A Game of Inches

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Bench jockeys heckled him from across the diamond and shirtsleeved kibitzers shouted advice from the stands, but the burly, ruddy man alongside the Cincinnati bat rack gave no sign that he heard. The center-field Scoreboard reminded him that he was a front runner in a National League pennant race so close that the loss of a single game might mean the difference between first place and fourth, but beyond pawing abstractedly at his red-sleeved uniform shirt, he appeared unmoved. All week long, alone in the shouting crowd with his furious concentration, the Redlegs' Manager George Robert ("Birdie") Tebbetts, 44, was busy outguessing the opposition, calling the shots for his own club and cocking his narrowed, china-blue eyes at the umpires. For a man with so much on his mind, Birdie seemed uncommonly cool and calm.

Birdie Tebbetts may have looked relaxed, but he was simmering inside with the problems, hunches, gambles and indecisions of a competitor who hates to be outguessed, hates even more to lose. He remained squatly in his corner of the bench--not because he was calm but because he was a catcher. As a catcher, he had learned to do his thinking in a crouch. It is a posture that seems to hone the intellect. For catchers, once they have mastered the mask, chest pads and other "tools of ignorance," seem to make the grade as big-league managers almost as consistently as big-time businessmen make the team on Republican Cabinets. The bright tradition runs way back to the late Connie Mack and Roger Bresnahan. And from Mr. Mack on through Gabby Street, Mickey Cochrane and Al Lopez, few major-league catchers-turned-manager have matched the swift success of George Robert Tebbetts.

The Redlegs were the sad sacks of the second division when Birdie took them over in 1954; by 1956 they had surprised themselves and come within two games of stealing the pennant. The big difference was Birdie. Sportswriters named him "Manager of the Year," but Cincinnati ball fans amended that, hailed him as "best manager in the majors."

This year the Redlegs are playing like men who really believe they can win--and once more the difference is Birdie. Now, like their manager, the Redlegs are convinced that there is nothing worse in life than losing. So they have bounced back from a staggering last-place start. They have made do without the services of Slugger Ted Kluszewski, whose injured back has turned him into a defensive drawback around first base and a spottv performer at the plate. Slowly and steadily they have clawed their way out ox recurrent slumps, and scrambled back toward the lead where they are sure they belong.

Picked for Patsies. This week they are right in the middle of one of the fanciest midseason free-for-alls that the National League has ever known. The first division really consists of six teams, and there is not a soft touch even in the last two clubs (Chicago's Cubs, Pittsburgh's Pirates). The aging Dodgers may not be the world-beaters of other summers, but they are hanging on while some of their best players nurse assorted aches and pains on the sidelines. The St. Louis Cardinals have come upon a pair of pitching brothers named McDaniel, and for the first time in eleven years St. Louis has reason to remember the happy days of the Gashouse Gang and the Dean boys, whose strong right arms used to burn up the league. The once feeble Phillies have fooled everyone and ice-picked their way into contention with a surprisingly potent combination of slap hitters and speedball pitchers. Milwaukee's Braves, despite their unhappy habit of losing the big ones, seem to be training down into fighting trim for the decisive half of the season. Even the sixth-place Giants have come on so fast that their fans are talking of 1951, when a midsummer spurt shot them all the way to the top. And all the while, on the edge of the pack, ready to drag down the first team to falter, the trailing Pirates and Cubs are giving none of their betters an easy inning.

Without Big Klu to flex his muscles and frighten opposing pitchers, every club in the league picked the Redlegs as roundheeled patsies. They had not figured on Birdie Tebbetts. This season's success is not so much a matter of tactics on the field as it is a triumph of Tebbetts' psychology in the clubhouse. Maybe off the diamond the Redlegs will never learn their manager's supreme self-confidence, the positive faith that no man is his superior; maybe some of them sometimes settle for second best--say, in arguments with their wives. But on the ball field, Birdie has converted them all. "The way they're thinking now," says Birdie, "is that any one of them can make up for Klu. Because of Klu's absence, we're getting a complete team effort. Even Frank Robinson is playing well, bad arm and all. McMillan, Temple--everyone is putting out. If the big man was in there but not hitting, it might be different. They'd be waiting for him to pick them up. Now they know they got to pick themselves up. So they do."

Fast Start. There is something about the Redlegs' current cockiness that perks up the whole town.(pop. 525,000). Rooting for them reminds Cincinnati fans that, in a way, they own big-league baseball. The 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings-were the first professional baseball team ever--the first team, that is, on which every member freely admitted that he was being paid to play. They were also the best; they had a 130-game winning streak before the Brooklyn Atlantics finally beat them in June of 1870.

By then the Red Stockings were known as the Reds.*For all their fast start in the fast-growing business of big-league baseball, they spent a long time on their way to the top. It took them 50 years to win their first World Series--and then, a year later, they learned that the Chicago White Sox, whom they had beaten, had thrown the series for gamblers. So the Redlegs' 1919 championship went into the record books as the "Black Sox" scandal. No one won; baseball was the loser.

After that, the Reds picked up their old habit of giving their managers a fast shuffle. Only one, Deacon Bill McKechnie in 1940, won them another World Series. When his teams started losing, too, the parade of pilots resumed--Johnny Neun, Bucky Walters, Luke Sewell, Earle Brucker, Colonel Buster Mills and Rogers Hornsby. Then the Redlegs found George Robert Tebbetts.

Talent, Not Tactics. Cincinnati fans knew Birdie as a hustling, 14-year veteran of major-league catching. They had heard of him as a scrappy American League catcher (Detroit, Boston, Cleveland) who hated to come out second best in anything--a ball game, an argument with an umpire, a. conversation with a friend. They called him "Most Voluble Player in the Majors," but he had had only one short summer of seasoning as a minor-league manager. It was hard to believe that he knew enough tactics to manage a major-league club.

Tactics turned out to be the last thing General Manager Gabe Paul was worrying about when he hired Birdie. "You assume that, all the way down to Class D, managers know when to bunt or when to hit-and-run," says Paul. "The important thing is common sense, the ability to handle men." Paul had been thinking of Birdie in terms of those attributes ever since he read some of Birdie's scouting reports on American Association players. Says Paul: "Anyone who could prepare reports like that had to be a capable and clear-thinking fellow."

Some sample Tebbetts observations: P:On a promising pitcher: "Major-league stuff and a great arm. Screwy in the head. Eliminate head, and I recommend. Get good surgeon."

P:On an outfielder: "A low-ball hitter and an off-field hitter. No power; should not be played to pull. He is a good center fielder with a strong arm. A base runner. Every time he bends his left knee toward his right he is stealing." P:On a pitcher: "Has major-league fast ball but is disturbing type on mound; looks like a mental case." P: On another pitcher: "Not recommended on present style. Has major-league equipment but is a Thomas Edison"--a baseball term for any player who is continually experimenting.

Hero or Bum. Impressed as he was by the scouting reports, Paul put even more weight on Birdie's reaction to the offer of a job. Birdie was not bowled over. He wanted to manage, said he, but strictly in his own way. Says Paul, "Here was a fellow who was going to run a ball club and rise and fall on his own abilities. He was going to do what he wanted even if it meant losing the type of job he always wanted."

The fans were a couple of years learning just what Birdie had in mind. In 1954 and 1955 the Redlegs wobbled in fifth place. But all the while, the players were learning their new manager's devotion to the intricate art of winning ball games.

"Baseball," Birdie told his men, "is exactly what Branch Rickey said it was: 'A race between a man and a ball.' Baseball is a game of inches. A guy catches the ball on the tip of his glove, a batter tops a ball and beats a throw to first. Or a fellow gets up in the ninth and comes through with a liner between third and short--he's a hero. Two inches the other way and he's a bum because he hit into a double play. The only thing you can do is get a little faster man to play each position, keep adding the men who can make the inches work."

The Redlegs spent two seasons learning to make the inches work for them, then last year inched their way to within two games of the pennant (and the Dodgers). Cincinnati fans recognized the new spirit early in the season, and it was catching. Operating with gay abandon, the fans stuffed ballot boxes so enthusiastically that when the All-Star game was held in July, five of the National League starters wore Redleg uniforms.

"I Play Talent." Manager-of-the-Year Tebbetts' own popularity impressed him not at all. "If my players like me," he reflects, "it's an accident of personality. I happen to like my players and I treat them like men. I don't know anything about patting one guy on the back and bawling another out. I don't have any doghouses, and I don't deal in personalities. It doesn't make any difference to me if a guy has a good or a bad personality. I play talent. If a guy is not producing and

I can't use him, it's not that he's in the doghouse, but that he isn't contributing to the overall picture.

"If a manager doesn't have confidence in his ballplayers, even when they're going badly, they're not going to have confidence in themselves. And when a ballplayer's confidence is gone, you haven't got a ballplayer--I don't give a damn how great he is. That's why I try never to lose confidence in the best or the least of my players. The rest of it, a ballplayer has to do for himself. He takes the bat up to the plate. He fields the ball. He throws the ball. If you want to be a good manager, get good ballplayers."

Get Out & Get Under. The Redlegs themselves are the first to quarrel with Birdie's earthy formula. Good players can be the making of a good manager, but Birdie's success is proof enough that a good manager can be the making of good players. Says Outfielder-turned-PitcherHal Jeff coat: "Birdie isn't a manager at all, if you want to know the truth. He's a teacher. He has a big knack of showing a ballplayer the results of effort and ability. Instead of saying two and two is four, he gives a player a problem and lets him figure it out. That way it's lasting. It's often said that the dumbest thing you can do in baseball is to get 'smart,' but Birdie makes you think. He makes it interesting because you get interested in yourself. It's like a kid learning to swim. First a few strokes, then courage. Then he realizes he has the ability to stay above water. First thing you know, he's going across the pond. Birdie makes you like baseball; he's a real good teacher."

Says Catcher Ed Bailey: "Hell, he changed me all the way around. He taught me more the one year I was sitting on the bench than I learned in my whole life; situations, how to go, what to do. He taught me how to get the ball away quicker in a throw, how to move easier on defense. I was probably the world's worst fly ball catcher. He taught me how to get out and get under."

Third Baseman Don Hoak, who was ready to quit baseball when the Chicago Cubs sent him to Cincinnati this season, remembers how Birdie took him aside in spring training and said: "You just can't hit .215 and play in the big leagues. Now you're going to do things my way and see how we make out." Hoak has been making out so well that he is third in the league in Runs Batted In (49). Says he: "Birdie's the guy who helped me--the helpful little things, the kind of little things that can help a little guy like me. He's the best manager I ever played for."

One after another, all the Redlegs lavish praise on Birdie. They know what he means when he says: "There ought to be a second-string or junior Hall of Fame for guys like me. I'll read about some superstar who has had a bad season and the writers apologize when they say, 'He only hit .311 that year.' Listen, I had a lifetime average of .270 and I'm proud of it. I poured my life's blood into it. I clawed and scrambled and fought and hustled to get it." Thanks to Birdie, the whole Redleg team is clawing and scrambling and fighting and hustling, and they have learned that belligerent approach to baseball from a man who never knew anything else.

Lips Like a Bird. Birdie started his scrambling when he was only eleven and determined to get the job of mascot on the Nashua (N.H.) Millionaires, a semi-pro baseball team that had just been organized in the New England mill town where he grew up. "I scared off three or four kids, and I was a better player than the others I couldn't scare off." In those days, Birdie's hero was a former big-league catcher named Bill Haeffner. Bill lent the youngster a mitt, and Birdie's career began. Soon he could catch the fastest pitcher on the club.

Birdie had not only chosen his position, he already had the nickname that would last through his lifetime. Strangely, it had nothing to do with his thin, querulous voice. A doting aunt, cooing over his cradle, had made the less-than-flattering comment: "Why, he's got lips like a bird." The name stuck. It was years later that Birdie's raucous shriek gave it extra meaning. (Once when playing for Detroit he got thrown out of a game for no apparent reason, and Umpire Bill McGowan confessed: "Birdie, I've got a splitting headache, and that voice of yours just kills me.")

Without Incident. As soon as he got to high school, Birdie started playing semi-pro basketball. He found time for football, too, and by senior year he was also elected All-State quarterback. But baseball was the game he liked best, and he spent his summers playing with semi-pro teams in the mill towns of Massachusetts. Big-league scouts began to notice him; the Yankees even offered him a $5,000 bonus if he would skip college and sign with their Newark farm club. But Birdie's widowed mother insisted that her two sons and one daughter had to get all the education they could. So Birdie finally signed with the Detroit Tigers. His reasons were perfectly practical: the Tigers not only offered a bonus, they promised to let him finish college and to pay him a minimum of $200 a month while he was there.

Birdie had his choice of several athletic scholarships, but he finally chose Providence College where he could play baseball under Jack Flynn, an old Pirate infielder. He thought of becoming a doctor, but he gave up his pre-med courses for a philosophy major when he learned that lab work would interfere with baseball practice. For all his athletic activities, Birdie was a good student, and he almost graduated cum laude. "All I needed," he says, "were a few percentage points, and I lost those in a couple of dance halls in Providence. It was worth it."

Once Too Often. After graduation, Birdie signed with the Tigers and began a three-year tour of the minors that took him to New Bedford, Mass., Springfield, 111. and Beaumont, Texas. By late 1936 he was up with the Tigers and learning his trade as catcher under one of the best ever, Mickey Cochrane. Busy as he was, picking up every baseball trick he could, Birdie still managed to let his fast lip lead him into more than his share of fights. "I wasn't any good at fighting," he says. "But it seems as though I could never convince myself, because I was always in the middle of things."

In 1942 Birdie enlisted in the Army, earned a commission, and soon was getting his first crack at managing. From Texas to Tinian he managed service ball clubs. When he came home, teetotaler Tebbetts had "a great big intestinal ulcer," a sure sign that he was temperamentally suited for more managing, for a job that could guarantee further digestive difficulty and extend to him the dubious privilege of changing his shorts in a private clubhouse cubicle.

But Birdie had a few more years of playing ahead. In 1947 he was traded to the Boston Red Sox, where he hit as well as he ever had, showed a remarkable talent for making friends with terrible-tempered Ted Williams, and only fell into disfavor when he opened his mouth once too often. In the fall of 1950 he called some of his teammates "moronic malcontents" and "juvenile delinquents." He was promptly traded to Cleveland. In 1953, just as soon as they could get a catcher to take his place, the Indians sent Birdie to the Cleveland farm in Indianapolis to start his career as a manager.

Looking for Loopholes. In 1948, while he was picking up some spare cash on the off-season banquet circuit, Birdie, then 36, met a brown-haired ex-WAVE namec Mary Hartnett. Mary was not only exceptionally pretty, but had the added attraction of apparent immunity to the Tebbetts charm. It was nearly a year before Birdie could get a date. But when he did, he wooed Mary with the same ardor that helps him win ball games. They were married in the fall of 1950.

Mary has long since resigned herself to the fact that while he loves her dearly, Birdie loves baseball more. He has occasionally been caught reading a novel, but even in the dead of winter he is more likely to spend his evenings digesting the Baseball Register, or poring over the rule book. "I don't know whether he's refreshing his memory or looking for loopholes," says Mary. Occasionally she will interrupt him by asking: "Well, dear, what inning are we in now?"

When he reads bedtime stories to his three button-nosed girls--Susan, 5^, Elizabeth, 4, and Patricia, 2^--Birdie never gets away from the great American game. "Instead of Jack and Jill going up the hill," says Mary, "Birdie will say, 'Jack went out, picked up a bat and hit a home run.' Instead of Peter Rabbit going under the fence into Mr. Whatshisname's garden, he'll say, 'And Peter Rabbit got a base on balls and Mopsy was up next.' Sometimes I pick up the same story and the children say, 'No, no, you're not read, ing it the way Daddy reads it.'"

A Game of Momentum. This year, if ever, Birdie has reason to concentrate on baseball. Cincinnati fans have already decided that the pennant is in the bag. They are so proud of their team that they have stuffed the All-Star ballot boxes so full that the All-Star game voting (which picks every starter except the pitchers) has been reduced to a patriotic absurdity. The poll count decreed that the National League start Cincinnati Redlegs at every position except first base. There, St. Louis' sturdy oldtimer Stan Musial managed to stand off the Redlegs' rooters. Though the balloting was perfectly legal under the somewhat farcical procedures followed by the big leagues, Commissioner Ford Frick felt compelled to step in last week and decree that the Redlegs may have only five starting positions. The All-Stars, Cincinnati public opinion notwithstanding, must have room for such as Hank Aaron and Willie Mays from other clubs.

Even the most passionate Redleg fans know that winning the games that count in the season's statistics will take a lot more than cheers and votes, especially in this year's National League.

"The big surprise," says Birdie, "is the Philadelphia club. Everybody expected that Cincinnati and St. Louis would have a chance to win, and Brooklyn and Milwaukee were the favorites. Now the season is almost half over and it still looks like a five-club race. Oh, the Phils have got great young pitching. The Cardinals could win it too; they've come up with young pitchers that have been tremendous for them. The Braves, they got the equipment. The most powerful ball club is ours or Milwaukee, and ours is the best defensive club. It's a tough league."

It's a tough league, indeed, and a tight race, and the Reds are counting on Birdie to keep them rolling. "This is a game of momentum," says he. "If a ball club gets hot and they begin to roll, you can throw all the statistics in the world right out the window."

*-So named because a young lady named Margaret Truman (no kin to Mrs. Cliftpn Daniel), who knitted the uniform socks, decided that the boys would look nice in red. -The nickname lasted until the era of Joe McCarthy--the late Senator, not the great New York Yankee manager. Then, patrioteering owners with an ear for public opinion and rustlings among the Reds ruled that their ball club should be called the Redlegs.

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