People talk about coaching trees in other sports, but I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t hear much about managerial trees.\u00c2\u00a0 Leonard Koppett and Bill James did touch on the subject in their seminal books on managers.\u00c2\u00a0 By the way, there is a new book on managers that just came out.\u00c2\u00a0 It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s by a longtime friend of mine named Chris Jaffe.\u00c2\u00a0 I read most of it as he prepared it and it is outstanding.<\/p>\n
This past week we celebrated Billy Southworth\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s birthday.\u00c2\u00a0 Southworth was just elected to the Hall of Fame a couple of years back, but he isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t all that well known.\u00c2\u00a0 Nevertheless, he led an interesting life.\u00c2\u00a0 I wrote about him for a book on Boston baseball in 1948, but some of the more interesting tidbits were left out.\u00c2\u00a0 His daughter told me that he grew up with Eddie Rickenbacker.\u00c2\u00a0 The World War I ace was tight with one of his brothers.\u00c2\u00a0 His older brother killed the last passenger pigeon in the wild.\u00c2\u00a0 And as a kid on the Nebraska plains, his family knew Buffalo Bill Cody.\u00c2\u00a0 Cody may have nicknamed young Southworth “Billy the Kid” after William Bonney.\u00c2\u00a0 As far as I know this is the only connection between baseball and the mythical West.\u00c2\u00a0 (Roger Kahn claims that Jesse James and Hoss Radbourn were buds, but I never saw any other evidence of this).\u00c2\u00a0 Do people still know who Buffalo Bill is or has he slipped out of our memory?\u00c2\u00a0 He started as a rider on the Pony Express and later in life starred in his Wild West show.\u00c2\u00a0 Introduced the world to sharp-shooting Annie Oakley.\u00c2\u00a0 Annie Oakley is archaic baseball jargon for a free pass; either to a game or to first base.\u00c2\u00a0 But I digress.<\/p>\n
Billy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s son, also named Billy, was also a baseball player.\u00c2\u00a0 Never made it to the majors, but he was an MVP of the International League.\u00c2\u00a0 He was one of the first athletes to enlist in the military during World War II. \u00c2\u00a0He became a pilot in the Army Air Corps, flew enough missions over Europe to get rotated home, only to die in a crash right after takeoff from LaGuardia.\u00c2\u00a0 One of his navigators was a guy named Jon Schueler.\u00c2\u00a0 Schueler borrowed Southworth Jr.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s diary and never gave it back.\u00c2\u00a0 The parts of it that I read reminded me of Catch-22<\/em>.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 At the time he wanted to become a writer.\u00c2\u00a0 But he wound up becoming a painter instead and hung out with folks like Mark Rothko.\u00c2\u00a0 The New York School was the name hung on that clique.\u00c2\u00a0 I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t say that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m a huge fan of Abstract Expressionism.\u00c2\u00a0 I am one of those philistines who got a chuckle out of Tom Wolfe\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s The Painted Word<\/em>.<\/p>\n Southworth went on to a baseball career.\u00c2\u00a0 Started with Cleveland then moved on to Pittsburgh, the Boston Braves, the Giants, and the Cardinals.\u00c2\u00a0 He played for John McGraw and Hugo Bezdek, among other people.\u00c2\u00a0 McGraw was an inspiration on how to handle players for Billy.\u00c2\u00a0 He would go on to do the opposite.\u00c2\u00a0 McGraw was a hard-ass.\u00c2\u00a0 Billy wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t.\u00c2\u00a0 Bezdek was actually a football coach that the Pirates brought in.\u00c2\u00a0 But he did sprout a few branches off of his managerial tree.\u00c2\u00a0 Deacon McKechnie and Southworth were the most prominent examples.\u00c2\u00a0 His training methods may have been an inspiration for Southworth\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s regimented spring camps during his managerial career.\u00c2\u00a0 McGraw had tough camps, too, but Bezdek\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s players looked forward to the games because they were easier than the practices.\u00c2\u00a0 Another player who was a teammate of Southworth\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s during his career was a failed dental student.\u00c2\u00a0 Casey Stengel was his name.\u00c2\u00a0 He and Southworth were like brothers from another mother.\u00c2\u00a0 If you took each of their best years, you might have the best managerial career ever.\u00c2\u00a0 Both liked to platoon.\u00c2\u00a0 Both were born west of the Mississippi less than three years apart back when it was still The West.\u00c2\u00a0 Both were outfielders and Bill James list each as the other’s most similar player.<\/p>\n Southworth was an influence on Earl Weaver, who second-guessed him as a teenager in the stands of Sportsman\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Park. \u00c2\u00a0In fact, there were a number of future managers from the Saint Louis area who were around for Southworth\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s teams.\u00c2\u00a0 Whitey Herzog and Dick Williams are two others.\u00c2\u00a0 (But Whitey was a Yankee fan; a front-runner.)\u00c2\u00a0 Players he managed that later became managers themselves include Del Crandall, Alvin Dark, Jim Elliot, Roy Hartsfield, Tommy Holmes, Lou Klein, Marty Marion, Gene Mauch, Terry Moore, Eddie Stanky, and Harry \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the Hat\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Walker.\u00c2\u00a0 I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not sure how much of an influence Southworth was on Dark and Stanky. \u00c2\u00a0They did not get along.<\/p>\n Stengel was not the Casey At The Bat.\u00c2\u00a0 That was a fictitious Casey who only existed in the mind of Ernest Thayer.\u00c2\u00a0 Thayer was a newspaperman for William Randolph Hearst.\u00c2\u00a0 Ernest had a nephew name Scofield Thayer who was an art collector and publisher.\u00c2\u00a0 At Harvard, he chummed with E.E. Cummings.\u00c2\u00a0 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Buffalo Bill’s\/ defunct\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is a poem by him that you may\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve read in high school.<\/p>\n Stengel was a more ardent disciple of McGraw; especially how he handled the press.\u00c2\u00a0 And he had some managerial bloodlines, too.\u00c2\u00a0 Another New York School, if you will, was in session in the Bronx.\u00c2\u00a0 Ralph Houk descended from him, as did Darrell Johnson, Hank Bauer, and Yogi Berra.\u00c2\u00a0 But his #1 fan was Billy Martin.\u00c2\u00a0 Billy Martin got his start managing the Twins, but he reached my consciousness with his stint with the Yankees.\u00c2\u00a0 Steinbrenner hired him.\u00c2\u00a0 Martin begat Lou Piniella and probably helped in the inspire Mike Hargrove\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s managing methods.<\/p>\n Like his predecessor Mike Burke, Steinbrenner makes a good connector because he ran in so many circles: political philanthropy, horse racing (like Bill Veeck, he ran a racetrack.\u00c2\u00a0 Unlike him, he also raised and raced thoroughbreds), Broadway, shipbuilding- he knew everyone from Howie Spira to John DeLorean. \u00c2\u00a0Big Stein had his own ideas about running a team.\u00c2\u00a0 During his twenties, he coached college football for a few Big Ten teams.\u00c2\u00a0 He was an assistant under Woody Hayes at Ohio State and Lou Saban at Northwestern.\u00c2\u00a0 This may explain his \u00e2\u20ac\u0153win every game\u00e2\u20ac\u009d mentality.\u00c2\u00a0 You only play a few games in football.\u00c2\u00a0 But, as Earl Weaver said, “This isn’t football; we do this every day.”\u00c2\u00a0 Steinbrenner named Saban president of the Yanks in the early 1980s.\u00c2\u00a0 After Northwestern, but before the Bronx, Lou went on to coach a number of college and pro teams; including the Buffalo Bills.<\/p>\n Jon Daly has been a SABR member since 2001.\u00c2\u00a0 He has written several biographies for SABR that have appeared online or in books, including ones on Billy Southworth<\/a> and Jim Willoughby<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 His writing has also appeared online at websites such as Baseball Think Factory and The Hardball Times. <\/em>Jon is also the sole contributor to the blog Designated Sitter (http:\/\/designatedsitter.blogspot.com\/<\/a>) He Tweets @designatedsittr<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" People talk about coaching trees in other sports, but I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t hear much about managerial trees.\u00c2\u00a0 Leonard Koppett and Bill James did touch on the subject in their seminal books on managers.\u00c2\u00a0 By the way, there is a new book on managers that just came out.\u00c2\u00a0 It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s by a longtime friend of mine named Chris […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":712,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[4974,4975,4977,378,4989,4979,4973,4985,4976,4983,4991,4980,4981,4978,4986,4984,4988,4982,4987,2224],"class_list":["post-3465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-annie-oakley","tag-army-air-corps","tag-baseball-jargon","tag-baseball-player","tag-billy-the-kid","tag-boston-baseball","tag-buffalo-bill-cody","tag-cody-cody","tag-eddie-rickenbacker","tag-leonard-koppett","tag-nebraska-plains","tag-passenger-pigeon","tag-pony-express","tag-roger-kahn","tag-seminal-books","tag-sharp-shooting","tag-southworth","tag-william-bonney","tag-world-war-i","tag-world-war-ii"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/712"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3465\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}