Sport: Managers Are Expendable

The baseball season was over, and the baseball writers who straggled into the front office of the Brooklyn Dodgers last week expected only routine fare: a freeloading lunch, and the news that Manager Charley Dressen had signed his 1954 contract. Instead, Brooklyn President Walter O’Malley sent them scurrying to the telephones with an announcement: “Brooklyn will have a new manager next year.”

It was not that Charley Dressen wanted to leave Brooklyn—or even, said President O’Malley, that Brooklyn wanted to lose Dressen. Charley’s irremediable error had been one of timing.

Back in late September, flushed with the achievement of leading the Dodgers to their second National League pennant in a row, Charley Dressen had sat him down to compose a letter to O’Malley & Co. In forceful phrases, the letter pointed out that the managers of several also-rans had got three-year contracts: Charley Grimm of the second-place Milwaukee Braves, Eddie Stanky of the fourth-place St. Louis Cardinals. Even Leo Durocher—especially Leo Durocher—of the fifth-place New-York Giants, had been given a two-year contract. Charley Dressen demanded a raise-(from $32,500) and something better than a one-year contract; three years, or at the very least, two. In September it made a good case. Charley’s mistake was to carry the letter around in his pocket until October. By that time, in Brooklyn’s front office, Dressen was not the manager who had won two National League pennants in a row but the fellow who had lost two World Series in a row to the New York Yankees.

So, last week, Charley Dressen learned an old baseball lesson that he should have known by heart: losers are expendable. O’Malley said all the right things—how Brooklyn would miss him, and how, if Charley changed his mind, he could have his job again, for a year. But by next day the front-office line had a fare-thee-well note to it. Said O’Malley: “It is inconceivable to me that Charley would humiliate himself and ask for a one-year contract at this point.”

It was inconceivable to Charley, too. At week’s end he agreed to manage the seventh-place Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League next year, the same team he led to a pennant in 1950. The Dodgers seemed in no hurry to replace him. “I might say the woods are full of managers,” said Walter O’Malley.