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Midgets & Managers. The job is, in a sense, the biggest challenge in baseball. Some people maintain — and attendance figures bear them out — that St. Louis cannot support two major-league teams. For years, the American League Browns, winners of one pennant (1944) in 50 years, have barely kept out of the red. Rival American League teams, including such drawing cards as the New York Yankees, lose money on the trip to St. Louis. Last year, after effervescent Bill Veeck (rhymes with heck) bought the doormat Browns, things began to change. Using the showman stunts that brought fans out in droves when he owned the Cleveland Indians, Veeck shot off fire works before games, imported jitterbugs and contortionists, selected grandstand managers to help run the team, handed out free drinks, and even sneaked a midget into the Browns' lineup (he drew a base on balls).
Fan interest began to perk up under Veeck's Barnum & Bailey tactics, not because the Browns were going anywhere in the pennant race (they finished last, 46 games behind the Yankees), but because the fans wanted to see what Veeck would do next. Cardinal Owner Fred Saigh (rhymes with high), whose club has drawn over a million fans every year of the five Saigh has owned it, countered by placing ads in the St. Louis papers extolling the Cardinals as "a dignified St. Louis institution." The struggle for fans was on.
Veeck, a flamboyant gladhander, relishes the feud. Publicity-shy Saigh prefers to let his team do the talking. After Veeck hired hard-bitten Rogers Hornsby, an old Cardinal favorite, to manage the Browns, Saigh felt forced to retaliate by getting baseball's most colorful character. Saigh fired Manager Marty ("Mr. Shortstop") Marion and hired Eddie Stanky. Veeck, who refuses to be topped, quickly hired Marion as a player-coach.
More Hit & Run. As the Cardinals wound up their spring-training barnstorming tour,*** some of the evidence was in on the new Stanky regime. Always the realist, Stanky knew that he could not remake a team of veterans and rookies into the old Gashouse image. Veterans like Outfielder Enos Slaughter, Second Baseman Red Schoendienst and Third Baseman Billy Johnson already play the game to the hilt. Stan ("The Man") Musial, baseball's best, summed up the new Cardinal feeling: "We'll be more aggressive . . . We'll play more hit & run ... We'll steal more."
Stanky, choosing his words carefully, says: "The men will play up to the fullest of their capabilities ... I do not plan to let anyone take advantage of me ... I am not a martinet—and I am not a sucker." A manager's first task, Eddie says, is "getting the players to believe in you. I do not care if players like or dislike me. Naturally, I want them to like me. But if all of them believe I know what I am doing, I am on the happy road."