The depression in Cleveland baseball that occurred between 1960 and the early 1990’s is often referred to as the Curse of Rocky Colavito, but this is blaming the victim and not the cause. Instead, full blame of the Indians failure as a team from 1960 through at least 1970 should fall on the shoulders of one Frank “Trader” Lane, the Indians GM from late 1957 through 1961.
Starting in 1935, the Indians were lucky enough to have some of the greatest management ever from the bench to the front office. C.C. Slapnicka, Roger Peckinpaugh, Bill Veeck and Hank Greenberg brought the Indians a pile of Hall of Famers including the pitchers Bob Feller, Bob Lemon and Early Wynn and two AL Pennants. Veeck was both owner and GM and after he sold the team in 1949 he was replaced by Greenberg, his assistant.
At this time Lane, who was born in Cincinnati in 1896, was the GM of the White Sox where he was already making a name for himself. That name was Trader Lane as he made 241 deals while the GM in Chicago from 1948 through 1955. After improving the White Sox from a 51 win team in 1948 to an 81+ win team each year from 1951 through 1955 (including 94 wins in 1954), Lane moved on to St. Louis where, among other things, he tried to trade the three time MVP and twenty time All-Star, Hall of Famer Stan Musiel. Fortunately for the Cardinals, Musiel and history, the St. Louis owner jumped in and wouldn’t allow Lane to complete the trade. From 1956 through 1957, Lane stayed in St. Louis before coming to Cleveland for the 1958 season to replace Greenberg (who himself left to become the GM of the White Sox from 1959 through 1961).
It didn’t take too long for Lane to prove his reputation accurate in Cleveland as he traded future Hall of Famer Wynn along with Al Smith to Chicago for Fred Hatfield and Minnie Minoso. While this could have been a great deal as Minoso was a budding star, he would play just two seasons in Cleveland before being traded by Lane back to the White Sox with Dick Brown and two others for Norm Cash, Bubba Phillips and John Romano. Again, picking up Cash for Minoso could have been a great deal for Lane, but before he ever played a game for Cleveland he was moved to Detroit for Steve Demeter. Demeter played four games for the Indians then left Major League Baseball forever while Cash went to four All-Star games and hit 373 home runs for the Tigers.
It was this kind of trading for trading’s sake that really killed the Indians in the decades following Lane’s reign. Had he left well enough alone, Minoso or Cash would have been great pick-ups for the Indians, but he had to keep betting the house until he had nothing left. In the end, every single regular player from the 1957 team was traded, released or retired by 1960 as the franchise that had been built up by Veeck and Greenberg was utterly decimated.
Of course, fans remember most the trade when the face of the franchise, Colavito, was traded to Detroit on April 17th, 1960 for batting champion Harvey Kuenn. Kuenn would famously play just a single year in Cleveland before being traded to San Francisco for Willie Kirkland and Johnny Antonelli. This is another instance where, had the second trade not been made, things wouldn’t have been so bad. Kuenn was an All-Star his one year in Cleveland and would go on to play four more solid years in San Francisco. This was considerably better than what they would get back from Kirkland and Antonelli, although it was nothing compared to what Colavito did in Detroit and Kansas City. It is almost funny in retrospect that a few of the players gained by Lane, like Romano and Kirkland, were ultimately traded by the next GM to get back those players lost (Colavito and Smith in this case).
Like in Chicago, Lane had an immediate improvement in his on the field product as the Indians won 89 games in 1959 after 76 and 77 the two years before. Largely thanks to the prodigious amount of trades mentioned throughout, the Indians fell off to 76 wins in 1960 and Lane left the team prior to the 1961 season to go to Kansas City. Gabe Paul took over as the Indians GM and spent much of the next decade trying to repair the damage done by Lane, but rather than just moving on and starting over, he tried to recreate the past and possibly set the Indians back even further.
Only twice in the 1960’s did the Indians win more than 50% of their games and they never finished above third place. While it’s hard to blame Lane for the decades beyond this, the trend continued long after the 1960’s as the 1970’s saw a high mark of 81 wins in 1976 and the 1980’s with 84 in 1986. It wouldn’t be until 1994 that the Indians finished above third and 1995 for them to return to the play-offs and win more than 88 games.
As for Lane, things didn’t work out well with the Athletics either as his tenure ended with a lawsuit from Charlie Finley that Lane ultimately won. Because he was not allowed to manage in baseball during the suit, Lane moved on to become the GM of the NBA’s Chicago Packers. With this, Lane played or managed in three of the four major American sports after beginning his adult life as a professional football player. When he was allowed to come back to baseball in 1965 Lane was hired as a special assistant in Baltimore and he stayed there until at the age of 75, when he was hired to be the GM of the Milwaukee Brewers, a post be maintained until 1972.
After all he had done in his career, it’s incredible that another team was willing to hire Lane at all, but it would be his final job and he wouldn’t live much longer, dying in a nursing home in 1981. Too much of the failure to compete from 1960 through 1990 has been blamed on the Curse of Rocky Colavito, particularly since an entirely new team could have been drafted many times over during that span, but even so, Lane deserves more blame for the failures in Cleveland Baseball than any single person since Stanley Robison destroyed the Cleveland Spiders back in 1899.
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