Welcome to the Baseball History Podcast: Featuring This Week in Baseball History, baseball dictionary and a tour of baseball cities. I’m your game announcer Bob Wright.
This is game 75 of the 2006 baseball season
In the first inning let’s take a look at This Week in Baseball History for the 3 week of December.
December 21
1960 Cub owner P.K. Wrigley announces the club will not have a manager next season, but will instead use a college of coaches.
Philip Knight Wrigley was born December 5, 1894 in Chicago, IL. Known as P.K. to his close associates, or sometimes Phil, he succeeded his father as president of the chewing gum manufacturing Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company and the Chicago Cubs.
Although honest and accessible to print reporters, he gave no radio or TV interviews and insisted on maintaining his privacy. With meticulous integrity, he would dock his salary as president of the gum company for time spent with the Cubs.
While the gum industry prospered, the Cubs grew less competitive over the decades, with a brief flurry of success in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although resisting installing lights at Wrigley Field, he was innovative in other ways. In 1961 he abolished the traditional field management/coaching structure and instead hired a “college of coaches”.
This anticipated the specialization of coaches that is taken for granted nowadays. His one mistake was in rotating the various coaches as a “head coach”, an approach that confused the team and invited constant media ridicule, largely due to the lack of apparent improvement in the team’s won-lost ratio.
Also, like his father, P.K. was a strong believer in maximizing media coverage. Starting in the 1920s, the Cubs’ games were covered extensively on the radio, sometimes by competing stations at the same time, for minimal fees. In the post-World War II era, when baseball was booming, Wrigley continued this practice, allowing WGN-TV to carry all the home games as well as a significant number of road games.
Some owners were aghast at Wrigley’s “giving away the product”, but it paid dividends in the long run. The evolution of WGN-TV into a superstation developed a truly nationwide fan base for the Cubs, which resulted in nearly constant sellout crowds at “Beautiful Wrigley Field”, regardless of the fortunes of the team at a given time.
P.K. was a fairly visible presence with the Cubs in his younger years, but was seldom witnessed attending games during his final few decades of ownership, making his presence known mostly through memos and sometimes full-page newspaper ads.
P. K. Wrigley died April 12, 1977.
The Cubs were sold to the Chicago Tribune company in 1981, ending over 60 years of Wrigley association with the team, save the name of the ballpark itself, which remains Wrigley Field.
In this inning we’ll open up the Baseball Dictionary
Under the letter: C
College of Coaches
The College of Coaches was an unorthodox strategy employed by the Chicago Cubs in 1961 and 1962. After the Cubs finished 60-94 in 1960, their eighth straight losing season and 14th consecutive nonwinning campaign, Cubs owner P.K. Wrigley announced in December 1960 that the Cubs would use four coaches as managers, rather than the traditional one-manager approach. Wrigley said at the time, “Managers are expendable. I believe there should be relief managers just like relief pitchers.”
The Cubs front office stated that under this system, players would be exposed to the wisdom and experience of four coaches instead of just one field manager. However, in practice, players were often confused by this system. It was not always clear which coach would be in charge for a given game, and occasionally the various coaches were at odds with each other.
The Cubs would be managed by four different men in 1961 and three more in 1962 — two were holdovers from 1961 — and all seven had losing records.
In 1961, the Cubs finished with a 64-90 record, and took seventh in the National League, which was actually a slight improvement over the previous year. However, the 1962 season brought the worst record in Cubs history, as they finished 59-103, in ninth place in the expanded National League. Only the first-year New York Mets, who lost a major league record 120 games, finished lower. Chicago finished 6 games behind the expansion Houston Colt .45s in the standings.
The next year, Wrigley designated one member of the College, Bob Kennedy, to be the team’s sole manager. Under Kennedy, the Cubs went 82-80 in 1963, their first winning record since 1946. However, they would sink back toward the bottom of the National League standings the next season.
The College of Coaches, which has never been attempted by another Major League Baseball team, remains widely ridiculed and is often cited as a prime example of the ineptitude of the Cubs’ front office over the past 60 years.
And now for the ninth inning…
Continuing our trip around baseball cities…
There is not going to be a tour in this game but I invite you to go to Exhibition Game 9 to hear the story of Beautiful Wrigley Field.
For those of you that want to stick around, here’s an
Extra Inning
You can email me at baseballhistory@gmail.com. Transcripts of the game can be found at baseballhistorypodcast.blogspot.com. Well, that’s it for today’s game of Baseball History Podcast. I’ll see you later at the ballpark.
Tour- Invitation
to Exh 8
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