmington, N.C., of the Piedmont League, Mayo batted .284 in 1934, upped his average to .315 the following year. He also covered center field like the well-known tent, and when he went to spring training with Toronto in 1936, he figured to stick.

'But it turned out to be a jinx year' Smith says. 'I had a good spring, but Toronto was overstocked with outfielders, so I was shipped out again.' Back to the Piedmont League went Mayo- this time to Durham, N.C., where he batted close to .400 during the first six weeks. Then, diving for a sinking line drive one day, he broke his left shoulder. Sidelined for 11 weeks, he found it difficult to regain his timing at the plate, finished with a .217 batting mark.

Nevertheless, Toronto recalled him in 1937, and Mayo nailed down a steady job, which was his for three seasons. His best effort was the .293 average he compiled in 1937. In the winter of 1939-40, the Leafs traded him to Buffalo for an outfielder named Johnny Tyler. Steve O'Neill, who managed the Bisons at the time, still talks about that transaction.

'It was,' O'Neill has said, 'the best deal I made in my three years at Buffalo, and one of the best of my career.'

Before reporting to the Bison camp, Smith made another type of deal for himself. Since high school days in Lake Worth he had kept company with pretty Louise Otto; at this stage, he and Louise decided to make it permanent. They were married March 10, 1940, and now have two children, Judith Ann, 12, and Fred, 4.

It is doubtful whether Buffalo ever has had a more popular player than Smith proved to be. The customers liked his bear-down attitude and the seemingly effortless manner in which he patrolled his post. Bucky Harris, the Buffalo manager in 1944, probably best expressed local sentiment about Mayo's defensive ability.

'I just thought of a perfect game,' Harris remarked one night after the Bisons had won a loose contest. 'That would be one in which 27 balls were hit somewhere near Mayo in center field.'

Until that 1944 season, Mayo's top batting performance for the Bisons was his .279 average of 1942. Then, under Harris, Mayo suddenly became the hitter Dan Howley expected him to become ten years earlier. He started fast, endured two short-lived slumps in midseason, and wound up with a .340 average to win the International League batting championship.

Throughout the season, Mayo had trouble with his arches. He wears size 12 1/2 shoes, and when the arches on dogs of that size kick up, they really howl. Yet Mayo missed only four games all year. He would go home immediately after a game to soak his feet for hours in a pain-relieving solution. It is now a family joke that Mayo ate most of his meals with his feet in a tub of water. Now and then Louise would urge him to take a week's rest, lest the arches cave in altogether. But Mayo always replied: 'What's a little pain when you're hitting and the team is winning.'

In November, 1944, Smith got the break for which he had been striving. At the annual major league draft meeting, the Philadelphia Athletics selected Mayo, paying Buffalo $7,500 for him. But before he was able to report to the A's training camp the next spring, a blow fell.

On Feb. 5, 1945, Mayo was struck down by a rheumatic fever. It was no mere touch of the illness. It was the real thing, with all its malevolence, and for two weeks, as Smith lay helpless in a Buffalo hospital bed, it was touch and go. Then the crisis passed and Mayo, still a very sick man, began to talk of his future.

His doctors told him that it would be better if he never attempted to play ball again. When Mayo insisted that he wanted to remain in the game, the medicos relented slightly. Perhaps in 1946, they told him, he might test himself. But playing that year was out of the question.

Accordingly, Smith informed the A's that he desired to apply for voluntary retirement. There followed a correspondence in which the A's expressed the intention of keeping Mayo's name on their active roster, in the hope that he might see his way clear to joining the club at some time during the season.

The upshot was that Smith, after a long convalescence, dropped in at what then was Shibe Park early in June to talk things over with Connie Mack. He had made an astonishing physical comeback but was still a long way from the condition expected of a major league player. His doctors had okayed his return to baseball, with the proviso that he undergo daily medical checkups to guard against the recurrence of the disease.

'Looking back,' Mayo says, 'I realize I had no business trying to play that year. But Mr. Mack said he wanted me, and when I gave him the figure I'd expect for playing, he agreed to it. So I signed.'

On June 12, Mayo began working out, and four days later he was in the A's lineup. It would make a nice touch to be able to report that he became an overnight sensation, but he was something less than that. His vitality sapped by his illness, Smith limped through the remainder of the season, batting .212 in 73 games.

It came as no surprise when the A's traded Smith and pitcher Steve Gerkin to Portland after the season for a pitcher named Wendell Mosser. Mayo played that 1946 season for the Beavers, batting .249. When Jim Turner took over as manager the next year, Smith took a new lease on his baseball life.

'Jim told me to disregard that .249 year,' Mayo says. ' 'This year,' he says, 'you're going to be a .300 hitter.' ' Smith must have taken the prediction seriously, for he finished with .311. He also kept an observer's eye on Turner's managerial methods, learning all he could about working with pitchers.

The 1948 season stands out in Smith's memory, not so much because it was his last as a player in the high minors, but because of a harrowing experience involving his wife and daughter. You may recall that on May 30, 1948, a flood swept over a vast residential section of Portland, wreaking death and destruction. The Smith home was in the affected area.

'The Beavers played in Seattle that day,' Mayo says, 'and immediately after the double-header, we flew back to Portland. When we landed at the Portland airport, I learned that Louise and Judith Ann, who was then five, had been reported missing. You can imagine the feeling of helplessness that overwhelms you at such a time.

'I jumped into a cab and told the driver to take me as close as he could to the flood area. On the way there, just on a hunch, I stopped for a moment at the home of a friend to learn what I could about the situation. And there were Louise and the little girl, all battered and cut and bruised. They had clung to a rooftop for hours until they were rescued. We lost our house, our car and our clothes, except those we were wearing, but the only thing that mattered was that Louise and Judith Ann were saved.'

After the 1948 campaign, Turner recommended Smith to the Yankees as a manager. Mayo asked for and drew his release from Portland and promptly was named to manage the Yankee farm club at Amsterdam, N.Y., in the Class B Canadian-American League. Doubling as pilot and outfielder, he brought Amsterdam home in fifth place in 1949, fourth in 1950. Coincidentally, Amsterdam was the first managerial post held by Eddie Sawyer en route to the job of bossing the Phillies.

In 1951, the Yankees assigned Smith to Norfolk, Va., of the Piedmont League. There, Mayo became a bench manager. Norfolk won the pennant that year, and again in 1952, causing the Yankees to mark him for advancement.

Assigned to handle Birmingham, Smith steered the Barons into fourth place in the Southern Association in 1953, got them up to third last year. Your agent can report that he overheard whisperings in pre-World Series bull sessions in New York last September to the effect that the Yankee brass looked upon Mayo as a possible successor to Casey Stengel when Ol' Case finally decided to retire. One thing was certain. The Yanks were pleased with Mayo's work.

'Anyone who can keep a smart and brainy baseball man like George Weiss happy over the years, as Smith did, has to be a good manager,' Wid Matthews, of the Chicago front office, has remarked.

Mayo and his family live in a pleasant home in Lake Worth during the off-seasons. The house is less than a chip shot from a golf course, which pleases Mayo considerably. His only hobby is golf. He shoots in the high 80's for the most part, although longtime golfing companions aver that it wouldn't take him long to get into the low 70's if he worked at it.

Until his appointment as boss of the Phils, Smith worked during the winter months as a carpet salesman in the Lake Worth area, did so well that he could have made a full-time job of it. 'But after the Phillies' job came along,' he says, 'I had to give it up. There were so many requests for me to make public appearances that I had little time to devote to the carpet business.'

An amiable, articulate man, Smith makes a fine impression at sports affairs. He has a light, deprecating way of talking about himself, as witness a remark at the banquet of Philadelphia sports writers.

'I enjoyed my meal here tonight,' Mayo said. 'The last time I was in Philadelphia, in 1945, I 'had a cup of coffee.' In ten years I seem to have made at least a little improvement.' "

-Edgar Williams, Baseball Digest, April 1955

"Mayo played in only 73 games during his major league career. But his ability to handle men and make the right decisions helped him become the Phillies' manager this year.

He managed Amsterdam for two years before leaving the active player list in 1950. He led Norfolk to the Piedmont League pennant in '51 and '52, then managed Birmingham the next two years."

-1955 Topps No. 130