The Crybabies of 1940

In the early spring of 1940, under a warm Florida sun, Cleveland Indians manager Oscar Vitt prepared his players for their upcoming season in the manner he’d learned as a teammate of Ty Cobb almost thirty years earlier. He peppered them with insult, invective, and threat. It was completely consistent with his personality, and Vitt felt that this version of the Indians finally had a chance to legitimately challenge the Yankees, Red Sox, and Tigers for the pennant.

Indians team owner Alva Bradley had hired “Ol’ Oss” Vitt before the 1938 season, following Vitt’s phenomenal run as skipper of the minor-league Newark Bears. Vitt replaced Steve O’Neill, who was popular with the players, gregarious, self-confident, and straightforward. Vitt was none of these things. Upon assuming the Cleveland helm, he’d gone to the press with the pronouncement that, after having had a look at the team, he had “only two major leaguers, Feller and [Mel] Harder.”

Vitt was tough, but the 1940 preseason gave no indication of the drama that was to play out in Cleveland. That isn’t to say that all was perfect. Veteran pitcher Johnny Allen and catcher Frankie Pytlak were contractual holdouts, young star Lou Boudreau tore cartilage in his ankle during an intrasquad game, and promising rookie Paul O’Dea was struck in the eye by a batting practice foul ball and never played again. Despite that adversity, Vitt was buoyant. Even when confronted with stories such as the one about Jeff Heath and another player staging a fight in the hope that Vitt would try to break it up so that Heath could “accidentally” take a swing at the manager, “Ol’ Os” remained calm.

“I guess it can’t be helped,” Vitt responded to reporters. “I’ll just go along doing the best I can and the boys will have to like it.” Those words are consistent with the notion that Vitt was a Dr. Jekyll to reporters but a Mr. Hyde to his players. The players thought the manager antagonistic and spiteful, while the press portrayed him as suffering and misunderstood.

Vitt had his work cut out for him on the field. Oddsmakers were so confident that the Yankees would win their fifth consecutive pennant that the odds on New York were set at 7-20, and the scarce few who disagreed almost unanimously believed that Boston would win the American League. Vitt, though, remained a study in confidence, telling reporters that Cleveland just might unseat the Yankees.

The season began with Feller’s opening-day no-hit classic against the White Sox, and by April 27 the team was in first place with a record of 6-2. Joe DiMaggio had suffered a sore heel earlier in the season, raising doubts about his health. If fate was not smiling on Cleveland baseball, at least it did not seem to be smirking, either. But fate has, on occasion, displayed a sense of humor.

On the following day, the real fireworks began. On a sunny afternoon against Schoolboy Rowe, and in front of a crowd of more than 30,000 in Detroit, the Tribe entered the ninth inning with a 9-3 lead. Cleveland pitcher Al Milnar, along with the bullpen, gave up six runs, allowing the score to tie at 9-9. At that point, Vitt theatrically “mugged” on the bench, criticizing everyone in earshot for the team’s play. Hal Trosky homered with two out in the tenth inning to win the game, but Vitt had dipped his toes in the river of discontent.

The next day Feller was a bit off, and Cleveland lost to Detroit 4-3. Vitt snapped at his star to the press, and the team edged toward meltdown. As captain, Trosky was toeing a thin line between the professional pride of his teammates and the responsibility afforded by his title. Managing egos became as much a daily ritual as managing to hit American League pitching.

On May 1, crisis found Trosky’ s family. His fourteen-month-old son James inhaled a piece of bacon at breakfast, and Hal’s wife Lorraine rushed the boy to the hospital. As soon as word reached the team, Trosky dropped everything and took a cab to the airport to get back to Cleveland.

Jim Trosky’s condition improved. After a few days, when doctors were confident that pneumonia would not set in, Hal made plans to rejoin the team in Washington for a series with the Senators. Frighteningly, the boy took an abrupt turn for the worse, and Hal cabled Vitt that he’d be staying home until the boy got better. While the delay was brief, Vitt wasn’t pleased. The slugger’s eventual return, though, boosted the team to a two-game-series sweep of the Yankees and imbued the clubhouse with renewed optimism. By Memorial Day, Trosky had eleven homers and the team was in second place with a record of 23-13. The first week in June, however, marked the beginning of the end.

After the Tribe split a doubleheader with the Senators, narrowly avoiding losses in both ends with a late run in the nightcap, Vitt conveyed his anger with Al Smith, despite the win, and said as much to the press. A couple of players later claimed to have overheard Vitt yearning for his Newark Bears squad, a thinly veiled assertion that the minor-league team would have performed as well or better. Opinion did not change at all when, three days later, despite Trosky’ s fourteenth home run, Cleveland lost to the Yankees when George Selkirk stole home off Feller.

On June 10, the Indians were rained out in Boston, and the players spent the day in the hotel lobby dissecting their misfortune. The blame, naturally, fell on Vitt. Some players advanced the idea of mutiny, of trying to have the manger fired, but again Trosky counseled patience. The slugger was a proud man, and he wanted no part of public finger pointing, even though he had been a repeated victim of Vitt’s acid tongue.

The next day, the Red Sox blew out the Indians. Vitt was in rare form during the game, again screaming about his star, “Look at him! He’s supposed to be my ace. I’m supposed to win a pennant with that kind of pitching?”

That evening, Trosky spoke with Frank Gibbons of the Cleveland Press. He told the reporter that the Indians could win the pennant with their current players but had no chance as long as Vitt was the manager. Gibbons cautioned Trosky to wait and see how things turned out before doing anything rash, the same advice Trosky had given his teammates.

In the hotel lobby the next morning, the players checked out early. At breakfast they began surreptitiously plotting about how to solve the “Vitt problem.” During the game that afternoon, which the Indians lost, Vitt snidely chastised Mel Harder. “It’s about time you won one, the money you’re getting.” To the other players, this was rock bottom. Mel Harder was in his thirteenth year with the team, was one of its touchstones in what was shaping up to be a memorable pennant race, and was unquestionably respected by everyone in the organization-everyone except one.

Harder could only respond, “I gave you the best I had.” On the train ride from Boston to Cleveland, no one bothered to break out the cards. Ben Chapman and Rollie Hemsley reportedly called Lou Boudreau and Ray Mack into their berth and told the young infielders that some of the players were circulating a petition calling for Vitt’s ouster. Boudreau and Mack, along with Al Smith, Beau Bell, Mike Naymick, and Soup Campbell, were excused from participating because the veterans did not want to penalize the younger players by potentially ruining their careers.

It was a gesture that demonstrated the sobriety and seriousness of the mutineers. Mel Harder and Johnny Allen, in a meeting with the rest of the players, told the team that they would go to owner Alva Bradley alone. The players disagreed, but they did anoint Harder as their spokesman. (See Fred Schuld’s article on page 46.)

On June 13, actual tragedy struck Trosky. As the train pulled into the Cleveland station, Hal received word that his mother had passed away unexpectedly in Iowa. Trosky went directly from the train station to the airport, while Harder called Bradley’s office seeking an appointment with the owner. Instead of sending Harder alone, though, ten of the dissidents went to Bradley’s office en masse to demonstrate the depth of their resolve. It was an act unprecedented in baseball history.

The players were all seasoned veterans who knew how baseball was played, both as a game and as a business. They were men who played before the era of spoiled superstars, men who worked in the offseason not of choice but necessity, and they were men who understood the consequences of their actions. Clearly, this was no idle grumbling about a stern taskmaster. Vitt had wounded each deeply enough to provoke them to take this extraordinary measure.

The players told Bradley that Vitt had to go if the team was to compete successfully. They outlined four specific grievances, each of which Bradley later confirmed, and they demanded that the owner take action. Trosky even telephoned Bradley from the airport to ensure that his absence would not be misconstrued as disagreement. Despite his personal misgivings about the action, as captain he could not stand by while his teammates pressed the issue.

Bradley told the players that he would look into the matter and warned them that if word of this got out, the players would be ridiculed forever. Naturally, the story was leaked to reporter Gordon Cobbledick almost immediately. The team won that afternoon, but it was the insurrection that was front-page news the following morning. The headline for the story was physically larger on the printed page than was the news of Hitler’s invasion of Paris. Even Trosky’ s hometown paper, the Cedar Rapids Gazette, jumped on the bandwagon and bashed the “Crybaby Indians.”

In the following days, reporters attempted to dissect the events leading up to the insurrection. Most concluded that although Vitt was a good baseball strategist, he had completely lost the respect of the players by making them lose face among the other American League teams. One Iowa writer contacted Trosky at home, where he was still grieving for his mother, and asked the player about the team.

“Those writers,” Trosky reportedly answered, “know the situation so well that I couldn’t add anything to what they have already stated. The boys are sincere in their complaints. Take Bob Feller, for example. Bob is the kind who never did anybody any harm. But he was among the leaders of the movement. He must feel justified. It’s the same with the rest.”

He continued:

“There’s a lot of defense offered for Vitt, namely, that he must have a lot of ability because he is keeping his team near the top of the league. But that is mis-leading. We are up there because the Yankees have not yet come into their own. But we’re only playing .575 ball. That isn’t championship stuff. Our showing is due mainly to the failure of some other teams.”

Owner Alva Bradley took no action. In 1951, the Cleveland News discovered and published a memo from Alva Bradley written a decade earlier:

“We should have won the pennant. … Our real trouble started when a group of 10 players came to my office and made four distinct charges against (Vitt) and asked for his dismissal. The four charges made against Vitt, on investigations I have made, were 100% correct.”

Bradley later offered the managerial job to coach Luke Sewell, who declined. “Oscar was a fine fellow, but he talked too much,” Sewell recalled.

“He would say these things, promise things, which he forgot he ever said or promised. Players resented this because they thought he did it on purpose. But he didn’t. … [The rebellion] was not all Oscar’s fault. The players were to blame, too. They picked on one another, blamed each other when things went wrong, and blew a pennant they should have won.”

Despite the players’ subsequent public retraction of their charges (Roy Weatherly refused to sign), after a half-season of humiliation at every park the team visited, and following a dramatic loss to Detroit and Floyd Giebell on the last weekend in September, Bradley fired Vitt after a directors’ meeting on October 28 and replaced him with Roger Peckinpaugh. The season had ended, but the event colored the careers and reputations of almost all those involved.

In a sad postscript, the Plain Dealer ran the following a year later, on September 28, 1941:

Oscar Vitt disclosed today he had resigned as manager of the Portland baseball club which finished last in the Coast League this season. The former Cleveland Indians manager submitted his resignation at the close of the season …. Vitt expressed belief that if the Portland club had had a few more replacements it probably could have finished well up in the first division.

 

SOURCES

Books
Schneider, Russell. The Cleveland Indians Encyclopedia. New York: Sports Publishing, 2001.

Thorn, John, et al. Total Baseball: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball. New York: Warner Books, 2001.

Newspapers
Cleveland News

Cleveland Press

Des Moines Register

New York Daily News

New York Times Plain Dealer

The Sporting News

Interviews

Rick Ferrell

Denny Galehouse

Mel Harder

Willis Hudlin

Lorraine Trosky