Before the Machine. Mark J. Schmetzer
journeyman pitcher Ken Johnson—all worked beyond anyone’s expectations. The 1961 Reds improved twenty-six games over the 1960 squad, a remarkable turn-around in the era before free agency.
Cincinnati fans will forever condemn Bill DeWitt for the 1965 trade of Frank Robinson, but this book will help balance out the scales. The Reds don’t win the 1961 pennant without Bill DeWitt in the general manager’s chair. And the foundation he built in his tenure in Cincinnati from 1960 to 1966 ended a dismal sixteen-year stretch in the 1940s and ’50s, when the Reds only managed two winning seasons. DeWitt put the Reds on a winning track for four decades. Between 1961 and 2000 the Reds were the winningest team in the National League.
You’ll find all this and much more in Mark Schmetzer’s wonderfully crafted tribute to the 1961 Reds. The ragamuffins deserve it. Rally ’round the Reds, boys!
Greg Rhodes
Team Historian
Cincinnati Reds
introduction
At first glance, the 1961 National League schedule only looks like it was put together by somebody who had no idea of how to do it.
As it turned out, the league couldn’t have done a better job, especially giving the Reds two days off in the middle of the last week of the season. The team—the town, for that matter—needed every one of the forty-eight hours consumed by September 27 and 28 to recover from its biggest party since V-J Day marked the end of World War II sixteen years earlier.
Everybody in Cincinnati had much to celebrate on September 26, 1961, and they had plenty of time to prepare. The pressure to let off the steam had been building like beer in a shaken-up keg. One day earlier, on September 25, the Reds had flown to Chicago to play one game against the Cubs. Cincinnati, picked by most observers before the season to finish sixth in the National League in 1961, owned a four-game lead over the second-place Los Angeles Dodgers with four games left to play. The Dodgers, though, still had six games to play and remained mathematically alive. If they swept their last six games and the Reds lost their last four, Los Angeles would win the pennant. On the other hand, one more Reds’ win and one more Dodgers’ loss would complete what many in Cincinnati and around baseball would consider to be nothing short of a miracle.
It took only the next day the two teams played. The Reds beat the Cubs, 6–3, at Wrigley Field on Frank Robinson’s two-run homer to tie the game in the seventh inning and Jerry Lynch’s two-run homer to give Cincinnati a 5–3 lead in the eighth. Besides coming out of the bullpen to allow one hit with four strikeouts over the final three innings to get the win, relief pitcher Jim Brosnan drove in Robinson with an insurance run in the ninth, and the Reds immediately flew back to Cincinnati.
Meanwhile, the Dodgers had won the first game of a doubleheader in Pittsburgh, 5–3. The second game still was being played as the Reds plane landed at the airport in Northern Kentucky, where Cincinnati mayor Walt Bachrach and a group of fans greeted the returning heroes. More fans lined both sides of much of the bus route to downtown Cincinnati, creating a parade feeling, and an estimated 30,000 gathered at Fountain Square, making it nearly impossible for the team bus to move more than a few inches at a time.
“I’ll never forget that,” said pitcher Jim O’Toole, a Chicago native who had left his wife and their newborn son with family in Chicago. “That was the biggest thrill of my life, to leave the airport and parade down I-75 all the way to Fountain Square. People were rocking the bus—on top of the bus. We were all so excited.”
Everybody was monitoring the second game of the Dodgers-Pirates doubleheader, some with transistor radios. When Los Angeles left fielder Jim Gilliam flied out to Pittsburgh left fielder Bob Skinner at Forbes Field to wrap up an 8–0 Pirates win, the party was officially on. While giddy fans created pandemonium on Fountain Square, the Reds gathered for their own celebration in a room located by manager Fred Hutchinson at the Netherland Hilton hotel.
G.M. Bill DeWitt proudly displays a team photo.
“Hutch was up there singing some Frank Sinatra songs,” O’Toole recalled. “The players were having a great time.”
Earl Lawson, who covered the Reds for the Cincinnati Post & Times-Star, remembered the party as a “wing-ding” in his book Cincinnati Seasons—My 34 Years with the Reds.
“‘Earl, how in the hell did we do it,’” Lawson recalled being asked by third baseman Gene Freese upon arrival. “‘We’ve got the worst infield in baseball.’”
“It was a good question. His comment had considerable merit. Freese was a guy who could poke fun at himself.
“Freese stood on the bandstand that night and bellowed, ‘Hutch, I may have bobbled some groundballs, but I never let one get through me.’ Teammates howled as Freese opened his sport coat, revealing a plastic baseball which he had attached to his shirt front.”
Freese was a major reason the Reds were able to rise from the team that finished sixth in 1960 to a champion. The veteran journeyman and second-year first baseman Gordy Coleman turned in virtually identical seasons, each hitting twenty-six home runs and driving in eighty-seven—production that kept opposing teams from pitching around Frank Robinson, helping the outfielder turn in a season that led to him being named the NL’s Most Valuable Player.
Freese was one of several key players acquired in a series of shrewd moves made by first-year general manager William O. DeWitt, who could do almost nothing wrong that year. Virtually every move made by DeWitt, the living, breathing definition of a lifelong baseball man, paid off that year—and for many years down the road.
DeWitt didn’t exactly save the franchise for the city with that season. To say that would be, at best, a stretch. To say, however, that the season put back on track a franchise that had been foundering would be, at worst, defensible. To say that seeing the team confound the so-called experts by winning the championship summed up the times would be an underestimation.
The National League—indeed, Major League Baseball in general—was in a state of upheaval at that time. From that point of view, Cincinnati winning the pennant was almost to be expected.
More unexpected was the impact that season had on the franchise. Starting with that season, which ended with a 93–61 record and .604 winning percentage, the Reds were one of only two teams in Major League Baseball to finish over .500 at least nineteen times in the next twenty-one years. Starting in 1961 and going through 1981, Cincinnati finished below .500 only twice—in 1966 and 1971. Only the Baltimore Orioles match that run. The Orioles also finished under .500 twice—1962 and 1967. The Los Angeles Dodgers come the closest to sustaining that level of consistent excellence, but they finished under .500 four times in that span of time.
Not only was Cincinnati’s franchise back on healthy ground, but the seeds were being planted that would lead to the phenomenally successful 1970s. Infielders Pete Rose, Tony Perez, and Tommy Helms already were in the organization. First baseman Lee May would be signed out of high school that year. Outfielder Bernie Carbo and catcher Johnny Bench would be the team’s top two picks in the first amateur draft in 1965. Right-handed pitcher Gary Nolan would be the last number one pick of the DeWitt era, in 1966.
They all would play roles in making the Reds a dynasty in the 1970s that reminded veteran fans of earlier times—when teams were built for the long haul.
By the end of World War II, no sport at any level could match the popularity of Major League Baseball, a title that was so safe that its proprietors felt no need to slap a trademark on it, so it didn’t need to be capitalized. College football was popular, but there were so many colleges that the fan base was splintered, and the turnover in players was too frequent to allow fans to hold on to any specific star for long-term adoration. Pro football still was more than ten years away from the epic playoff game between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants that would allow it to grab a share of the national spotlight. Pro basketball didn’t even have a league until 1946 and only became the National Basketball Association when