Other Crap

RIP - Former Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Preacher Roe dies at 92.

The lanky lefty could pitch a bit. More than a bit. He was a much better pitcher than his current obscurity would imply. He did not become a major league regular until age 29, so his career was short, but mighty sweet. From 1951 to 1953 he won 44 and lost 8. Look at those numbers again. And he did that between ages 36 and 38. In 1951 alone he went 22-3 and pitched more than 250 innings, with 19 complete games.

1951 was the year when the Dodgers held a 13-game lead, but eventually lost the pennant to the legendary Bobby Thomson home run in the third of three playoff games. What few people realize is that manager Chuck Dressen was the one who blew that pennant for the Dodgers. In the three-game playoff against the Giants, Dressen did not give a single start to his 22-3 pitcher, who also had the club's best ERA. Instead he gave a start and a key relief appearance to Ralph Branca, who lost both of the team's defeats! During the season, Branca had been a mediocre 13-12 for a team that won 97 games. Presumably Dressen did not want to start a lefty against the Giants, whose best hitters (Thomson, Mays, Irvin, Dark and Stanky) were all right-handed.

Another mystery was why Dressen never warmed up Roe to face Bobby Thomson in that key situation in game three. Thomson had been the hottest hitter in the NL in the second half of the year, and Branca had a September-October ERA of 5.71, including a loss in game one, when he gave up a homer to ... Bobby Thomson. Statistician Allan Roth knew that Roe was a better bet than Branca against Thomson, but "Dressen didn’t want to see it,” Roth told author Lee Heiman. “He made little or no use of the information I provided. The man didn’t want help from anybody. He thought he could do it all by himself. It’s always been that way with the big ego managers. They couldn’t believe a statistician sitting in the stands could give them information they didn’t know themselves. So Charlie ignored me.”

Even after he decided on Branca, Dressen had one more good strategic move. He could have walked red-hot Thomson to pitch to callow 20-year-old Willie Mays, who had batted .105 against Branca that year, with no RBI, and was nearly 0-for-October (One for ten). But Dressen was not exactly Tony LaRussa in the analysis department, and made every possible wrong move.