Baseball History Podcast

Welcome to Baseball History Podcast, featuring baseball biographies.  I’m your announcer Bob Wright.

This is game 08 of the 2012 baseball season.

In the first inning let’s take a look at This Week in Baseball History for the 4 week of February.

February 24

1986 Padre manager Dick Williams resigns and will be replaced by Steve Boros.

Richard Hirschfeld Williams was born on May 7, 1929, in St. Louis, MO.

Williams’s intense competitiveness and versatility earned him 13 years as a major league utility player.  He parlayed those strengths into one of baseball’s most successful managerial careers.

Williams signed his first professional contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, and played his first major league game with Brooklyn in 1951.

On June 10, Williams debuted in a double-header against Pittsburgh.  In the first game, Brooklyn manager Chuck Dressen sent the right-handed Williams in to pinch hit and the rookie grounded out.  Dressen made Williams the left-fielder and leadoff man in the second game.  Aiming to make an impression in his first plate appearance in that game, he beat out a bunt for a single and went 4-for-5 with a triple, but that game contained the sum of his highlights for the season.

He eked out only 64 plate appearances for a team in a tight pennant race and with three accomplished starting outfielders in Carl Furillo, Duke Snider and Andy Pafko.

While Williams was riding the bench, he did get experience that would serve him later.  Manager Dressen kept the youngster close to him on the bench; a place to sit and shadow Dressen’s decisions.

In a season that saw the Dodgers’ lead vaporize from 13 1/2 games ahead on August 10 to tied on the next-to-last day of the season, Dressen taught Williams one critical managerial lesson.  Williams believes Dressen’s intense anxiety and the manager’s pacing and screaming and whining weakened the team’s ability to hold the lead. Williams internalized the idea that the field manager needs to radiate calm confidence more than the shared worry.

In 1952 Williams again played sparingly.  In a game in August Williams raced in to throw himself at a dying pop fly off the bat of Vern Benson.  Williams dove, extended his right arm and heard a crack.  It was a three-way shoulder separation that essentially destroyed his ability to reach his highest potential.  His arm became a launcher of soft looping throws.

Williams believed this career-sapping injury made him a good manager.  He said, “My injury forced me to watch, to listen, to learn every tiny detail about this game that once I could play in my sleep.  Because if I ever wanted to play it again, I could no longer be faster or stronger than anyone.  Now I had to be smarter.  I would sit on my butt in the dugout for nine innings and watch both the game and its players like I’d never watched them before.  I studied opposing pitchers.  I studied strategy.  More than anything, I studied human nature.”

He bounced between Brooklyn and the team’s minor league system until the middle of the 1956 season, when the Orioles snatched him off the waiver wire.  The Orioles were led by Paul Richards, an important mentor for Williams.  Richards loved having the full-tilt Williams on the team so much he acquired him through trades three more times: in 1958, 1961 and with the Houston Colt .45s, in October 1962.

Williams had more than a few individual highlights in the next 8 1/2 years of his career.  From 1957-61, playing for Baltimore, the Kansas City Athletics and Cleveland Indians, he notched at least 340 plate appearances each year, playing up to six positions.

Williams was a fundamentally sharp and aggressive base runner with decent home-run power.  Added to that intensity was his versatility.

On July 15, 1956, for example, Richards inserted Williams as leadoff batter in both ends of a double-header against the Detroit Tigers.  Playing center field and second base in the first game and third base and first base in the second, Williams went 6-for-9 with two doubles, a home run, a walk and a stolen base, scoring four runs and driving in two more.

With his career winding down in 1962, Williams went from the Houston Colt .45s to the Boston Red Sox in a trade for Carroll Hardy. He played as a lightly-used utility man, getting into 140 games over the next two seasons.

Boston was the American League’s big-market team with the weakest front office.  He got to witness, and despised, what he called the “country club” atmosphere.  The Red Sox hadn’t risen above .500 for six years before Williams arrived, a frustration they extended the two years he was with them.  Williams struggled to amp up the team’s intensity from the bench, to teach them to hate losing as much as he did, but he believed he was associated with “a bunch of losers.”

While his playing skills were slipping at age 35, his intensity, flexibility and passion for observing and understanding caught the eyes of the Red Sox’ minor league director Neal Mahoney and business manager Dick O’Connell.  After the Sox released Williams after the 1964 season, Mahoney gave Williams his first professional managing job as skipper of the Toronto Maple Leafs.

It was enlightening for several reasons.  First, according to Williams, he had to make the transition from criticizing others’ mistakes to judging his own.  He worked to see no mistake went unanalyzed or uncorrected.  Williams’s relentless pursuit of excellence was rough on his players, rougher on opponents.  He was doubly intense because he was working within the “country club” organization that, to him, represented the opposite approach.

Williams led the Maple Leafs to International League championship in both 1965 and 1966.  In those two seasons, the Red Sox finished ninth.  Business manager O’Connell became general manager and, agreeing with Williams about the corrosive “country club” atmosphere, decided to let manager Billy Herman go.  The 1966 squad had played at about .500 after the All-Star break, a possible indicator that with the right leadership, the team might be ready to excel.  In September O’Connell chose Williams to manage for the next season.

Williams’s preparation evolved from lessons learned from his principal mentors.  “I had three managers that you could call my mentors: Dressen, Richards and Bragan. You could put them in a room and they wouldn’t agree on anything,” Williams said.  Dressen was his counter-example; for all his smarts, a narcissist who wasn’t happy if the credit went to anyone else.  Richards was the innovator and tactician, seeking edges small and large every minute.  And Bragan was personally loyal, a straight-shooter and a transmitter of the Branch Rickey method.  But Williams made all his bosses mentors: “I managed right along with them. I learned from every manager what to do and what not to do.”

From the first day of spring training, Williams made it clear that there would be only one person in charge — him — and there would be an avalanche of changes in management processes and rules.  With the standard practices he had learned with the Dodger organization as a basis, Williams stressed fundamentals.

Before the 1967 season began press and oddsmakers’ predictions for the team were no different from years past.  Williams promised that the team would “win more games than we lose.”  Opening day at Fenway Park only drew 8,000 fans, but by the end of the season all the home games were sellouts.

Even with the new passion Williams injected, the team started 11-11, the same as it had the previous year.  The club slipped to 18-20 and sixth place by May 27.  A ten-game win streak in mid-July put them a half-game out of first place.  By August 17 they were in fourth place, 3 1/2 games behind the Twins.  Their fate might have seemed sealed the following day when right fielder Tony Conigliaro, usually the team’s clean-up or number five batter, was knocked out for the season by a fastball to the head.

On September 6, there was a four-way tie for first with 21 games to play.  The Twins came to Boston for the final series of the regular season, leading the Red Sox and Tigers by a game.  Many people expected Williams to start his ace, Jim Lonborg, on short rest, but the skipper decided to stick with his normal rotation.  He needed to win both games, and Lonborg couldn’t start both, so Williams sent gritty right-hander José Santiago to face the Twins.  The Twins scored a run in the top of the first, the Red Sox caught up and passed Minnesota in the fifth, and then put the Twins away in the seventh on Yastrzemski’s three-run homer.

The 162nd game of the season was as dramatic.  The winner would play in the World Series, with the Twins starting their best pitcher, Dean Chance, the Red Sox their ace.

Williams’s infusion of relentless, aggressive baseball took hold.  The Twins scored a run in the first and one in the third.  With his team still down 2-0 in the sixth, Lonborg led off, and, on his own initiative, the 6’5″ pitcher laid down a surprise bunt on the first pitch and legged it out for a hit.  The Twins came apart: three batters, three singles, a run in and the bases loaded.  The Twins replaced Chance with elite reliever Al Worthington, who uncorked a pair of wild pitches.  The crowning blow was an error by first-baseman Harmon Killebrew.  The inning ended with a 5-2 lead the Red Sox would not yield.

In the World Series, Boston faced St. Louis Cardinals, led by future Hall of Famers Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, and Orlando Cepeda.  Even minus his clean-up hitter, Conigliaro, Williams played his hand well enough to take the Series to a seventh game, when Bob Gibson started, and won, for the third time, pouring it on with a complete game three-hitter and 10 strikeouts.

The Red Sox’ season was one of the great turnaround jobs in twentieth-century baseball history. It was the first of many Williams engineered.

The following season saw increased attendance but not wins.  Baseball’s 1968 campaign featured stifled offense that seemed a throwback to the Deadball Era.  Pitching depth would shape the final standings more than usual.  This worked against the Red Sox in ways a manager couldn’t control.  Lonborg was injured while skiing in the off-season, and did not come back until late June.  At that point Santiago’s arm came up lame.  Conigliaro, unable to recover from the beaning, was lost for the entire season.

The team finished 86-76, in fourth place.  Williams had led the Red Sox to their two best records since 1951, but the skipper wasn’t behaving any more humbly toward the owner or the press. He was on a tight leash now, more vulnerable to office politics, without the victor’s garlands to deflect the toxicity of the unhealthy organization.

The Red Sox’ performance in 1969 could not overcome the manager’s poor relations with the Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey.  When Wlliams called out Yastrzemski for a mental error on the basepaths and pulled him from the game as an object lesson to all, he smudged his relations with his squad. On September 22, with the team in third place, Yawkey fired Williams.

Williams worked as Gene Mauch’s third base coach with the Montreal Expos in 1970.  He credits Mauch for advancing his knowledge of how to think ahead two or three innings, how to balance work and rest for bullpen pitchers.

The owner who rescued him was Oakland’s Charles O. Finley, a nonconformist, showman, and executioner of managers, even those who achieved winning records.  Finley was as uninterested in conventions and niceties as Williams; he was interested in winning.  Even with the A’s recent success, he had changed managers eight times in eight seasons.  The winners didn’t win enough for his taste.  Finley wanted it all.

The 1971 Athletics lost four out of their first six games, allowing 40 runs in five of them.  Finley was calling Williams every single day to co-conspire and wheedle and whine, and it was driving the manager nuts.  A sophomoric practical joke by players on the team plane was the final straw.  Williams had a meltdown, spewed some fire into the team, and either by design or coincidence, they won 12 of their next 13 games.  By the thirteenth game of the season, they were in first place in their division.  They stayed there, finishing 101-60, the franchise’s best record since 1931.

Oakland lost the American League championship series to the pitching-rich and more experienced Orioles.  Williams took the blame for the playoff loss.  In Game One, he had to decide whether to relieve Vida Blue in the seventh inning with a three-run lead.  He stuck with his ace, and the tiring starter yielded the game, and in Williams’s thinking, by a cascade of events, the series.

With the addition of Holtzman, the ingredient they agreed they needed, Williams knew Finley’s determination to win would make the manager a target if the team fell short of a World Series victory.  Winning the 1971 Manager of the Year Award was not enough protection from the owner.

The 1972 season would deliver that victory, although not without a set of fights that filled the A’s clubhouse with angry noise and the sports pages with lively reports: Vida Blue vs. pitcher Blue Moon Odom, Reggie Jackson vs. first baseman Mike Epstein, Epstein vs. Williams, to name a small sample.  The Brawling A’s became a legend, underscoring the idea that a team didn’t have to get along to go the distance.

The A’s won 93 games and were as balanced in their play on the field as they seemed imbalanced in their conduct off it.  Oakland defeated the Tigers in a five-game playoff series and faced Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine in the World Series.  The Reds were as balanced as the A’s.

In the Series, Williams showed a range of extraordinary managerial moves.  Against baseball tradition, he bypassed veterans with playoff experience and used young George Hendrick to replace the injured Jackson in center.   At catcher, he decided to use back-up Gene Tenace instead of Dave Duncan, who had hit 19 homers.  Williams’s rationale: on a team with four other homer hitters, a fifth didn’t make as much difference.

Tenace opened the scoring with a two-run homer in the second inning and delivered the game-winning hit, another homer, in the fifth.  In Game Two, with a 2-0 lead in the sixth, Williams put in defensive replacement Mike Hegan at first for slugger Mike Epstein.  Hegan made a game-saving play in the bottom of the ninth by spearing a César Gerónimo liner that would have gone for extra bases.

Behind 2-1 in the bottom of the ninth in Game Four, Williams called for three consecutive pinch-hitters and each delivered a hit, winning the game.  In the eighth inning of the seventh game, up 3-1 with runners on second and third and one out, Williams had Fingers intentionally walk the cold Johnny Bench to load the bases for the hot Tony Perez, putting the go-ahead run on base to set up a force-out or double play.  This belied standard baseball dogma, but the strategy succeeded.

For one World Series, everything Williams decided turned to gold.

In 1973, relations between Finley and Williams worsened.  Williams, paid to be Finley’s advocate with the players and the players’ advocate with Finley, found playing go-between increasingly challenging, mostly because of Finley’s conduct.

The A’s made it to the World Series, and beat the New York Mets, but not until Finley had poisoned the pleasure.  After second baseman Mike Andrews made two consecutive costly errors, Finley humiliated him by forcing him to sign a false affidavit declaring he was injured, so Finley could replace him on the Series roster.  Williams was forced by his sense of responsibility to explain his employer’s decision and at the same time, by his sense of integrity to make clear to all that he didn’t agree.  In that moment he realized his position was untenable, that he would have to resign.  In a clubhouse meeting he called before Game Three, Williams told his players that after the Series, he was moving on, even though he was signed to a contract for another year.

Williams was confident he had a back-up plan with the New York Yankees that did not work out.  Finley knew the manager’s contract had value and he never let an opportunity to make money go by.  Precedent made clear that Finley was entitled to cash or prospects or a player.  He demanded two of the Yankees’ most promising young players.  It was an unacceptable price, and one Williams knew was doomed to quash the deal.

Williams worked outside of baseball for six months, until a baseball offer came that Finley would accept, from a team Finley was confidant would be no danger to the Athletics’ supremacy.

In June, Williams was recruited by the California Angels. This was not the free-spending Gene Autry of the free-agency era who would explode into the winter player markets a few years later; this was the 13-year owner of a major-market team who Williams believed tried to get talent on the cheap, and who delivered teams that were middling at best.

Williams said, “They lost simply because the players were like day-old, marked-down doughnuts.  They came cheap and even then they weren’t worth the money.”

Lack of talent may not have been the reason the Angels struggled to deliver winning teams.  Harold Parrott, who had served in the Angels’ front-office in the years before Williams’ arrival blamed the team’s consistent underachievement on the lack of focus caused by years of warring cliques in the front office, and the owner’s disinclination to discipline any of the participants.

In Williams’ first partial season, the team went 36-48, little different from what his predecessor had been able to coax.  Williams felt the team was imbued with a self-reinforcing culture of contentment in losing.

The 1974 Angels had two ace pitchers, Nolan Ryan and young Frank Tanana, and almost no offense.  With no batter who had hit 20 home runs, and with many fast, young players, Williams experimented with stealing bases and taking extra bases as the foundation of a strategy to create runs.

The 1975 Angels finished 70-91, and for the first time in Angel history, ownership coughed up assets to acquire talent in its prime: a pair of home run hitters, Bobby Bonds and Bill Melton, who between them had more power than the rest of the squad combined.  However, Bonds broke his hand in a spring exhibition against the Dodgers, insisted on playing through it, and never attained his full force.

By the end of June, their 29-45 record was a great disappointment both to ownership and Williams.  The manager and his coaches decided to ride the roster hard, especially the relaxed players, driving them, offering unequivocal critique, even insults.  It didn’t work, either, though it made the clubhouse more tense.  After nearly coming to blows with the underperforming, overweight third baseman Melton on the team bus, Williams was fired.

Williams idled for the rest of the season.  Near the end of it, he called the Montréal Expos executive John McHale, for whom he’d worked as a third-base coach in 1970, to ask for that franchise’s managing job.  He knew the Expos had plenty of young talent in their system, a new general manager he liked in Charlie Fox, and a seven-year history of losing records.  It was a tasty prospect for a turnaround artist, and quite a difference from the environment in California.

The 1977 Expos won 20 more games under Williams than they had the year before, on the bats and arms and gloves of young talent.

Williams got them to be more patient and they boosted their walks by about 10%.  He also got them to run the bases aggressively.  They improved to the middle of the pack in both pitching and batting.

The 1978 squad improved by a single game, winning 76.  The hitters’ walks had declined back to worst in the league and the Expos were finding it too difficult to beat the good teams.

In 1979 the team joined the league’s elite, bringing a balanced offense with power and speed and a pitching staff that blended the young and the old.  From April 11 to the end of the season, they were either in first place or second, battling the Phillies, Cardinals and Pirates.  Montreal held on to the top spot as late as September 24 with a half-game lead.  The pitching turned shaky down the stretch and the Expos finished two games behind Pittsburgh, the team that proved to be the World Series winner.

The 1980 season proved to be similar.  The Expos grabbed first place on June 11 and stayed in the lead until game 159.  But again, the young Expos faded in the home stretch.  They fell short by a single game.

The 1981 campaign would be Williams’s last in Montréal.  He believed the players were tired of him; he’d never stayed so long in a job.

On June 11, with the team 30-25 and in fourth place, the Players Association and owners were unable to come to an agreement on an ownership proposal to roll back free-agency gains.  The season stopped until the sides reached a compromise that allowed play to resume August 10.  This interrupted season spawned a scheme to add a layer of playoffs by dividing the year into pre-strike and post-strike halves, with the divisional winner of each half meeting in a pre-playoff playoff.

Montreal’s record was 14-12 on September 7, just one-and-a-half games behind the division-leading Cardinals, when Williams was fired.  Under new manager Jim Fanning the Expos won the second half and beat the first-half leaders, the Phillies, 3 games to 2. In the National League Championship Series, they lost to the Los Angeles Dodgers in the final inning of the final game.

Williams views that team as his finest creation, one that had learned everything he had to teach, and he mourned their loss to the Dodgers, rooting for his squad even after being fired.

Williams was still driven; he had gotten the Red Sox and A’s into World Series before his time expired.  So in the ensuing off-season, when he was courted by the National League’s sad-sack franchise, the San Diego Padres, he accepted the position.

San Diego had more talent than the Angels, but Williams saw the same comfortable-with-losing clubhouse.  In General Manager “Trader” Jack McKeon, Williams had a co-conspirator who was willing to turn over the roster to weed out those unable to get fired up whose unhappiness pulled the rest of the players down.

In Williams’s first season, the Padres rose to .500 for the first time in their history; it was the equivalent of a 20-victory improvement over the shortened previous season’s winning percentage.

The 1983 squad moved sideways, again with 81 wins, but the players were learning to understand the Williams game.  McKeon added power in outfielders Kevin McReynolds and Carmelo Martinez, and acquired first baseman Steve Garvey.  While Garvey’s best years were clearly past him, he provided a model of the hard-work ethic Williams favored and a positive mental attitude that helped dispel some more of the team’s lax attitude.  Williams thought this team was on the cusp of breaking out.

For the 1984 season, the General Manager added what Williams and he both thought was necessary to put them over the top: an intense veteran who could model winning behavior and enforce as a peer.  McKeon acquired two: third baseman Craig Nettles and reliever Goose Gossage.

After a seven-game losing streak that held them to an 18-18 start, the Padres began running on all cylinders. Williams believes the team responded either with anger at his chronic critique of mental mistakes, or simply from a desire to prove him wrong. A 15-5 run took them to first place on June 9. They didn’t yield that spot through the end of the season.

In the League Championship Series San Diego faced the Chicago Cubs, who made it to post-season play for the first in nearly 40 years.  The Cubs hammered the Padres in the first two games, and Williams’s club looked and felt dead.  But led in part by Garvey’s heroics, Templeton’s cheerleading and endless comebacks, the Padres won their first pennant.

Their World Series opponent, the Detroit Tigers, had taken sole possession of first place in the season’s fourth game, a position they would never lose.  Detroit burned through the Padres in five games in what looked like a foregone conclusion.  No amount of inspirational speechmaking would allow the Padres to overcome that Tiger squad.

Even with the disappointment of losing, it was a big win for the Padres franchise.  For the third time, Williams had turned a chronic loser into a financial success.

In 1985, the Padres made it to the All-Star break just a half-game out of first, needing one more starting pitcher to keep up. “Trader Jack” McKeon, for perhaps the only time in his career, made no deals, and the team struggled.

The front office forced Williams out, making the announcement on the first day of spring training in 1986

Williams would be lured to one more major league managing position, yet again with a sad-sack franchise, the young and under-funded Seattle Mariners.  Seattle brought him on 28 games into the 1986 campaign, and he led the team to a listless 58-75 mark, a little better than his predecessors.  The team appeared to have a healthy proportion of young talent but they seemed to Williams to be listless and content with losing.  Williams, ever driving himself, wanted to prove he still had the magic, and he assumed the owner would eventually spend to win.

In 1987, his first full season, the Mariners achieved their best-ever record at 78-84.  Williams believed he needed some veteran talent, but the General Manager couldn’t talk the owner into spending money.  Ownership was generous, Williams believed, with one thing they shouldn’t have been: unconditional love for the players.  So his attempts to discipline went under-supported or even undermined.  It would prove his downfall the following season.

Ownership considered the financial bottom line the true measure of success, and winning only as a side dish.  Williams was demoralized and angry, although it didn’t always show at work.  Forty-six games into the 1987 season, Williams was gone.  He never again managed in the major leagues.

In January 2000, while attending a fantasy camp, he was arrested on an indecent -exposure charge at his motel.  He allegedly walked around the grounds naked.  He pleaded no contest, according to court records.  This happened within two months of the 2000 Veterans Committee Hall of Fame vote, and it’s been alleged, but not documented, that Williams missed being elected that year and for the next six years because of the incident.

Dick Williams was successful with different kinds of teams, not relying on a rigid protocol to be a roadmap to success.  He could adapt his tactics to the roster he had, something few managers can do.

At the same time, he was unafraid to take chances to improve his personnel.  He was able to observe, monitor and analyze his young players, and successfully determine when the team would be able to take an immediate-term hit in experience as an investment in the development of a player who could become an all-star.

In December 2007 Williams was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

The combination of humorous self-deprecation and swagger that he always carried on and off the field came through when he heard he was to be enshrined in Cooperstown.  “I’m very humbled by it, if I can ever be humbled, because you know me.”

Dick Williams died on July 7, 2011 in Henderson, Nevada at the age of 82.

A large part of this biography comes from the SABR Baseball Biography Project written by Jeff Angus.  It can be found online at http://bioproj.sabr.org

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Well, that’s it for today’s Baseball History Podcast.  I’ll see you later at the ballpark.