On September 23, 1969, I was driving down LaGrange Street in West Roxbury when the news came over my car radio: “Dick Williams was fired today as Red Sox manager. Eddie Popowski will manage for the rest of the season.” I was so upset that I had to pull over for a few minutes.
I knew things had not gone well for the Sox since the 1967 pennant. Every fan knows the stories. Jim Lonborg went skiing. Jose Santiago hurt his arm. George Scott gained weight and stopped hitting. Slugging outfielder Ken Harrelson was traded for reliever Vicente Romo and two other players who helped little. But firing him even before the season ended? The man who brought the Sox one game from a World Series win just two years ago?
At the time, the Sox had an 82-71 record and were long out of the race. Things were spiraling downward. In his book Baseball, the Wall, and Me, Carl Yastrzemski describes an ugly confrontation between Williams and himself when he accused Carl, who he knew was playing hurt at the time, of not hustling. The argument ended with Yaz being fined $500 and throwing a beer can against the clubhouse wall.
Tom Yawkey was also losing confidence in Williams. Yawkey was quoted as saying that Dick was a good-not excellent-manager, but was not in a category with Casey Stengel or other greats. The next day he stormed into Yawkey’s office in protest, and that seemed to be the last straw. A month later Williams was gone. He would go on to have a long managerial career and have his greatest success in Oakland, where he won two World Championships.
As often happens when a demanding skipper like Williams is fired, the front office went the other way with the next one. Feeling that “communication” had been the problem in the last two years, Yawkey and Dick O’Connell hired Eddie Kasko, a knowledgeable but easygoing man who had ended his playing career for the Sox in 1966 and gone on to manage at Louisville, the top farm club. He was the total opposite of Williams.
Unlike Dick’s rather autocratic ways, Kasko resolved to “treat the Red Sox like men…I am going to communicate with the players I will have.” If communication was the issue, Eddie was a success. The only problem was that without a common enemy like Williams in his last years, the team reverted to different cliques, especially when, as in 1970, there was no pennant race. In his fine biography Tony C, David Cataneo states that “after the despotic Williams, the players were happy to have a manager they could walk over…Yaz and Reggie Smith were leaders of the most powerful clan. Tony C was leader of the other.”
Yaz had grown accustomed to unchallenged stardom (which he always said he never wanted) while Tony was out of baseball in 1968 after his eye injury. Now Conig was keeping pace with Carl and even exceeding him in rbi’s. Tony was a rival again.
Kasko was easy to criticize. He was a balding, affable man who only wanted to manage the team. But radio talkmasters and writers thought he should be more like Ralph Houk and Earl Weaver. The Sports Huddle, a very popular talk show at the time, derisively called him “Eddie the Fox”. It also didn’t help that the team was perenially short of pitching. During the 1970 season, in which the Sox fell out of the race early and finished with an 87-75 record, they allowed 10 or more runs thirteen times, and, not surprisingly, won only three of those games. The squad had three fairly good starters in Gary Peters, Ray Culp, and Sonny Siebert, but lacked an effective fourth or fifth starter and had a weak bullpen. Their closer, Sparky Lyle, had 20 saves but also had 10 blown saves and a 1-7 record.
(This is the first part of my article. I will submit the rest sometime this weekend)
Mike Passanisi
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!