ADVERSITY MOLDED MAYO SMITH AS A PILOT
Illness, Losing Streak Aid Him
"Edward Mayo Smith, new manager of the Cincinnati Redlegs, believes a man learns more managing in adversity than when he is in the throes of success.
Smith, a rugged, balding man of 43, learned this through the harshest of experiences. What he went through was a living hell. He survived baseball fire and brimstone.
After six years of minor league managerial apprenticeship, in his twenty-third consecutive season of professional baseball, Mayo, then 40 years of age, was blessed suddenly with the opportunity to lead a big league team. The Phils' general manager, Roy Hamey, had plucked him out of the New York Yankees' farm system to manage the Philadelphia National League club.
This was in 1955. Mayo, who had played only a year in the majors himself, was taking over a club whose nucleus consisted principally of the same ball players who, as Whiz Kids five years earlier, had captured the pennant. They had gone through two managers since 1950, however, while finishing fifth, third and fourth in the post-pennant years.
Mayo enjoyed a pleasant spring period while getting acquainted with his major league charges, and had a so-so first week as the championship season began. Suddenly, everything went wrong. 'We started to lose and I just couldn't stop the slide,' Smith related to a visitor to his quarters during the World Series.
'We lost and lost and lost,' Mayo continued. 'We made terrible mistakes. Mental errors as well as physical errors. In seven of the 13 games we dropped, we led in the eighth or ninth innings. Then something would go wrong. Believe me it was an awful thing to live through.'
'What did you do about, Mayo?' the visitor asked.
'After every loss I'd go into the clubhouse ready to blow my top. Coming off the field, I'd tell myself I'm really going to let these guys have it. Then I'd look at at the clubhouse scene and I'd see my players were suffering as much as I was. They'd sit there in front of their lockers staring down or into space. Nobody was having any fun.
'I'd ask myself then, Mayo, if you blow your top now, with these men feeling this bad, what good could you possibly do?'
'Each time I'd have to admit it would do no good at all. I'd bite my tongue. The next day we would go over our mistakes of the day before calmly and hope to do better.'
Somehow Mayo's Phils contrived to find new ways to blow games- 13 of them in succession.
'Did you sleep well in that time, Mayo?'
'No, I liked to died, but suddenly it straightened itself out and we won a game or two. WE weren't hot or cold, but we got out of that awful streak.'
Then in late July or August, the club put together a winning streak of 11 games and began a climb toward the first division. The team that once stood last, 17 games below .500, finished all-square with a 77-77 record and fourth place.
Mayo won't quite say it this way, but it's obvious that it was that depressing period at the start of his major league managerial career that helped to mold him into a solid manager, who was able to stay with the Phils until July of last year when they parted company. Solid enough to get this second chance in Cincinnati.
Mayo's Cincinnati predecessor, Birdie Tebbetts, had told a story during the past summer about baseball sympathy. The details were repeated to manager Smith, who recalled the incident that involved him.
'Yes, right in the midst of the losing streak, we're in Cincinnati and one evening long before the game the Reds' clubhouse boy came into the visitors' clubhouse to say Birdie would like to see me in his office. I didn't know what to expect, but I went,' Mayo chuckled.
'Birdie was very nice about it. He said he knew what I was going through and advised me to keep my chin up. He said he was doing it because he had known some depressing periods in his first year himself and he had welcomed a kind word. I admitted my spirits were real low and I thanked him.
'Well, when we got into that winning streak later on Birdie brought the Reds into Philadelphia and you know what? We knocked 'em off five straight. They'd beaten us seven straight at one period. It was a miserable way to repay Tebbetts for his kindness but, as a result of that series, we finished fourth and the Reds finished fifth.'
'Yes,' a man said, 'and that taught Birdie a lesson, too. He said no matter how much he liked an opponent he would never commiserate with him again as long as he was on the opposite side. In baseball, you live by only one rule- and that is to win.'
The visitor's next question was a blunt one. 'Mayo, you must know that Jimmie Dykes finished the season as interim manager of the Reds with a great deal of success and public acclaim. There was a 'ground swell' in Cincinnati and other Redleg rooting points for Dykes to get the 1959 appointment. Do you feel this puts you on a hot seat right off the bat?'
'Yes, I've heard,' Mayo said. 'Dykes did a great job. I can understand the feeling for him. But I can't start out this new responsiblity worrying about the reaction of the fans to my appointment.
'One way to please the fans is by winning. That's the essence of this business. You have to win. I want to worry about improving the power and the pitching and whatever else we need to win, and maybe go all the way. I think we've got the nucleus of a good ball club. My problem is to develop a winner. If I do, then the people will be on my side. If I lose, then I expect I'll have to take the consequences.'
'Seems to me,' general manager Gabe Paul spoke up, 'if there's any blame, I'm the guy, not Mayo, who should get it.'
As noted before, Mayo Smith played but one season in the big show- that was 1945. It was a season marked by sheer mediocrity at the plate; his batting average was .212. We wanted to know more about that season and how it was that a man with such limited experience eventually became a big league manager.
It developed that illness had something to do with it. Mayo had been a minor leaguer for 12 years- most of that time in Triple-A ball in Toronto and Buffalo in the International League. In 1944, playing for the Buffalo Bisons, he batted .340 and won the league batting championship.
That winter, at the annual baseball draft meeting, Smith was drafted by the Philadelphia Athletics as an outfielder at age 30, to play for Connie Mack in the 1945 season. Mr. Mack wrote him and said he would be given a chance to make the team.
But it was in that same winter that Mayo became seriously ill. Doctors diagnosed his case as rheumatic fever and prescribed long bed rest.
'I was on my back for three months,' Smith recalls. 'I figured I had blown my major league chance forever. In fact, the doctors told me not to consider playing ball again. Every ball player, I guess, thinks about managing some time, but I hadn't actually given the idea much serious thought. I had lots of time to think.
'I asked myself a question. 'Mayo, what are you going to do now? A minor leaguer is no kid at 30. If this game means as much to you as you've always thought, you'd better give some serious thought to a career as a manager.' That was the beginning.'
Strangely enough, Mayo did recover in time to spend about half the season with the A's, although he missed all of spring training. It was 1945; the war was still on; baseball was digging down to the bottom of the manpower barrel for talent.
The .212 batting average, however, was a bar to his future as a big leaguer. Mayo, who studied Connie Mack's managerial methods, now that he had decided inwardly to pursue a pilot's career, was sold to Portland of the Pacific Coast League the next winter.
At Portland, the manager was Jim Turner, former National League league pitcher, whom Smith had known as a rival player in the International League. Another Coast League manager was Casey Stengel, who had the Oakland club.
Turner liked Smith from the start and began to give him little extra duties. They were together for three years and by the third season Smith had become an unofficial player-coach for the Portland Beavers.
At that time, the Yankees had a loose working agreement with Portland and actually had assigned Turner to the club as manager. It is part of the Yankee system to ask for recommendations among its farm managers for possible managerial talent among the players.
It was Turner, who advised George Weiss, general manager of the Yankees, that Mayo Smith had managerial promise. At the end of the 1948 season, Stengel was named manager of the Yankees and invited Turner to become his pitching coach.
The Yankees kept title to Mayo and asked him to become player-manager of the Amsterdam, New York, club of the Canadian-American League. His pilot's career was launched in 1949 at age 34.
During the World Series, a reporter sought out Turner and asked the basis of his recommdation of Mayo Smith as a manager.
'From the beginning,' said Jim, 'Mayo was a good listener. When Mayo talked, he asked the right kind of question. He knew about outfielding, but he wanted to know more about pitchers, catchers and infielders.'
In the winter time, Smith would go back to Buffalo on occasion since he had played there four years. Usually, he would find a way to visit the town's most famous baseball resident, Joe McCarthy, longtime manager of the Yankees, and consult with him about managing.
'Another managerial privilege,' Mayo recalls, 'was serving on the faculty of the Yankees' preseason school at Lake Wales, Florida. I got to study Stengel's methods closely.
On this phase, Turner adds a thought. 'When I saw him operate in our school,' Jim says, 'I kind of thought myself proud of having picked Mayo. My impression of him as a manager was that he knew what to do when the game was on. He thought situations out very well.'
Smith managed in the Yankee chain for six years, the last two for Birmingham in the Class AA Southern Association. After the 1954 season in which the Birmingham Barons finished third, he went to the Phils.
Now the Redlegs expect him to 'think situations out very well.' "
Si Burick, Dayton News (Baseball Digest, February 1959)