Before the Machine. Mark J. Schmetzer
really a team with no stars.”
Clearly, something had to be done.
ONE
Makeover
By the end of the 1960 season, the only person who’d been involved with the Cincinnati franchise longer than Gabe Paul was the owner, Powel Crosley Jr., but only by a couple of years.
Crosley had purchased the Reds in 1934 at the urging of flamboyant general manager Larry MacPhail. When MacPhail left in 1936 to take over the Brooklyn Dodgers, Crosley replaced him with Warren C. Giles, business manager of the Rochester Red Wings of the Triple-A International League. Giles brought Paul with him from New York.
Paul was only in his mid-twenties, but he already had a decade’s worth of education in how to run a baseball team. He started as a Red Wings batboy at the age of ten. Six years later, he was helping cover the team for a Rochester newspaper as well as for The Sporting News, already highly regarded as “The Bible of Baseball.” Paul was eighteen years old in 1928 when Giles named him the team’s publicity director and twenty-four in 1934 when he was promoted to road secretary.
Paul took over as Cincinnati’s publicity director when he and Giles moved from Rochester. After serving in the Army during World War II, he returned to his familiar role and remained in it until 1951, when Giles became National League president and Paul was promoted to general manager.
The Reds were unable to win a championship during Paul’s ten years as general manager. In fact, they managed just two winning seasons—1956, when they finished third with a 91–63 record and 1957, when they went 80–74 and finished fourth.
Paul was named Major League Executive of the Year in 1956, the season in which the Reds reached seven figures in attendance for the first time in franchise history, but his record in trades as general manager was mixed. His best acquisition was outfielder Gus Bell from the Pittsburgh Pirates for three toss-away players shortly after the 1952 season. Bell became one of Cincinnati’s most consistent and popular players throughout the decade.
Paul also traded for pitchers Bob Purkey and Jim Brosnan and infielder Eddie Kasko, all solid performers through the late 1950s, and the club signed prospects such as outfielders Frank Robinson and Vada Pinson and pitchers Jim O’Toole, Jim Maloney, and Ken Hunt. Purkey won seventeen games in two of his first three seasons with the Reds, 1958 and 1960, while Kasko was named the team’s Most Valuable Player in 1960 and Brosnan established himself as a dependable relief pitcher.
Robinson burst onto the scene in 1956, tying what was the National League record for home runs by a rookie with thirty-eight while turning twenty-one years old during the season. Pinson, who was three years behind Robinson at McClymonds High School in Oakland, California, showed signs of stardom after being called up for good in 1959, but the pitching prospects still were developing as the 1960s approached.
Paul, after going through seven managers in his first eight and a half seasons, finally found his man in Fred Hutchinson, who replaced Mayo Smith during the All-Star break in 1959.
Other Paul deals didn’t work out as well. He traded power-hitting outfielder Wally Post, another player popular with fans, to the Philadelphia Phillies for left-handed pitcher Harvey Haddix after the 1957 season. Haddix spent just one season with the Reds, going 8–7, before being dealt to Pittsburgh with catcher and pinch-hitting specialist Smokey Burgess and fiery power-hitting third baseman Don Hoak for pitcher Whammy Douglas, utility player Jim Pendleton, and outfielders John Powers and Frank Thomas. None of the new Reds spent more than a year with the team, and Douglas didn’t even play a game for Cincinnati, while Haddix, Hoak, and Burgess all contributed to the Pirates’ 1960 World Series-championship season.
Thomas’s biggest contribution to the Reds was being part of the package sent to the Chicago Cubs on December 6, 1959, in a trade that brought left-handed relief pitcher Bill Henry to Cincinnati.
Paul’s contributions to the 1961 Reds are undeniable, but they had yet to yield anything by the end of the 1960 season, when he was pondering his own change of scenery. The owners of the fledgling Houston franchise, which was scheduled to start play in 1962, were looking for an experienced baseball man to run their operation. Paul, with his experience in several different areas, was an attractive candidate, and when the Colt 45s—later to be called the Astros—approached him during the 1960 season, he was more than intrigued. He announced his decision to leave Cincinnati for Texas on Monday, October 25.
“I met with the Houston people one week ago today, and I had no intention of taking the job,” Paul told reporters. “As the day wore on, I changed my mind.”
Paul made his decision while the aging Crosley, who turned seventy-four on September 18, was hospitalized in Savannah, Georgia. Giles, who had moved the National League offices to Cincinnati’s Carew Tower after taking over as president in 1951, helped with the search for a new general manager. It quickly led to Detroit, where another lifelong baseball man named Bill DeWitt was looking for a way out of his job as president and general manager of the Tigers.
William Orville DeWitt Sr.’s baseball roots ran even deeper than Gabe Paul’s. He started in 1916, at the age of thirteen, selling soda at St. Louis ballgames before becoming an office boy in the front office of the American League Browns, where he started learning the business from Branch Rickey.
Rickey, who is to baseball what Paul Brown is to football, practically invented many aspects of the game now taken for granted, everything from the framework of the farm system to batting helmets. He is most famous, of course, for tearing down baseball’s color barrier with the signing of Jackie Robinson.
When Rickey moved from the Browns to the Cardinals in 1917, DeWitt followed. While working for the Cardinals, he went to night school to study shorthand and typing, which led to being named Rickey’s secretary. DeWitt would go on to fill several jobs in the organization—ticket seller, ticket taker, scoreboard operator, concessionaire—and he handled the tickets for St. Louis’s first appearance in the World Series in 1926. At the same time, he was attending St. Louis University, Washington University, and St. Louis University Law School, all at night, and he eventually passed the Missouri bar examination in June 1931.
DeWitt eventually rose to the role of team treasurer before being named in 1936 an assistant vice president specializing in procuring players for the major- and minor-league teams, which allowed him to indulge his eye for talent. He spent less than a year in that job before returning to the perennially woebegone Browns as vice president and general manager in 1936, and in 1944 he put together the only team to win an American League championship while the franchise was located in St. Louis. The Browns lost to the Cardinals in a six-game World Series, but The Sporting News recognized DeWitt’s accomplishment by naming him Major League Executive of the Year.
The Browns couldn’t maintain the momentum of the mid-1940s and struggled in the shadow of the more successful Cardinals, who appeared in nine World Series and won six in the twenty-one-year span from 1926 through 1946 while sharing Sportsman’s Park with their American League counterparts. DeWitt displayed his taste for dramatic deals in November 1947 when he traded outfielder Vern Stephens and pitcher Jack Kramer to the Boston Red Sox for nine players and $310,000. The deal couldn’t lift the Browns out of the second division, which didn’t keep DeWitt and his brother, Charlie, who was working as the team’s traveling secretary, from scraping together enough money to purchase controlling interest in the Browns in 1949. The DeWitts sold the franchise in 1951 to a group led by the flamboyant Bill Veeck, but Bill DeWitt stayed in the front office until Veeck was forced to sell the team, which was moved to Baltimore and became the Orioles for the 1954 season.
DeWitt landed in New York as assistant general manager of the Yankees for two years before taking over administration of a fund designed to help needy minor league teams in 1956. He spent four years in that job, but he never lost the urge to run a ballclub and put together a contender, so when a group of investors who admittedly knew little about baseball bought the Detroit Tigers, they turned operation of the franchise over to DeWitt.
He wasted little time indulging his own flair for flamboyance while trying to improve a team that finished two games