Before the Machine. Mark J. Schmetzer
the 1961 AL batting championship and spend fifteen years with the Tigers, playing a key role in their 1968 World Series championship.
Five days after acquiring Cash, DeWitt and the even more flamboyant Frank Lane, general manager of the Cleveland Indians, hatched an eye-popping trade in which 1959 batting champion Harvey Kuenn went to the Indians for 1959 home run champion Rocky Colavito. Lane and DeWitt later collaborated in August on the only trade of managers in major league history, with Detroit skipper Jimmy Dykes taking over for Joe Gordon in Cleveland.
The deals made headlines, but did little to improve the teams. DeWitt’s Detroit team lost five more games in 1960 than it had in 1959, and his employment circumstances had gone similarly downhill, recalled his son, William O. DeWitt Jr.
“He was in Detroit, and he’d gone up there as president, general manager, chief executive officer,” said DeWitt, who followed his father into baseball and retraced the family’s roots back to St. Louis as chairman of the board and general partner of the Cardinals. “A group had bought the team, and they didn’t have any baseball background. They wanted a baseball man. They said, ‘You’ll have ultimate authority to run the business.’ Then, after the first year, John Fetzer bought the other guys out and became the controlling partner. He said to my father, ‘I still want you to be the GM, but I’m going to run the team and oversee everything.’ My father said, ‘I understand, but if I get another opportunity, I’m going to take it, because that’s what I signed up for.’”
The younger DeWitt, who turned twenty in the summer of 1961, was a student at Yale University at the time. He recalls his father being approached by Cincinnati banker Tom Conroy, who was secretary and treasurer of the Reds.
“He knew my father,” DeWitt Jr. said. “I can’t tell you the background, but when Gabe Paul left, I think he suggested to Powel Crosley that my father could be available and if so, that he should be the guy who should come and replace Gabe Paul.”
Giles, who had known DeWitt since the two first met in Rickey’s office in St. Louis in 1920, had the same recommendation. At least two other men were rumored to be interested in the job—Cedric Tallis, general manager of the minor league team in Seattle, and Dewey Soriano, president of the Pacific Coast League in which Seattle played—and Giles and Crosley spent two days discussing the situation. In the end, Crosley liked DeWitt’s extensive major league experience.
“We discussed the job,” Crosley told reporters on November 2. “I didn’t make up my mind until this morning. I feel that DeWitt is the most qualified man for the job.”
Despite his long career in baseball and his accomplishments, the DeWitt name wasn’t well-known, at least in Cincinnati.
“I had no clue who DeWitt was,” said pitcher Jim O’Toole, who made his off-season home in Cincinnati. “I didn’t realize he was hanging around with Bill Veeck. He’d been around forever, but he was a very intelligent financial genius.”
How shrewd was DeWitt? While he was getting paid by the Reds to be the team’s general manager, he was still getting paid by the Tigers to not work for them.
“None of the owners knew anything about baseball,” DeWitt said at the time. “Fetzer wanted to be president, which he now is, and he used me against Harvey Hansen, who was president. That didn’t help me a lot with Hansen. Making things worse was the fact that the Detroit farm system hadn’t produced anyone worthwhile in seven years. When Fetzer moved in as president, he wanted to put me in cold storage for two years as his assistant, but I had a contract as president rendering me $100,000 in three years. When the call came from Cincinnati last October 25, I settled the remainder of my Detroit contract for 50 percent, so I will be paid $16,666 a year by the Detroit club until November 1, 1962.”
DeWitt stepped into a situation desperate for stability. Crosley’s illness had allowed questions regarding the franchise’s future in Cincinnati to linger. The latest example was a newspaper report a week earlier that Harry Wismer, a flamboyant New York broadcasting entrepreneur who already owned the American Football League New York Titans, was trying to form a syndicate to buy the Reds.
“If we get the club, I’ll keep it in Cincinnati,” Wismer said. “We have learned there is a chance the Reds may be for sale, and we have been working on this for a couple of weeks. I think if Powel Crosley gives us an even break in negotiations, we will wind up with the franchise.”
Wismer dangled the possibility of Cincinnati getting an AFL franchise as a sweetener. Paul had approached Wismer on Crosley’s behalf about Cincinnati getting an AFL franchise.
“Things were pretty well set for the football franchise, but Powel backed out at the last minute,” said Wismer, who knew his promises about keeping the baseball team in Cincinnati would do little to comfort local fans. They easily recalled that New York was supporting two National League teams as few as four years earlier and might like the Reds at least as much as the Mets, who were due to start playing in 1962.
“Why would we want to move out of Cincinnati?” Wismer said. “Cincinnati is a wonderful, rich, aggressive baseball town. All it needs is for some management to put money into the operation, and it will really go places.”
That man, however, was not Wismer. He didn’t have enough money to operate the Titans. The situation grew so dire that making payrolls grew iffy. The other AFL owners, realizing the league needed a successful team in New York, arranged for Wismer to sell the team to a more financially stable owner. The team was renamed the Jets.
Rumors about the impending departure of the Reds to another city were common, according to Jim Ferguson, who shared coverage of the Reds for the Dayton Daily News with sports editor Si Burick. Ferguson even wrote some of the stories based on those rumors.
“It was very much a fear, whether it could really happen or not,” Ferguson said. “The fear was losing a team to New York. Baseball wanted an NL team in New York, and the Reds obviously weren’t a team drawing a lot of people. They weren’t drawing any people, so there were all these rumors. It wasn’t every day, but stories would pop up that somebody in New York wanted to buy the team.
“There were lots of stories in 1959 and 1960—especially 1960—about the Continental League. They were going to form the Continental League, and one of the strongest guys was Bill Shea in New York. That forced expansion, and when the Mets were awarded a franchise, that definitely eased off the situation with the Reds.
“Another factor against the Reds leaving was that Powel Crosley was the owner. Crosley, as a local guy, wasn’t going to let this team leave Cincinnati.”
DeWitt had to put possible changes in ownership on the back burner in favor of working on turning around the fortunes of the team on the field. His first step was to talk with Hutchinson.
“I’m going to call Hutch,” he told reporters. “I want him to come to Cincinnati next week. We’ll sit down and discuss who the club needs to strengthen itself for next year.”
That comment immediately snuffed out any suspicion that DeWitt would bring in another manager—somebody with whom he was more familiar, maybe somebody he’d worked with in the past. That was a practice common among general managers. DeWitt might have been tempted to bring in Luke Sewell, his pennant-winning manager in 1944 with the Browns, but Sewell had already failed in just short of three seasons in Cincinnati. He led the Reds to back-to-back sixth-place finishes in 1950 and 1951 before being fired by Paul with the 1952 team 40–61 and headed for another sixth-place finish.
“It was different in those days,” Ferguson said. “It wasn’t an automatic thing, when you had a new general manager, that you had to have a new manager and farm director. There was less of that in those days. Hutch was pretty well established at that point. He was a very solid baseball guy and a very strong person. That team didn’t have a lot of leaders on the field.”
DeWitt Jr. wasn’t surprised that his father stuck with Hutchinson.
“He had heard good things about Hutch,” DeWitt Jr. said. “I think he wanted to get the lay of the land here, and I know that his view was that Hutch was a good