Talkin Baseball, Talkin Cards

OK, I am ready to talk about the Cardinals. Got the turntable cranked up with
Fever Tree's "Another time, another place" (cir. 1968), great psychedelic stuff. Glass of cheap Spanish red at my left.

First, let me mention sources. When I do these posts, I use some or all of the following:
Baseball Digest (I have every issue from 1959-1995)
The MacMillan Baseball Encyclopedia (ninth edition)
The Bill James Abstracts
My own personal baseball scrapbooks from the 1950s and 1960s
Various sports magazines from the 1960s
baseball-reference.com
Baseball trading cards (1956-1973)(I don't care about the later cards)

All these sources have unique information to impart, different perspectives and statistics. You could look em up.

Back to the St. Louis Cardinals. What fascinates me about this franchise is its phoenix-like quality, its ability to rise from the ashes of defeat to the top of the heap time after time. In this decade, under Tony LaRussa, the Cards have put it all together, defying and debunking the "small market" theory. Gotta love 'em!

But back in the 1950s, things looked bleak for the Cards. They'd fattened up in the WWII period; Musial didn't get the call from Uncle Sam till '45,which helped immensely. After the 1946 season, the Cards entered what was for them a prolonged pennant drought. The club had good position players like Enos Slaughter, Musial and Red Schoendienst. But the pitching just didn't jell. Certainly not sufficiently for the Cards to catch the Dodgers and Giants and Braves.

The Busch family does not like not winning. There's a difference between doing well and not winning and winning. If you like doing well and don't care about winning...then stay away from competitive sports. (The Texas Rangers should just go away and stop bothering everyone.) You don't belong.

Augie Busch liked winning.

First he tried with the man whose heart I would have loved to have ripped out through his anus: Frank "Trader" Lane. He took over as G.M. in the mid-'50s, but guess what? Busch could see he was an idiot! And he replaced him with home-grown Bing Devine, a man who would leave an indelible impression on this franchise for decades to come.

Devine looked down upon his Cardinals and was displeased. The team, by sheer luck, had finished 2nd in '57, Lane's last year. Under Devine, the Cards went 5-7-3-5-6. But he was not standing pat. Neither the infield nor the outfield quite worked. The pitching staff was still a muddle. Devine went to work. He acquired Bill White, then 26, for an aging but still effective Sad Sam Jones for the 1959 season. He installed Curt Flood in center, and moved Julian Javier to second base fulltime in 1960. Meantime, Ernie Broglio was helping to set the stage for Devine's most brilliant (and luckiest) trade by winning 21 games in 1960.

But still the team sputtered. One suspects that Devine, by 1962, was disturbed by the aging of Cards' stars like Musial, Schoendienst, Simmons, Boyer and Larry Jackson. Especially Musial. So Devine turned to Branch Rickey for advice.
Rickey, the old Mahatma, immediately ruffled every feather in sight. He recommended a complete overhaul of the team, including a demand that Stan the Man retire after the 1962 season. Although many of his suggestions were ludicrous (he wanted to replace Javier with someone named Ed Pacheco), he also advocated the immediate calling up of youngsters Nelson Briles and Steve Carlton. Now that was brilliant. But Devine didn't bite. (They both joined the squad in 1965, following the tumultuous departure of Devine and Johnny Keane.) Rickey was basically run out of town for this radical call to action. But Devine realized Rickey was right about the team needing a shake-up.

And tomorrow, we'll talk about that shake-up, and why the 1964 team was a bit of an illusion as pennant winners go.

Untouchables: What's the cost of keeping them?

I'm not quite ready to dump what I've learned about the Cardinals and their ability to win pennants despite their small market status. But having just looked at the Cubs, it strikes me that Untouchables, as much as fans love them, can hold a good team back. The Cards won a couple of pennants with a very young Musial in the lineup in the 1940s. Then the team struggled until Stan the Man retired in 1963. Ted Williams played in just one World Series--the 1946 Series, which was Musial's last. The Cubs never won with Banks, Santo and Williams on the Untouchables list. The Tigers went to the WS just once (1968) during Kaline's career (they did win their division in '72 just before Kaline retired).

Mantle and Ford were in that category, but with a difference: Casey Stengel constantly berated Mantle, something people tend to forget today, which kept Mickey hungry for Casey's approval. He never achieved "star status" till after Casey was gone and he had become an aging and hobbled legend. And Whitey never had the star quality about him. Surrounded by so much talent, it was only later in his career that people began to notice how awesome he truly was.