Before the Machine. Mark J. Schmetzer

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СКАЧАТЬ in 1926. At the same time, he was attending St. Louis University, Washington University, and St. Louis University Law School, all at night, and he eventually passed the Missouri bar examination in June 1931.

      DeWitt eventually rose to the role of team treasurer before being named in 1936 an assistant vice president specializing in procuring players for the major- and minor-league teams, which allowed him to indulge his eye for talent. He spent less than a year in that job before returning to the perennially woebegone Browns as vice president and general manager in 1936, and in 1944 he put together the only team to win an American League championship while the franchise was located in St. Louis. The Browns lost to the Cardinals in a six-game World Series, but The Sporting News recognized DeWitt’s accomplishment by naming him Major League Executive of the Year.

      The Browns couldn’t maintain the momentum of the mid-1940s and struggled in the shadow of the more successful Cardinals, who appeared in nine World Series and won six in the twenty-one-year span from 1926 through 1946 while sharing Sportsman’s Park with their American League counterparts. DeWitt displayed his taste for dramatic deals in November 1947 when he traded outfielder Vern Stephens and pitcher Jack Kramer to the Boston Red Sox for nine players and $310,000. The deal couldn’t lift the Browns out of the second division, which didn’t keep DeWitt and his brother, Charlie, who was working as the team’s traveling secretary, from scraping together enough money to purchase controlling interest in the Browns in 1949. The DeWitts sold the franchise in 1951 to a group led by the flamboyant Bill Veeck, but Bill DeWitt stayed in the front office until Veeck was forced to sell the team, which was moved to Baltimore and became the Orioles for the 1954 season.

      DeWitt landed in New York as assistant general manager of the Yankees for two years before taking over administration of a fund designed to help needy minor league teams in 1956. He spent four years in that job, but he never lost the urge to run a ballclub and put together a contender, so when a group of investors who admittedly knew little about baseball bought the Detroit Tigers, they turned operation of the franchise over to DeWitt.

      He wasted little time indulging his own flair for flamboyance while trying to improve a team that finished two games under .500 and in fourth place in the AL. Early in the 1960 season, he pried first baseman Norm Cash from the Chicago White Sox for little-used infielder Steve Demeter. Cash would win the 1961 AL batting championship and spend fifteen years with the Tigers, playing a key role in their 1968 World Series championship.

      Five days after acquiring Cash, DeWitt and the even more flamboyant Frank Lane, general manager of the Cleveland Indians, hatched an eye-popping trade in which 1959 batting champion Harvey Kuenn went to the Indians for 1959 home run champion Rocky Colavito. Lane and DeWitt later collaborated in August on the only trade of managers in major league history, with Detroit skipper Jimmy Dykes taking over for Joe Gordon in Cleveland.

      The deals made headlines, but did little to improve the teams. DeWitt’s Detroit team lost five more games in 1960 than it had in 1959, and his employment circumstances had gone similarly downhill, recalled his son, William O. DeWitt Jr.

      “He was in Detroit, and he’d gone up there as president, general manager, chief executive officer,” said DeWitt, who followed his father into baseball and retraced the family’s roots back to St. Louis as chairman of the board and general partner of the Cardinals. “A group had bought the team, and they didn’t have any baseball background. They wanted a baseball man. They said, ‘You’ll have ultimate authority to run the business.’ Then, after the first year, John Fetzer bought the other guys out and became the controlling partner. He said to my father, ‘I still want you to be the GM, but I’m going to run the team and oversee everything.’ My father said, ‘I understand, but if I get another opportunity, I’m going to take it, because that’s what I signed up for.’”

      The younger DeWitt, who turned twenty in the summer of 1961, was a student at Yale University at the time. He recalls his father being approached by Cincinnati banker Tom Conroy, who was secretary and treasurer of the Reds.

      “He knew my father,” DeWitt Jr. said. “I can’t tell you the background, but when Gabe Paul left, I think he suggested to Powel Crosley that my father could be available and if so, that he should be the guy who should come and replace Gabe Paul.”

      Giles, who had known DeWitt since the two first met in Rickey’s office in St. Louis in 1920, had the same recommendation. At least two other men were rumored to be interested in the job—Cedric Tallis, general manager of the minor league team in Seattle, and Dewey Soriano, president of the Pacific Coast League in which Seattle played—and Giles and Crosley spent two days discussing the situation. In the end, Crosley liked DeWitt’s extensive major league experience.

      “We discussed the job,” Crosley told reporters on November 2. “I didn’t make up my mind until this morning. I feel that DeWitt is the most qualified man for the job.”

      Despite his long career in baseball and his accomplishments, the DeWitt name wasn’t well-known, at least in Cincinnati.

      “I had no clue who DeWitt was,” said pitcher Jim O’Toole, who made his off-season home in Cincinnati. “I didn’t realize he was hanging around with Bill Veeck. He’d been around forever, but he was a very intelligent financial genius.”

      How shrewd was DeWitt? While he was getting paid by the Reds to be the team’s general manager, he was still getting paid by the Tigers to not work for them.

      “None of the owners knew anything about baseball,” DeWitt said at the time. “Fetzer wanted to be president, which he now is, and he used me against Harvey Hansen, who was president. That didn’t help me a lot with Hansen. Making things worse was the fact that the Detroit farm system hadn’t produced anyone worthwhile in seven years. When Fetzer moved in as president, he wanted to put me in cold storage for two years as his assistant, but I had a contract as president rendering me $100,000 in three years. When the call came from Cincinnati last October 25, I settled the remainder of my Detroit contract for 50 percent, so I will be paid $16,666 a year by the Detroit club until November 1, 1962.”

      DeWitt stepped into a situation desperate for stability. Crosley’s illness had allowed questions regarding the franchise’s future in Cincinnati to linger. The latest example was a newspaper report a week earlier that Harry Wismer, a flamboyant New York broadcasting entrepreneur who already owned the American Football League New York Titans, was trying to form a syndicate to buy the Reds.

      “If we get the club, I’ll keep it in Cincinnati,” Wismer said. “We have learned there is a chance the Reds may be for sale, and we have been working on this for a couple of weeks. I think if Powel Crosley gives us an even break in negotiations, we will wind up with the franchise.”

      Wismer dangled the possibility of Cincinnati getting an AFL franchise as a sweetener. Paul had approached Wismer on Crosley’s behalf about Cincinnati getting an AFL franchise.

      “Things were pretty well set for the football franchise, but Powel backed out at the last minute,” said Wismer, who knew his promises about keeping the baseball team in Cincinnati would do little to comfort local fans. They easily recalled that New York was supporting two National League teams as few as four years earlier and might like the Reds at least as much as the Mets, who were due to start playing in 1962.

      “Why would we want to move out of Cincinnati?” Wismer said. “Cincinnati is a wonderful, rich, aggressive baseball town. All it needs is for some management to put money into the operation, and it will really go places.”

      That man, however, was not Wismer. He didn’t have enough money to operate the Titans. The situation grew so dire that making payrolls grew iffy. The other AFL owners, realizing the league needed a successful team in New York, arranged for Wismer to sell the team to a more financially СКАЧАТЬ