The Cardinals, winners of nine pennants in 20 years from 1926 through 1946, had not won another since. After the club fell to seventh place in 1955, 68-86 their lowest number of wins since 1924, they were at rock bottom. More to the point, attendance was plummeting with the victory totals. In an era when drawing a million fans was an achievement, the Cardinals had done so from 1946 to 1951. In 1952 the attendance was down to 913,113, and in 1953, it sunk to 880,242. In 1954, despite finishing 10 games below .500, the team drew 1,039,698. Since the St. Louis Browns had just skipped town, it is possible the Cardinals had added some disoriented Brownie fans to their fan base—but not for long. By 1955, attendance was down to 849,130, the lowest total since the World War II years.
Owner August A. Gussie Busch Jr. wanted to restore the team to glory, and the head of the world’s largest breweries was accustomed to getting what he wanted with no excuses and no delays.
When Gussie Busch's initial efforts to run the Cardinals from 1953-1954 resulted in lot of wasted money and effort, he decided he'd better put someone else in charge of the team. He named brewery executive Dick Meyer the general manager of the franchise because Meyer had been a baseball player as a youth. A major league general manager during the 1950s typically combined career-long experience in baseball operations (including talent evaluation and player acquisition and development) as well as business acumen. Although Meyer was a talented executive with the brewery, he had none of the experience required of a baseball general manager. However, Meyer was now in charge-except during those times when Gussie Busch lost patience, went over his head, and unilaterally decided to act.
Dick Meyer didn't like being in the public eye. He wanted to do his job and live with his family and not have people call him at all hours questioning him or criticizing him about player deals. Meyer never had the desire to do that, so the first thing he did was look for someone to take over the general manager's position, so he could return to the brewery and to a normal life. Dick Meyer didn't want or like the general manager position, but he held on for two full seasons.
Among the executives brought to the St. Louis front office by Meyer was Bing Devine, a mild-mannered, savvy baseball operative whom Meyer brought up from Rochester after a successful six-year tour running the Cards' top Triple A franchise. Meyer had hand-picked Devine to take over the team's general manager's job.
In the interim, Gussie Busch had gotten some recommendations from outsiders, friends, big investors. A friend of his, a big Anheuser-Busch investor from Chicago, told him, "You need to get a general manager who is experienced. Frank Lane is out of favor in Chicago. He wants to move. You ought to hire Frank Lane." As the 1955 season neared its end, Busch asked J.G. Taylor Spink, publisher of The Sporting News, to recommend the best general manager to hire. Spink suggested Frank Lane of the White Sox.
All this without Dick Meyer's knowledge as he was grooming Bing Devine for the position.
In September 1955, Lane resigned from the White Sox and let Busch know he was interested the Cardinals general manager position.
Busch sent Meyer to New York to begin negotiations with Lane during the 1955 World Series between the Dodgers and Yankees. That led to a follow-up meeting involving Busch, Lane and Meyer in St. Louis. Part of the negotiations involved keeping Bing Devine on as an assistant to Lane.
On October 6, 1955, The Cardinals signed Lane to a three-year contract, Busch had his experienced general manager and promised Lane a blank check to turn the Cardinal fortunes around. Meyer was promoted to executive vice president. Bill Walsingham Jr., a Cardinals vice president for nine years, resigned, acknowledging the club didn’t need two vice presidents.
Lane had become general manager of the White Sox after they finished the 1948 season in last place at 51-101. He improved the White Sox through trades, and they posted 89 wins in 1953, 94 in 1954 and 91 in 1955.
In seven seasons (1949-55) with the White Sox, Lane made 241 trades involving 353 players, earning the nickname “Trader Lane.”
Two weeks after he was hired, Lane fired manager Harry Walker and brought in Fred Hutchinson. Walker had been on the job for less than a year as a player-manager and had only a 51-67 record to show for his efforts. As it turned out, Walker did not leave the organization; he took over the Cardinals Double-A team in Houston.
Hutchinson had managed the Detroit Tigers for three years 1952,53 & 54 compiling a 155-255 won/loss record finishing 8th,6th & 5th. At the end of the 1954 season Hutchinson asked for a two-year contract, through 1956. Then, in a typically stubborn Hutchinson gesture, he quit his $40,000-a-year job. Long aware that he wasn't being consulted on player deals or inner council planning, Hutchinson demanded a two-year contract. A few days later, after a meeting of the Detroit board of directors, Walter Briggs, Detroit Tigers president, telephoned Hutchinson at his home. "It's a club policy," he said. "One year is all we can do. "Then I'm turning it down," Hutch replied, ending a 16-year association with the team.
Out of the majors for the first time since 1941, Hutchinson went home to Seattle and the Rainiers of the PCL, becoming their manager in 1955. Even though the club did not enjoy a major league affiliation, Hutchinson led Seattle to a 95–77 record and a first-place finish. His success led to his second major league managerial job when he replaced Harry Walker as skipper of the St. Louis Cardinals shortly after the 1955 season.
Fred Hutchinson, was known as a ferocious competitor who suffered defeat with a vesuvian, chair-throwing temper, mostly aimed at umpires, but he was also a "players manager." He made the following statement to his players in his initial spring training, “Baseball doesn’t have many naturals, a lot less than you might imagine." “The ones who work the hardest are the ones who make it, the ones who win. Sometimes that’s the only difference. If you don’t work hard at this game, you might as well hang them up. Sweat is your only salvation.”
Al Kaline said this about his former manager, and at the time his only major league manager, "The one thing he demanded was a 100 percent effort, no alibi-ing at all." “He was a guy who didn’t like to be embarrassed, and maybe that one word might be what he really stood for. He wanted his teams to be competitive and not embarrass themselves when they play. If they lose, fine. Lose in the right way. But don’t embarrass yourself… When you played for him, you knew what to expect. There was no behind the back. He let you know, and you knew where you stood all the time, which is really what anybody really likes to know. He was an up-front type guy.”
Stan Musial said of Hutch, "Let's put it this way: If I ever hear a player say he can't play for Hutch, then I'll know he can't play for anybody. "Essentially, this team will stand or fall on its young players. Hutchinson is patient with them, knows how to use them. You'll never hear him taking credit. He never does that. But he brings out the best in us because everything's out on the table with him."
Joe Garagiola Cardinal broadcaster said of Hutch, "Hutchinson looks at the world through an angry scowl, but this is partly a facade." "He's really kind of a happy guy inside, only his face doesn't know it."
Hutch once told Gussie Busch, who rarely hears "no" from a subordinate, "Mr. Busch, do you want me to say what I really think, or what you want to hear?" Frank Lane was in the meeting and after a moment of silence, he turned to the Cardinal owner. "Mr. Busch," he said, "that man is worth a million dollars to you, because he always tells you the truth."
Frequently, the frustration of losing a close game would touch off wild, demonstrative rages. He has broken water coolers, stools, light bulbs, but his rages were rarely directed at an individual player; knowing his own temper, Hutchinson made it a private rule to wait until the next day to chew out a player for his mistake. Sarcasm, the goading tool of many baseball managers, was no part of Hutchinson's nature. His bluntness was deceptively simple.
"When I first came here," he once said, "I kept hearing about how this pitcher couldn't pitch in Brooklyn, that pitcher couldn't pitch in Philadelphia and how somebody else was effective at home. One guy couldn't hit against a certain background and somebody else got a bellyache in Chicago. The hell with that. I want men. I want big leaguers, guys who grind and fight until somebody gives in, guys who can play every day under all kinds of conditions."
One of the arts in managing a modern major league baseball team over a long, crisis-ridden season is the art of patience—and patience was Hutchinson's paradox. The man of a short-fused temper has an amazing reservoir of restraint with young players and a deep compassion for ballplayers as a group. The answer may be that Hutchinson, who brought to baseball pitching no blazing natural equipment, understands the degree of difficulty baseball presents. Of the loud-talking grandstand critics, he had only contempt. "They've never been there," he said. "Never crossed those white lines. What do they know? Do they know what it's like to hit against Newcombe, or bunt against him with Hodges coming down your throat? Hell, anybody can play ball in a saloon!"
Doc Bauman, Cardinals trainer said of Hutch "I'd have to go far back in my memory to recall a finer man. I've seen him leave the clubhouse for a few minutes and stop to ask the clubhouse boy if he could bring back a sandwich. He's got real humility."
"Some of these guys—and I've seen them—they get to be a manager and right away they have to prove they're big men. They're quick to take credit for anything good a ballplayer does. But Hutch never does that, and these players respect him for it. He goes right on being himself, same to everybody, because he is a big man. I don't know how to say it"—Bauman shook his head—"he's humble, he's kind, he's strict and he's tough. He's all these things in one man."
Frank Lane said of him, "I knew we were going to have to build with young players, and I needed a manager who could handle them. Did you notice his conduct at Detroit? He left because he wouldn't be a puppet. But even when they treated him like one, he was never disloyal. Never tried to justify himself, and he didn't sound off about his troubles. And even when they wanted him back, he walked out. He never carped or complained or criticized. He's all man. Hutch has a rough, tough demeanor, but he has that damnable patience. I've even accused him of being a character-builder. I cuss him out from the stands because I'm that way—when I've got anything to say, I tell the world about it. I don't think Hutch has ever experienced fear in his life. In a way, that's a minus factor in his makeup. He applies it as a yardstick to his players. As a strategist, I think he's unimaginative, but he goes right on getting results. Hutch just won't 'yes' to anybody."
Bob Broeg, veteran St. Louis Post-Dispatch baseball writer, summed up Hutchinson in part when he wrote that he is "a man who has a way with men...who makes no pretense of maneuvering or manipulating with the winking wisdom of a Casey Stengel, the mysticism of a Paul Richards, the daring of a Leo Durocher or the bravado of a Charley Dressen.
"If, as a tactician, Hutchinson is uninspired, he has the rich quality of holding the confidence and loyalty of his players, a combination that has produced a team spirit the club knew under neither of his immediate predecessors, Harry Walker and Eddie Stanky. The Cardinals like their rugged manager...he has the players believing they can win."
Hutch once said, "The important thing is not to panic. You have to grind, day after day, and forget about yesterday. The easiest thing to do is second-guess, but the worst thing to do is to second-guess yourself. Then you panic."
"Lane gets excited. They all get excited. I don't mind it from Lane, because he's always been that way. He dies on every pitch. Funny thing about Lane, the way he cusses the ballplayers out and jumps on me from the stands. If anybody else did that to us, I think he'd fight. I try to make a ballplayer believe in himself, and the only way you can do that is to give him a chance."
In short, Fred Hutchinson was exactly what the St. Louis Cardinals needed in 1956 to turn the team around. As it turns out, 1956 would be pivotal year for the Red Birds.
Frank Lane, well, he must have made a secret pact with somebody to do whatever he could to piss off the fan base in St. Louis.
First and one of Lane’s most controversial decisions did not involve players, but their uniforms. When the Cardinals took the field for their first home game on April 20, 1956, the fans must have been shocked to see that the uniforms no longer had the familiar insignia of two redbirds perched on a bat—the symbol of the franchise since 1922, when Rogers Hornsby was in his prime.
Instead, the uniform featured a simple “Cardinals” in script lettering with a flourish for an underline. Actually, only one bird had been banished, the other was relegated to a less prominent place on the left sleeve. Perhaps Lane felt that a bird on the sleeve was worth two on the bat. At any rate, the fans did not hesitate to voice their opinions about these changes. Some teams could get away with changing their uniforms every few years, but the Cardinals were not one of them.
Then Lane listed six Cardinals as untouchables: Stan Musial, Red Schoendienst, Ken Boyer, Bill Virdon, Wally Moon, and Harvey Haddix. Three of them were gone before the season was half done, and he would have traded two more if Busch hadn’t stopped him.
The Cardinals, under Hutch's steady hand, were virtually tied with Brooklyn for first place when Lane’s merry-go-round began whirling. In the first 17 days of May he pulled off six deals involving 17 players. The two most significant: Haddix, a onetime 20-game winner and three time all-star, and Stu Miller, a failed pitching prospect, to Philadelphia for middling pitchers Herm Wehmeier and Murry Dickson, a former Cardinal who was 39. This trade may not have been all that bad. In 1954 Haddix was struck below the right kneecap by a line drive off the bat of Milwaukee first baseman Joe Adcock. Haddix said the injury bothered him the rest of his life and affected his pitching. “I was never the same after that,” said Haddix. “I didn’t have the same spring off the mound.” But even at that Haddix was about a .500 pitcher the rest of his career until 1964. Wilmer Mizell returned from two years of military service and a staff of Mizell, Haddix, Willard Schmidt, Larry Jackson, Lindy McDaniel would seem to have been formidable. Or if you're going to trade a veteran like Haddix to the Phillies, get a couple of youngsters like Jack Sanford and Turk Farrell and let Hutch work with them.
But unfortunately, Lane was just getting started. Next, he traded Bill Virdon, the previous year's Rookie of the Year, to Pittsburgh for Bobby Del Greco and Dick Littlefield. Let that one soak in for a minute or two. Now granted the Cards were stacked with left-handed hitting outfielders, Virdon, Musial, Moon, Cunningham in the minors. They also had a young right-handed centerfielder, Jackie Brandt. So, if you're needing pitching, offer Virdon for maybe Bob Friend or Vernon Law. Or trade Virdon straight up for Dick Groat. The Cardinals hadn't had a decent shortstop since Marty Marion and wouldn't have one until 1963 when they acquired Groat. Don't know if the Pirates would have gone for any of those, but did you ask? Of course, Curt Flood would come along later, but this was 1956. I would think a pitching staff of Bob Friend, Harvey Haddix, Wilmer Mizell, Larry Jackson, Lindy McDaniel would have been formidable with a right handed hitting Jackie Brandt in centerfield. Or an infield of Boyer, Groat, Schoendienst, and either Cunningham or Musial would have been very potent.
The Virdon trade “made no sense at all,” said Lane’s assistant, Bing Devine. “But Frank worked to convince everyone that Virdon had bad eyesight, that his sight was going bad so that he won’t be able to play much longer. Virdon hit .334 for the Pirates and played 10 more years. Del Greco hit .215 for the Cardinals. In later years Lane acknowledged that this was his worst trade.
But Lane wasn’t finished. Just before the June 15 trading deadline, he offered Stan Musial, three-time MVP and future St. Louis statue, to the Phillies for ace pitcher Robin Roberts. Seriously! Musial’s business partner, Biggie Garagnani, got wind of the impending deal. Unable to reach Busch, he warned brewery executives that Musial would retire if he was traded. Busch ordered Lane to forget it.
Unable to trade Musial, Lane traded his roommate, second baseman Red Schoendienst, to the New York Giants for basically Al Dark. Now I'm a big Al Dark fan and I know he had a steadying influence on Don Blasingame, but Al Dark was 34, Red Schoendienst was 33. In a way this made baseball sense: Don Blasingame nine years younger than Schoendienst, was ready to take over at second base, but maybe he could have been converted to a shortstop. Don Blasingame in his wildest dreams would never be a Red Schoendienst. Schoendienst was almost as big a St. Louis icon as Musial, and they were the last men left from the 1946 World Series champions. “The way they carried on there,” Lane said, “you’d think I’d killed Schoendienst.” Gussie Busch, furious, voided Lane’s blank check and ordered him to clear all major deals with the owner. Schoendienst would be traded from the Giants to the Milwaukee Braves in 1957 and help the Braves win the '57 NL championship and World Series while participating in his 10th All-Star game and finishing 3rd in the NL MVP balloting. Dark on the other hand participated in three All-Star games his entire career and his highest MVP ballot was 3rd, this coming in his rookie year. But this is not meant to take away from Dark's leadership abilities.
The renovated Cardinals improved by eight wins finishing 76-78 good enough for a fourth-place finish. But Lane’s upheaval played havoc with morale and left the club wracked by dissension. Only Hutch's leadership abilities kept the Cards from finishing near the bottom of the league again
Pitching still plagued the Cardinals. Wilmer Mizell, after a two year stint in the military, was back and led the staff with 14 wins, but also tied for the lead in losses with 14. Murry Dickson acquired from the Phillies finished 13-8 and Herm Wehmeier, also acquired from the Phillies was 12-9. No other pitcher won more than 9 games. Team era improved to 3.97 but that was next to last in the NL.
More than beer was brewing at Anheuser-Busch. In Gussie Busch, Lane encountered a character as impulsive and unpredictable as himself.
Season Highlights:
The Sporting News names Stan Musial Player of the Decade. Musial was presented with the first Player of the Decade Award as a highlight of the annual All-Star Game. Musial was voted first place on 97 ballots to 83 for DiMaggio and 52 for Ted Williams.
On August 12 Stan Musial broke Mel Ott's NL record for extra-base hits collecting a double against the Cubs in Chicago.
Ken Boyer, Stan Musial, and Rip Repulski were named to the National League All-Star team. Musial homered in the game, his 5th career All-Star Game home run.
