Solly Hemus, last Cardinals player-manager, dies at 94
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@EasyAce
I remember reading about Hemus in Jim Brosnan's The Long Season. Hemus sounded like a real dick, and possibly racist.
@Machiavelli Hemus
was a real dick and a definite racist. He's the damn fool who told Curt Flood and Bob Gibson
they'd never make it. It was after Hemus was succeeded by Johnny Keane that the Cardinals actively
began changing their racial culture with things like compelling hotels in spring training to allow black
and white and Hispanic players to stay in the same hotel and even room together if they chose.
(Keane, among other things, had managed Bob Gibson in the minors and knew both his ability and
his personality well.)
Johnny Keane probably deserved better than he ended up getting, too. For those who don't know
the story, it goes like this:
After ending his playing career in 1963 as a player-coach, Yogi Berra was installed as the manager
of the Yankees. The motivation: desperation to cut into the popularity of the crosstown, comically
inept Mets, managed by former Yankee skipper Casey Stengel, and outdrawing the Yankees in the
dilapidated Polo Grounds (Shea Stadium would open for 1964), and there was no more popular
Yankee who might fit the bill than Yogi. The wick to the powder keg: general manager Roy Hamey
retired unexpectedly after the 1963 World Series, stepping down to become a part-time scout,
and manager Ralph Houk was named to succeed him. Not to mention that the Baltimore Orioles
had feelers out about whether Berra might like to manage them, which probably helped the
Yankees make up their minds.
It also turned out that co-owners Dan Topping and Del Webb were hoping to make the team more
attractive to prospective buyers with those moves—the pair decided to get out at long last. Except
that the Yankees struggled to stay on top through the first half of 1964 . . . and a number of
disgruntled players found themselves a convenient outlet for their displeasure. Houk turned out to
be keeping his door open to anyone wanted to
kvetch about Berra, who’d gone from teammate to
boss practically overnight, and who was struggling to establish his authority while his field strategies
(and, his seeming over-reliance on a rookie sinkerballer named Pete Mikkelsen out of the bullpen)
raised a few eyebrows and hackles.
By the time of the CBS sale it looked like there would be no Yankee pennant for only the third time
since 1949. The sale itself proved controversial: American League president Joe Cronin (himself a
Hall of Fame shortstop) tried to ram it through by way of a telephone/telegraph vote—against league
rules, which required a vote at an official, formal, in-person meeting unless the vote was known to
be unanimous in the making.
Two owners—Charlie Finley of the Kansas City Athletics, Arthur Allyn of the Chicago White Sox—
were opposed to the sale. Eight teams needed to approve the deal. Baltimore owner Joe Iglehart
was considered the swing vote . . .and Iglehart had one whale of a conflict of interest: he not only
owned the Orioles, he chaired CBS’s Financial Board and owned considerable enough CBS stock.
He ended up voting to approve the sale and unloading his Oriole ownership posthaste.
Which was nothing compared to the devious double switch the Yankees cooked up for Yogi Berra.
The Yankees were still struggling at the time of the CBS deal, and Houk decided he was going to
dump Berra at season’s end no matter how it ended. He even had a potential successor lined up,
unofficially: St. Louis Cardinals manager Johnny Keane.
The Cardinals, too, were struggling in 1964, despite the deal soon to become infamy in Chicago
lore: the swap of Cardinals pitcher Ernie Broglio to the Cubs for young outfielder Lou Brock, despite
warnings (mostly from Lew Burdette, another pitcher the Cubs acquired from the Cardinals earlier)
that Broglio’s arm was just about shot. The Cardinals had already dumped general manager Bing
Devine, and now they were thought to be flirting with Leo Durocher, then a Dodgers coach, as a
successor to Keane at season’s end.
What happened next upended just about everyone:
1) The infamous Philadelphia Phillies collapse (they had the pennant just about in the bank vault,
six games ahead of the pack, when they hit that notorious ten-game losing streak near September’s
end) opened the door for the Cardinals to end up the pennant winners on the regular season’s final
day—after they’d lost the first two of three in a season-ending set with the Mets, of all people.
2) With the aid of late-season callup Mel Stottlemyre (who went 9-3 with a 2.06 ERA down the stretch
including a five-game winning streak) and veteran pickup Pedro Ramos (a journeyman starter who’d
save seven key games in September to shore up the Yankee pen), the Yankees moved into first place
to stay 17 September and managed to hold off serious challenges from two teams who almost killed
the CBS deal: the White Sox and the Orioles.
3) The Cardinals won the World Series in seven whacky games, crowned when Keane famously let Bob
Gibson finish what he started in Game Seven despite the Yankees threatening to tie it seven all in the
ninth inning in Busch Stadium (the former Sportsman’s Park). “I had a commitment to his heart,”
Keane said after the game.
4) The
next day came the double switch:
a) Cardinals owner Gussie Busch called a press conference to announce Keane’s re-hiring, and Keane
responded by handing Busch his letter of resignation—Keane had been only too well aware of the
backchannel machinations at mid-season and was particularly miffed over Devine’s firing, Devine
having been a Keane mentor.
b) Berra went to the Yankee offices thinking he’d been called to start making plans for the 1965 season
and came out with his head in a guillotine’s catch basket. Bless his soul, Yogi had no clue to the wheeling
and dealing that preceded it, including the prospect of Keane, the man who’d just defeated him in the
World Series, becoming his successor, which is exactly what happened.
What nobody in the Yankee hierarchy ever explained satisfactorily was how the hell, if Berra was such a
horrible manager, the Yankees managed to win that pennant by winning thirty out of forty-three games,
including one eleven-game winning streak and fifteen of their final nineteen games.
The aftermath:
—Bing Devine ended 1964 getting himself hired by the Mets to succeed George Weiss, the former Yankee
general manager who’d become president of the newborn Mets for 1962. Devine would finish what Weiss
started, building the groundwork for shoring up the Mets’ farm system, reaching for more younger talent,
pitching in particular, and thus planting the seed that would become the 1969 Miracle Mets. The irony:
Devine also proved the master builder of the Cardinals’ 1964, 1967, and 1968 pennant winners (and two
World Series champions), even returning to the Cardinals after the 1967 World Series triumph when Stan
Musial decided he wasn’t comfortable being the team’s general manager.
---Red Schoendienst, once a Cardinals mainstay at second base and now a coach, was named the Cardinals'
new manager. He'd win pennants in 1967 and 1968 and a World Series in 1967.
—Yogi Berra also moved to the crosstown Mets, reuniting with former manager Stengel as first base coach.
Berra would hold that job until he was named the Mets’ manager following the unexpected death (his second
heart attack) of Gil Hodges in spring 1972. Berra would manage the Mets to an unlikely pennant in 1973—
they opened September last in the NL East, won the division at the last minute, just about, then took the
League Championship Series from the Cincinnati Reds before losing the Series in seven to Oakland—but be
fired in 1975 when the team’s 1970s collapse continued in earnest.
—Johnny Keane learned the hard way he’d taken on a white elephant in 1965. Mickey Mantle’s long-trouble-
some legs and hip finally caught up to him in earnest. (He probably should have retired after 1964; biographer
Jane Leavy isn’t the only one to point out the Yankees needed his box office appeal.) Whitey Ford’s hip and
then elbow became more bothersome. Jim Bouton developed arm trouble in 1965 that would reduce him
to journeyman relief work. (And, to writing
Ball Four in due course.) Joe Pepitone, who broke in with
big promise in 1962, proved to be the shakiest Yankee with a morass of personal troubles that probably
tied to his Brooklyn boyhood as the son of a violently abusive father. The parched farm produced promising
minor leaguers who proved journeyman major leaguers at best; the best of the post-1964 Yankee products
proved to be Roy White, and he proved a long reliable but barely higher than journeyman player.
Unconscionably, too, the Yankees kept the true seriousness of a wrist injury (it turned out to be fractured,
sapping the man’s long ball power at last) from Roger Maris.
Also, Keane practised a typically National League style of run-and-gun, station-to-station baseball that didn’t
mesh with the Yankees’ having been built as always “to going for the big inning,” as Pepitone would phrase it.
(Bouton would call it “sacrificing a season to win a game.”) The Yankees finished 1965 in sixth place and
opened 1966 going 4-16. Keane was fired in favour of Ralph Houk, who’d had it with front office work; Houk
would manage the 1966 Yankees all the way to last place—a slot in the standings the franchise hadn’t seen
since 1912.
Keane accepted a scouting job with the Angels after the season—shortly before his unexpected death of a
heart attack. At age 55, and looking about twenty years older.
