Before the Machine. Mark J. SchmetzerЧитать онлайн книгу.
going to get a chance to perform every fourth or fifth day, and he’s no dummy,” Hutchinson promised. “He knows if he can’t pitch for us, he’ll have to start thinking about the minor leagues.
“A lot of people think we gave up on Roy McMillan. It isn’t so. Joey Jay and Juan Pizarro are a couple of good, young pitchers. The Braves were willing to give them up only for what they wanted, and that was McMillan.”
McMillan, a native of Bonham, Texas, had become so settled in Cincinnati that he purchased a pizza franchise in Hamilton, located about thirty miles north of the city. Still, he wasn’t surprised about being traded.
“When you read in the paper every day that you may be going, you’re not surprised when you go,” he said. “When you hear so many rumors, it’s not just general manager’s talk. I knew it, but I hoped it wouldn’t happen. No baseball player likes to be traded. It’s the toughest thing in the game. It’s worse than a bad year. You get used to the fellows on the ball club and the town and the way of doing things, but I’ve been around in baseball long enough, so I wasn’t surprised. I knew I was going to be traded.
“I’ll tell you something. I didn’t like being traded, but I’m glad I’m with a club that has a chance to win it. Third place is the highest we ever finished in Cincinnati. I sure wouldn’t mind playing in a World Series this year.” He would miss, of course, that opportunity.
Pizarro was only twenty-three, but he also was blocked in Milwaukee’s pitching plans. The Puerto Rican made just ninety appearances, including fifty-one starts, in four seasons with the Braves. Those are averages of twenty-three appearances and thirteen starts. He was 23–19 in those appearances, but by going 6–7 with a 4.55 ERA in twenty-one 1960 games he convinced Milwaukee that he wasn’t going to pan out.
The presence of O’Toole and Henry and the acquisition of Jay made Pizarro expendable, and DeWitt knew exactly what he wanted to do. He had his sights set on Chicago White Sox third baseman Gene Freese, an outgoing twenty-six-year-old native of Wheeling, West Virginia, known as much for defensive lapses as he was for the pop in his right-handed bat. The solidly built Freese had just completed his sixth season in the majors, but Chicago was already his fourth team. He’d hit twenty-three home runs and driven in seventy runs with Philadelphia in 1959, prompting the Phillies to trade him to the White Sox for outfielder Johnny Callison. Freese’s homer output dropped to seventeen, but he drove in seventy-nine runs while hitting .268.
Freese was listed on official rosters at five feet eleven and 175 pounds, but he admitted that his height was an exaggeration.
“I lied on my bubblegum cards,” he said. “I said five-foot-eleven just to make me feel bigger. Other guys lied about their age. I lied about my height.”
Despite that, DeWitt saw Freese as the power-hitting third baseman common to most winning teams, and he knew the Reds had enough pitching depth to tempt the White Sox. Just hours after completing the deal with Milwaukee, he sent Pizarro and a thirty-five-year-old right-hander grandly named Calvin Coolidge Julius Caesar Tuskahoma McLish—who’d gone 4–14 with a 4.16 ERA for Cincinnati in 1960—to the White Sox for Freese.
Ironically, McLish had joined the Reds exactly one year earlier when he was traded with Martin and first baseman Gordy Coleman by Cleveland for second baseman Johnny Temple.
“I knew Chicago was going after pitching help, and by the process of elimination, I figured I’d be the one to go,” said Freese, who was nicknamed “Augie” but liked to refer to his bat and, occasionally, himself as “The Old Destroyer.” “I was the only one they figured they had a replacement for.”
He also knew that his defense was the butt of jokes. Sometimes, he made them himself.
“They don’t make jokes when I’m swinging ‘The Old Destroyer,’” he pointed out.
Though he didn’t know it yet, with those two bold, decisive moves, DeWitt had added what would become critical pieces of the team that would win the NL championship. He hadn’t answered all of the questions—Hutchinson still had concerns about his second base situation—but DeWitt was confident that he’d shored up the pitching and improved the run production.
Unfortunately for DeWitt—a portly man who wore rimless glasses and whose wide eyes made him look as if he were perpetually startled—the brilliance he displayed in completing the 1961 team will forever be overshadowed by his headline-making trade of Robinson to Baltimore after the 1965 season. In one book about Cincinnati’s baseball history, the Robinson trade was ranked on the list of the ten worst trades in Reds history. The December 15, 1960, deals didn’t make the list of ten best trades, even though it took a lot of courage to trade away a very dependable shortstop who also was one of the team’s most popular players in exchange for two unproven pitchers.
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