Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, The by James Bill

Author:James, Bill [James, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SPORTS &#38, RECREATION/Baseball/History
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2014-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

Harry Craft Harry Craft had a slow, languid walk, rolling gently from side to front, that fit perfectly with his mesmerizing Mississippi drawl. He had a habit of swallowing about three times before he said anything, the combination of which tended to reduce the number of questions in a press interview by roughly 80%. He was slow to anger, slow to criticize, careful to say nothing that he might come to regret.

Craft played baseball and football at Mississippi College in Jackson. He was a better football player than baseball player, but baseball got the best athletes at that time, and Craft signed with the Cincinnati Reds. Bill McKechnie brought him to the majors in 1938, and as a rookie he was probably the best all-around center fielder in the National League.

That was his best season. By 1942 he was a player/ coach for Billy Meyer at Kansas City, the American Association team in the Yankee system. Craft always said that Meyer was the best manager he ever knew. His own chance to manage came at Independence in the Kansas-Oklahoma-Missouri League in 1949, still in the Yankee system. He had a seventeen-year-old Oklahoma kid named Mantle on his roster that summer, beginning his own minor league career, which made Craft’s assignment easier. He moved up to Joplin the next year, and took Mickey with him. Mickey hit .383 and drove in 136 runs. This got Mantle to the majors quicker than it did Craft, but Craft arrived in 1957, in Kansas City.

Craft managed Kansas City from 1957–1959, and Houston from 1962 to 1964. His record is interesting because, on a simple level, it looks so awful—360 wins, 485 losses, a .426 winning percentage. His best full season was 1958, when he went 73–81 with the A’s.

But compared to the expectations of his teams, Craft’s record is actually quite good, scoring at +12. The A’s had lost 102 games in 1956, and were headed for another 100-loss season in August 1957, when Craft was hired. They played .460 ball the rest of that season, averting 100 losses, and then outperformed expectations by 10 games in 1958; the A’s 73–81 record that season was by far their best in their thirteen seasons in Kansas City. His other assignment was with an expansion team.

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