Before the Machine. Mark J. Schmetzer
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Название: Before the Machine
Автор: Mark J. Schmetzer
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Спорт, фитнес
isbn: 9781578604647
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The stop-and-start nature of the interstate system at that time made getting to Reds games much different than it is today. Ferguson recalled the challenges of getting to Crosley from Dayton.
“There were three or four ways to come,” he said. “You could come straight down U.S. 25 right through Miamisburg, or you could take a couple of side roads over to (state route) 741 that ran parallel to 25, east of there. Another way we took was going partway down 25, then swinging west past Middletown over to 747. Eventually, that would hit Spring Grove Avenue when it went way on out.”
By the late 1950s, according to a history of Interstate 75 written by Jake Mecklenborg for “Cincinnati-transit.net,” the highway had advanced south to the Ludlow Viaduct, getting closer to linking up with the Kenton County expressway in Northern Kentucky. The last link was the four-mile stretch from the Ludlow Viaduct to the Ohio River, including construction of the Brent Spence Bridge. Space for the stretch through Cincinnati’s West End and Queensgate neighborhoods still was being cleared in 1961. Eventually, as many as 20,000 people from close to 5,000 families, as well as 551 businesses, would be displaced.
The city cleared out the buildings on York Street, behind Crosley Field, to create additional parking spaces.
Before construction prevented it, the Reds were able to use the cleared area beyond the outfield walls for—you guessed it—parking.
TWO
Taking Aim
Considering the concealed weapon charge Frank Robinson still was dealing with when he arrived in Tampa, Florida, for spring training in 1961, some people might have found it a bit ironic that the sound of gunfire was common around the Cincinnati camp.
Nobody was particularly alarmed, however, for two reasons—it was expected, and the guns shot only BBs.
They were part of an exercise designed by a Columbus, Georgia, company known as Unlimited Enterprises to improve the players’ focus. A brainstorm of ever-innovative owner Powel Crosley Jr., the idea was for the players to shoot BBs at targets tossed into the air. The targets got progressively smaller and smaller, from baseballs to discs to pennies, all the way down to BBs, which meant the shooter was trying to hit a BB with a BB. The instructors—Lucky McDaniel, Mike Jennings, and John Hughes—eventually would tell shooters to “look at the shiny side of the BB.”
Reds players shoot at the sky during spring training.
Outfielder Wally Post hit six consecutive discs in one stretch before knocking out a wad of paper stuffed into the middle of the disc on his seventh shot.
“It was eye-hand coordination stuff,” pitcher Jim O’Toole said.
“The object of all this is for the boys to correlate their attempts to hit my targets with their attempts to hit baseballs,” Hughes said. “I’m trying to get the players to concentrate on their target, whether it’s a baseball or disc. I have the boys shoot with both eyes open, and I teach them that they should think of the gun or bat as merely a working member of their body.”
Shooting BBs at BBs actually had been implemented by Crosley a couple of years earlier.
“My best year was 1959, and that was the year we had a week of this shooting in spring training,” outfielder Vada Pinson recalled. “Last year I bought a little gun and worked out myself, but that’s not as good as when you have someone helping you. These drills teach you to concentrate, and they help you to pick up the ball faster. Learning to do those things isn’t going to hurt any batter.”
Pitcher Bob Purkey was convinced the drills also helped the mound staff.
“Sometimes a pitcher gets out there and just throws without concentrating completely on his target,” Purkey admitted. “I’ve done it. These drills help me concentrate. You can’t hit the spots if you aren’t concentrating. That’s the difference between a thrower and a pitcher—concentration.”
“They got us down to where he would throw a BB in the air and we could hit it,” young pitcher Jim Maloney said. “We’d started with big washers, bigger than a silver dollar, ten feet in front of you. Within two to three weeks, we were doing that every day. It broke up the monotony of just standing around shagging balls.
“We went from hitting a washer to hitting a piece of paper inside of a washer. Then we got it down to three feet in front you.”
Shooting at BBs was just one of several unusual methods tried by the Reds in their efforts to get the franchise turned around. When the pitchers and catchers reported on February 22 to Plant Field at Tampa for the team’s twenty-eighth spring training in the city, most of them—if not all—had little idea of what was waiting for them.
One new person on hand to greet them was Otis Douglas, a coach described as a physical conditioning consultant. The fifty-year-old Douglas was a fascinating character, sort of a Renaissance man of sports.
The Reedville, Virginia, native, who owned with his wife, Eleanor, a 3,300-acre pheasant preserve in Hague, Virginia, lettered and served as team captain in football and track while earning Bachelor of Science, Master of Arts, and Doctorate of Education degrees at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. He taught physical education, directed intramural athletics, worked as an assistant football and track coach and as head swimming coach while also serving as head athletic trainer for all of the Indian teams before moving on to the University of Akron in 1939 as assistant and then head football coach.
Besides teaching physical education Douglas also coached wrestling, swimming, track, gymnastics, and freshman basketball and again served as athletic trainer before being named Akron’s athletic director in 1941.
Douglas served as an officer in the Naval Aviation Physical Fitness Program from 1943 to 1945 and was player-coach with the Jacksonville, Florida, Naval Air Station football team in 1945. After the war, he embarked on a professional football career as a player and trainer with the Philadelphia Eagles while coaching football at Drexel Tech at the same time before landing the job as head coach at the University of Arkansas, which he gave up for a job as an assistant with the Baltimore Colts. From there, he spent a year as an assistant at Villanova and another on the staff of the NFL Chicago Cardinals before going north to be head coach of the Calgary Stampeders of the Canadian Football League.
After a year of scouting talent for the Minnesota Vikings in 1960, Douglas joined the Reds.
“He put the Reds through a sprightly course of calisthenics designed to stretch shoulder-girdle muscles, loosen hamstrings and strengthen ankle and knee joints,” Sports Illustrated reported. “The Reds, a bit wary of all this exercise, finally were won over by the diffident but appealing personality of Mr.—or Dr.—Douglas and went into the regular season as well-conditioned a baseball team as there was in either league.”
Frank Robinson, who’d had problems with his throwing arm since 1954, overcame them with Douglas’s help. Robinson’s arm was so bad that he spent most of the 1959 and 1960 seasons at first base, though he was an outfielder by trade.
“Douglas had been hired by the Reds to get the ballclub in condition, and he did just that, though he nearly killed us in the process,” Robinson СКАЧАТЬ