Tall Tactician
CHALBERG, JOHN C.
Tall Tactician The Philadelphia Athletic in the three-piece suit. BY JOHN C. CHALBERG Connie Mack and the Early Years of Baseball by Norman L. Macht Nebraska, 742 pp., $39.95 By his own...
...Having spent 22 years on this labor of love, perhaps the near-octogenarian Macht thought he’d better quit while he was still ahead...
...One year...
...A superb fi nder and handler of baseball talent in his prime, Mack was proudest of his careful cultivation of pitchers...
...The second is briefer, but no less pointed: Who will read this testament to Ruthian excess...
...Judging baseball talent has never been an exact science...
...To learn how and why these greats got away, you’ll have to do your own plowing, or resort to the index...
...On this score, Macht is to be credited with keeping multiple Macks at the center of his story: They would be Connie Mack behind the plate, as in the catching pioneer who moved right behind the plate...
...After all, his 1914 Athletics pitching staff set a record for fewest complete games (68—yes, 68), which stood for 10 years...
...John C. Chalberg teaches history in Minnesota and performs a one-man show as baseball’s Branch Rickey...
...It’s also a story of money, as in how and when to spend it, and how and when not to...
...Ten last-place fi nishes in the fi nal 16 seasons of his incredible tenure might have been a hint that it was long past time to head in a different direction...
...It’s a story of acumen and patience, as well as the story of the Mack/Shibe relationship...
...For that matter, you have to wonder what one-star Mack would have done with Collins, Mathewson, Lajoie, and Jackson on the same team...
...Hence that folded scorecard as choreographer’s baton...
...On defense, he could excuse physical, but not mental, errors: “A man should know what to do with a baseball once he gets it...
...A catcher by trade and preference, Mack (born Cornelius MacGillicuddy) escaped the mills of Massachusetts for a professional baseball career that took him to Washington, Pittsburgh, and Milwaukee before collaborating with Ban Johnson to create the American League, and then with Ben Shibe to build the Philadelphia Athletics into the pride of the junior circuit...
...Despite his stretches of managerial failure, Mack belongs in the Hall of Fame and deserves a biographer’s attention...
...Does that suggest that I might have missed a nugget or an inning—or a base—along the way...
...Maybe, maybe not...
...With gentle humor and numbing detail, Macht records Mack’s care and feeding of the chronically zany Rube Wadell and the chronically ailing Eddie Plank, among many, many others...
...After all, there had been another stretch of Athletics futility, highlighted by six straight cellardwelling seasons between the great A’s teams of the pre-World War I era and the dynasty of 1929-1931...
...Or the research...
...For six years of the fi rst A’s dynasty, that star was Eddie Collins...
...In sum, it’s a lower-budget version of the same baseball game that is still being played today...
...But it ought to produce a highly competitive squad more often than not, if the man on top has the skill and time to spot and develop talent and the good sense to surrender the reins a few years (or perhaps a few decades) more than one year too late...
...Mack dealt Collins to the White Sox in 1915—or at least a decade (rather than a year) too soon...
...The obvious questions are two: Why tell barely a fourth of Connie Mack’s major league story over the course of a book that would be far too long if the subject were the entire history of professional baseball...
...Maybe Mack wasn’t speaking “nonsense” after all...
...It may also have helped that the other Philadelphia team was, well, the other Philadelphia team...
...Mack thought that one star was all that a winning team really needed...
...When baseball was essentially a fi elder’s game, the idea was to put the ball in play and let the defenders do the rest...
...In the front offi ce, Mack had a reputation as a penny-pincher...
...BY JOHN C. CHALBERG Connie Mack and the Early Years of Baseball by Norman L. Macht Nebraska, 742 pp., $39.95 By his own estimation, Connie Mack’s 50-year (1901-1950) career as manager of the Philadelphia Athletics lasted precisely one year too long...
...It’s one thing to face the prospect of a potentially endless baseball game, but does a biography of an important baseball fi gure have to be nearly as eternal...
...He also instructed his hurlers to pitch to a batter’s strength...
...While Mack may not have been right to equate baseball intelligence with academic credentials, he was surely on the mark in stressing the former...
...By today’s standards, Connie Mack’s managerial career would have been cut short by multiple decades rather than a single year...
...and Connie Mack in the front offi ce desperately trying to balance the books and diligently working to balance his lineup...
...No doubt, there are other baseball tidbits here...
...If you win, the players all expect raises...
...Of course, in his case, it helped that Connie Mack, full time fi eld manager, was also Connie Mack, part-time part-owner...
...Actually, the Mack/Macht story began in 1948 when the 18-yearold Norman Macht introduced himself to the “Tall Tactician” at an Atlanta ballpark...
...The larger story in all of this is the story of Connie Mack at work assembling his fi rst dynasty...
...But surely a crisp full story would have been better than this sprawling half-story...
...at least there ought to be in a tome this size...
...He was supposed to have said that the “best thing for a team fi nancially is to be in the running and fi nish second...
...Connie Mack on the bench, trademark scorecard in hand, signaling to this or that outfi elder to shift in this or that direction...
...True or not, it’s “nonsense” to Macht: With or without free agency, Mack was simply stating an economic fact of baseball life...
...This season’s Barry Bonds countdown saw the Phillies complete a countdown of their own by becoming the fi rst major league team to reach 10,000 losses...
...By the same token, it’s always been something other than a crapshoot...
...The spending behemoths aside, there remains room in today’s game for at least an abbreviated version of Connie Mack...
...In the intervening decades, Macht has authored numerous baseball books, but he has never quite forgotten Connie Mack...
...Maybe Norman Macht’s target audience was current or budding general managers on the lookout for that ever-elusive edge...
...The second half of the title might amount to an excuse, only because Connie Mack was a key fi gure during the “early years of baseball...
...If there are other explanations for Mack’s longevity, Norman L. Macht cannot be the fi nal word—at least not yet, since this backstop of a book takes the Mack story only to 1914, or the end of the fi rst of Mack’s two (and, yes, there would be only two) Athletics dynasties...
...Such a combination of men and traits won’t necessarily assure a dynasty, or even a world championship, what with 30 teams now competing for the prize...
...That would be a man of infi nite patience and voluminous baseball wisdom who (at least in Mack’s case) also happened to be fortunate enough to have a major partner (Shibe) who had the wisdom to be patient with him...
...Then again, maybe the octogenarian Mack was waiting for yet another rebuilding plan to bear fruit...
...After all, both scouts and reviewers have long been known to keep a few things to themselves...
...On the mound, Macht deems Mack to have been the game’s “original Captain Hook...
...Then there were the three A’s Hall of Famers who might have been: Christy Mathewson, Napoleon Lajoie, and Joe Jackson...
...The last of the skippers in street clothes, the Tall Tactician was never quite one of the boys, but as of 1914, Mack, already 51, was not yet the remote fi gure of baseball legend...
...Then and now, the trick has always been to know just when to jettison a player, especially a star...
...Who knows...
...Mack’s Athletics were barnstorming their way north following spring training, and Macht was Atlanta Cracker broadcaster Ernie Harwell’s gofer...
...Hence this high school dropout’s sometimesmisplaced preference for “college boys” over “rowdies...
...On offense, he considered base-running the “most important, most interesting, and most intelligent” aspect of the game...
...All else being equal, Mack looked for ballplayers who were “quick thinkers...
Vol. 13 • November 2007 • No. 9
