BRAD MILLS: FRESH EYE ON AGING TEAM CULTURE.
When the Houston Astros announced yesterday that Brad Mills would be the new field manager of the club in 2010, I was more than OK with it. I would have been all right with either Phil Garner or Dave Clark too, but both of those guys, especially Garner, were insiders to the organization and may have suffered already from one condition that the new manager is going to have to deal with next season, one way or another. It might have been a lot harder for Phil Garner, whom many of the current players already know well from his very recent tenure as the most vertically successful manager in Astros history. Dave Clark may have had a better shot at it, but even Dave has already suffered from being the interim manager for what, eighteen games at the tail end of this past awful 2008 season? It wasn’t the kind of formula for imbuing a man with much authority on the near future screen and scheme of things.
The “it” factor here is the influence of certain key veterans upon the rest of the team as producers and clubhouse politicians. I’m talking here about the impact of Lance Berkman, Carlos Lee, and Roy Oswalt. What each of these stars do, and fail to do, matters greatly. These guys can lead the younger players to get behind a manager from the start – or they can just as easily, no matter how subtly they do it, send out a message of disrespect for a manager that spreads like a virus. And why not? After all, this has been “their” club for years – and they’re the guys who get paid the big bucks to make Houston a champion. Brad Mills may have played some third base, but he was no Mike Schmidt. Who is he to tell anybody in this family what to do?
Our Houston stars didn’t invent that dynamic. The resistance of elitists to control by others viewed as less qualified by talent and tenure is as old as the proverbial hills. It goes way back and way beyond baseball as one of the great destroyers of aspiring kingdoms and expiring dynasties. We just seem to have it at play in Houston baseball today, even though we’ve never won anything but a single National League pennant.
Let’s face it. The Houston Astros cannot win without good production from Lance Berkman, Roy Oswalt, and Carlos Lee. They also cannot win if these key veterans fail to support Brad Mills as manager. Everybody, including us fans, loses if Brad Mills doesn’t have a clue as to how important these three guys are to both team production and morale. Just as importantly, Brad Mills needs to come in with an honest strategy for gaining their confidence and support as early as possible. All three of these players are also smart guys – and should quickly see how important resolving this issue is to each of them and the club, as well. Pretending it doesn’t exist is both foolish and potentially fatal to future success in the National League.
That issue, my friends, is the one that 90% of the 2010 season now turns upon, in my humble opinion. Let’s all get behind Brad Mills and wish him and our Houston Astros the best outcome possible.
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.
Alex Schmelter (above) received the MVP from his grandad, Babies Manager Bob Dorrill, as Grandma Peggy Dorrill looked on over his right shoulder. Also in the photo, left to right, are Kathleen and Larry Miggins, the former Cardinal and Buff, Babies General Manager Bill McCurdy, plus Bob “Double Duty” Blair and his wife, our Babies scorekeeper, Brigitte Blair. 
seems that way. His 17-year minor league playing career (1930-41, 1946-48) as a pretty good hitting middle infielder, however, quickly revealed an even greater talent for leadership. At age 26, Keane was awarded his first managerial assignment from the parent Cardinals as Manager of the Class D Albany, Georgia Travelers. Johnny promptly rewarded the Rickey organization’s judgment of him by reeling off two consecutive first place league pennant winners in Albany in both 1938 and 1939.
Willard Brown was one of those older, out-of-the-shadows players who glanced his way through organized baseball during the early days of its desegregation. He got there in time to leave one very indelible mark, but not early enough to use all of his abilities in their prime form, and not late enough to find any real place for himself in the major leagues among a more receptive crowd of accepting white teammates. No indeed. An older Willard Brown got there playing for a team that still overflowed in 1947 with some old school white racists.
hitting .179 in 21 games with the Browns, Willard Brown left the big leagues and returned to the familiar confines of his more comfortable life among the Monarchs in Kansas City. That winter of 47-48, Brown went to Puerto Rico and batted .432 with 27 homers and 86 RBI in only 60 games, earning for himself yet another nickname as Ese Hombre or – “That Man”.
Among all the great controversial names ever assigned to minor league baseball clubs, I have to go with the Tampa Smokers as my all time favorite venture into the future of political incorrectness. Of course, it came about in the early twentieth century, during the era in which Tampa, Florida was reknowned for its cigar products, but that kind of explanation probably cuts little ice with the 2009 Surgeon General or his/her legion of anti-smoking lobbies. As a puritanical culture, we still aren’t that forgiving of people found guilty of past addictions, even those that once held their ground as the social norm. I was a smoker for a long, long time, and although I wouldn’t recommend it today to any young person that wants to save his or her lungs, I never became one of those holier-than-thou ex-smokers who enjoyed either beating-up-on or lauding-my-abstinence-over those folks who still smoke. Anyone who really ever went through breaking the tobacco habit, I think, will not soon forget what it was like to be trapped there. It was the toughest bad habit that I ever had to break, bar none, and I didn’t get out early, easy, or without God’s Help. That’s how I see it, anyway.
Dizzy Dean (age 21, BR/TR, 26-10, 1.53 ERA): Dizzy was brilliant and Houston loved him. His 26 wins and 303 strikeouts led the Texas League in 1931 and his 1.53 ERA tied him with Whitlow Wyatt of Beaumont for the lowest mark in the league.
What is demonstrable is the fact that Ruth accomplished things in 1927 that no other hitter, including Prince Albert, could ever hope to top. 1927 was the season that Babe Ruth broke his own season home run record by hitting number 60 on the last day of the season. It was a record that turned the digit “60” into an iconic number for baseball’s most glamorous power statistic, and, thirty-four years later, it converted 61* (asterisk included) into the new record for Roger Maris, who needed 162 games to best by one homer what Babe Ruth had done in 154 contests.
The 1951 Texas League Champion Houston Buffs didn’t finish 13 1/2 games in first place by accident. Like most good teams, they had a pitching staff that got them there. Fortified by knuckleball ace Al Papai (23-9, 2.44), lefty rookie phenom Vinegar Bend Mizell (16-14, 1.96), veteran righty Fred Martin (15-11, 2.56), Mike J. Clark (10-7, 2.78), relievers Dick Bokelmann (10-2, 0.79) and Jack Crimian (1-2, 0.90), the ’51 Buffs needed few other pieces to be as about as complete a staff as any winning club could ever hope to unfold, but they had that extra “umphh” arm too!
Rubert had a blind and wandering left eye. I always thought it was just an abnormality in his natural eye, but teammate Larry Miggins says it was actually a glass eye, one that Rubert could actually manipulate in the socket as he saw fit while he worked the mound. The stories are quietly legend about how Rubert used the eye to hold first base runners close to the bag. An unsuspecting opponent could reach first base and be fine as per normal – until he started to take his lead on Rubert. Then he’d look over to the mound and see the pitcher in the stretch position, but also looking straight at him.
The 6’0″ , 160 lb. Cuban also enjoyed several good seasons with Almendares in the Cuban Winter League prior to the 1959 government takeover by Fidel Castro. He was inducted into Cuban Baseball Hall of Fame in Miami, Florida in 1997. That organization went into into some kind of suspended status following 1998 due to political tensions between Cuban-American residents and their homeland of origin, but it’s still quite a statement about the abilities of Octavio Rubert that he even got there.
Houston, Baseball, & Other Musings.
The Pecan Park Eagle 