The Pecan Park Eagle

 Iconic General Manager Branch Rickey of the St. Louis Cardinals had a three-pronged plan for helping himself. (1) He had a deal with club owner Sam Breadon. He got to keep a percentage of the net profits on the club’s operations, which meant, of course, that the less he paid out in personnel salaries, the more he got to keep for himself, as long as the club kept on winning. (2) He counted on the reserve clause and a loaded pipeline of talented players in the farm team system, players with no choice in baseball beyond the Cardinals, to keep him supplied with game-winning material. (3) He needed a few key people in the organization who were capable of doing more than one essential task at one time for the lowest salary he could work out with them for the price of a single employee’s salary.

Branch Rickey hit the jackpot when he met and signed a young pitcher/1st baseman/outfielder/baseball thinker/field manager/accountant/front office businessman named Eddie Dyer.

Born October 11, 1899 in Morgan City, Louisiana, Eddie Dyer’s family moved to Houston when he was still a kid, and he grew up among us as another “got here fast as I can” Houstonian with a talent and love for the game of baseball. After high school, he attended and played baseball at Rice, where he caught the attention of Branch Rickey and the Cardinals. This was around the same time that Mr. Rickey was surreptitiously taking control of the Houston Buffaloes for the Cardinals through a straw man purchaser for the sake of avoiding censure from Commissioner Landis, who thought that major league club control of minor league teams was bad for baseball.

Signed as a right handed pitcher, the Cardinals assigned Dyer to Syracuse of the International League to sharpen his skills.  Dyer’s progress was slow and mediocre. For the next five years, Eddie shuffled back and forth between the Cards and some of their top farm clubs, trying to break through as a more consistent winner. He seemed to be getting things together in 1927 when, again with Syracuse, he won his first six games before running into one of those life-changing events. An arm injury tagged Dyer with his first loss, but that was the small deficit. That 1927 arm injury ended Eddie Dyer’s pitching career.

From 1928 forward, Eddie Dyer became a Cardinals farm club manager, also continuing his playing career as an outfielder through the 1933 season he split between Greensboro and Elmira. Here’s where the Rickey touch/Dyer ability really started coming together. Wherever he went for the Cards as a manager, Dyer also served as business manager or club president – and all for the same money. What a deal!

In 1937-38, Eddie Dyer pulled leave as a manager, taking over in 1938 as Supervisor for Cardinal Farm Team Operations in the Southern and Southwestern Regions of the United States. He returned for three years (1939-40) as Manager of his home town Houstons Buffs . It turned out to be an impressively successful run, one that that would vault Dyer even higher up the Cardinal ladder of managerial plans in the years immediately following World War II. Dyer led the 1939-41 Buffs to three consecutive first place finishes in the Texas Leage, averaging 102 runs per season. His 1940 Buffs club also won the playoffs for the pennant, but then lost the Dixie Series to Nashville in five games. In 1942, Dyer moved up to the then AA Columbus (O) Redbirds of the American Association, finishing first and also winning the league pennant playoff series.

During World War II (1943-45), Dyer performed admimistrative duties for the Cardinals as Farm System Director in 1943 and then spent a couple of years (1944-45) taking care of his personal businesses in Houston. Then, when Cardinals Manager Billy Southworth suddenly departed St. Louis to take over the helm for the Boston Braves after the ’45 season, the wheel passed to Eddie Dyer to take over as Manager of the St Louis Cardinals in 1946. – What a timely move that turned out to be.

With all the big stars returning from military service, Eddie Dyer led the 1946 Cardinals to a first place tie with the Brooklyn Dodgers for the National League pennant. The Cardinals then took the flag by winning the first two games of  a best two of three games series with the Dodgers. They then faced off with Ted Williams and the Boston Red Sox in that “one for the ages” World Series in which Enos Slaughter’s “mad dash” run-scoring, game and Series-deciding tally from first base in Game Seven became one of the iconic moments in World Series history.

Dyer kept the Cardinals close again in 1947 and 1948, but lost out in the end as second place finishers to the Dodgers and Braves. When the Dyer-led Cards again narrowly missed in 1949, finishing only a game back of the Dodgers, things looked bleak. With Branch Rickey now guiding the Dodgers, the Cards no longer had the talent jam in their system that they once enjoyed. Dyer knew that too. He had worked every phase of the Cardinal operations over the years and really needed no “handwriting on the wall” to tell him what was coming soon. If anything, in fact, Eddie Dyer’s next actions were the writer of things to come for the St. Louis Cardinals.

After finishing the 1950 season in 5th place, Eddie Dyer resigned as manager of the Cardinals and retired to tend his considerable business interests in Houston. Dyer was involved in insurance, real estate, and oil. Marty Marion would take over as Cardinals Manager in 1951, but neither he nor any of the many who followed him would have the answer to winning it all again anytime soon. The Cardinals would not win another World Series until another Houstonian, Johnny Keane, got them there for that thrilling seven-game triumph over the New York Yankees in 1964.

Eddie Dyer’s retirement years in Houston were productive – and presumably content. Sadly, Eddie Dyer suffered a stroke in 1963 and then passed away in Houston on April 20, 1964 at age 65. Part of his legacy will live on as a tribute to Branch Rickey. The great Branch Rickey couldn’t have done it quite as renumeratively in baseball without the help he received from people like Eddie Dyer, but, of ourse,  it took a man like Rickey to recognize from early on what he had on his hands in the kid from Houston that he signed out of Rice (now University) Institute back in 1922.

Tags: Baseball, History, Houston Buffs, St. Louis Cardinals

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