Before the Machine. Mark J. Schmetzer

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      Owner Powel Crosley (left) welcomes Gene Freese (right) to the Reds as Bill DeWitt (center) looks on.

      In many ways, the 1960 deals compare favorably with Bob Howsam’s headline-making November 29, 1971, trade of first baseman Lee May, second baseman Tommy Helms, and utility specialist Jimmy Stewart to Houston for second baseman Joe Morgan, pitcher Jack Billingham, outfielders Cesar Geronimo and Ed Armbrister and third baseman Denis Menke—the historic deal that turned the Big Red Machine into eventual World Series champions.

      “One thing about him was he did what he thought was right and made the deals that he thought would be successful and didn’t think too much about ‘gosh this guy was a fixture’ and what was the media going to say,” Bill DeWitt Jr. said of his father.

      Even a pitcher such as O’Toole didn’t flinch at seeing an accomplished defender traded away.

      “DeWitt made some tremendous trades,” O’Toole said. “McMillan was near the end of his career. He was still a great shortstop, but we had some guys in the background that could fill in that spot, and you can never replace good pitching. I wasn’t really that concerned, because there are a lot of guys around who can catch the ball. Eddie Kasko was a perfect example, and we had Cardenas backing him up, so we were fortunate in that regard.”

      Maloney, watching developments from his off-season home in Fresno, California, didn’t know what to think.

      “I didn’t know too much about Gene Freese,” Maloney recalled. “I’d heard of Joey Jay, and I knew that he was the first Little League player to go to the big leagues. McMillan had been with the Reds quite some time. When I signed with the Reds, he was one of the older guys who sort of took me under his wing—him and Gus Bell. When they traded McMillan, I was sorry to see him go. To me, he was ‘Mr. Shortstop.’ He was a nice guy, but I was just getting my feet wet. I didn’t know a lot about how teams operate. I was just keeping my mouth shut and my eyes open and taking direction.”

      In what turned out to be an off-season of quality over quantity, DeWitt would make just a couple more deals before spring training. He sold Martin’s contract to Milwaukee on December 3 and traded left-handed pitcher Joe Nuxhall to the Kansas City Athletics for twenty-seven-year-old right-hander John Briggs and twenty-four-year-old right-hander John Tsitouris.

      Nuxhall, a Hamilton native, was best known for being the youngest person to play in a major-league baseball game when he took the Crosley Field mound for the Reds against the Cardinals at the tender age of fifteen on June 10, 1944. He’d made the National League All-Star team in 1955 and 1956, but by the time he turned thirty-two in 1960, he couldn’t stick his head out of the dugout without being greeted by a torrent of boos. Going 1–8 with a 4.42 ERA and letting his explosive temper get the best of him at times didn’t help.

      “I asked for it,” Nuxhall recalled. “That particular year, nothing went right. It was a horrible year. I could pitch six shutout innings, and all of a sudden, something would happen. The fans were on me, and I just felt, ‘Well, I want to get out of here. I’ll see if they’ll trade me.’”

      A more stable and effective Nuxhall would be back with the Reds in time to go 5–0 with a 2.45 ERA in twelve games, including nine starts, in 1962, and he would go on to finish his career as a player before becoming a much-beloved broadcaster. He would never say he was haunted by the irony that he spent fifteen of his sixteen big-league seasons with the Reds and that they won a championship in the only season he missed, but his disappointment was understandable.

      “You don’t know if we would have won if I’d been here,” said Nuxhall, who died in November 2007. “Those things you don’t know. In fact, it was a miracle year, from whatever people tell me about it. They weren’t that great of a ballclub, but everything popped into place, which is really what has to happen in a lot of cases. It just happened to fall that way, and they won the pennant.

      “Sure, hell, I would’ve loved to have been here. That’s the dream of any professional athlete—to play for the world’s championship. Like I told some people at a banquet, I don’t care what you’re doing in sports as a team, your ultimate goal is to be in a championship, whether it’s Little League, municipal league, whatever. You say, ‘Well, I’m just playing for fun.’ Basically, I don’t buy that, because you know at the end of the season, somebody has to be the champion, and if you don’t have that feeling, then you’re wasting your time, in a sense. You might as well go jog or something.”

      Perhaps DeWitt’s best move of the off-season was one he didn’t make—out of bed in the wee hours of the morning of February 10, 1961. DeWitt was called at his home by Earl Lawson, the Reds beat writer for the Cincinnati Post and Times-Star who’d been tipped off that Frank Robinson had been arrested and charged with carrying a concealed weapon. Lawson told DeWitt that Robinson could be released at 8 a.m. if someone would post $1,000 bail, and the reporter admitted being “a little startled” when DeWitt said, “Well, I guess one of his friends will bail him out.”

      Robinson had been arrested following the second of two altercations that night at a Cincinnati diner. He and two friends had stopped for hamburgers after a night of bowling and basketball and gotten into an argument with three youths. The cook called for help from two police officers who were eating in their cruiser. They came in and, while trying to calm the situation, referred to Robinson and his two African-American friends as “boys,” prompting one of Robinson’s friends to grow irate enough that the officers arrested him for disturbing the peace.

      After he was bailed out, the three went back to the restaurant to retrieve their food—as did the two police officers. The officers left the restaurant and went back to their car while Robinson and his friends decided to stay and eat at the restaurant. At some point, Robinson looked into the kitchen and saw the cook looking at him and making throat-slitting gestures. That was the last straw for Robinson, who challenged the cook, as he described in his 1968 autobiography, My Life Is Baseball, co-authored with Al Silverman.

      “He started toward me, with a butcher’s knife in his right hand,” Robinson recalled, adding that the restaurant layout prevented other diners from seeing the knife. “I saw him all right. He was coming at me with that butcher’s knife poised in his right hand.”

      Robinson pulled a .25 Beretta—a small, Italian-made pistol—from his jacket pocket and held it in the palm of his left hand. He’d purchased the gun during spring training a year earlier, primarily because he often carried large amounts of cash and had to walk fifty yards in a dark area from where he parked his car to his Cincinnati apartment.

      The cook stopped and yelled, “Hey, that guy’s got a gun,” bringing the officers back inside. Robinson slipped the pistol back into his pocket and lied when asked by one of the officers if he had a gun. They found it after frisking him and arrested him.

      Robinson was as surprised as he was disappointed that DeWitt did nothing. Gabe Paul and Birdie Tebbetts had personally rescued Robinson after he became involved in a police matter during spring training in 1958. No charges against Robinson were filed after that incident, and Robinson understandably expected similar help from DeWitt after the later problem—even though the accepted practice at the vast majority of businesses is to leave employees to handle their own personal legal issues. That’s what adults do, and that’s what DeWitt made the twenty-five-year-old Robinson do.

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