The View from the Dugout: The Journals of Red Rolfe

Epilogue

Epilogue Red Rolfe enjoyed a short three and a half seasons’ run as a big league manager. In two and a half years he went from leading his team in a hot pennant race to a runner-up ‹nish, in 1950, and being honored by the Sporting News as American League manager of the year to being an unemployed resident of New Hampshire. When he left on July 6, 1952, the Tigers were buried in the cellar and on their way to the ‹rst last-place ‹nish in franchise history. The change in managers in 1952 had no impact on the team’s destiny. Rolfe went home to Gilford, New Hampshire, where he would live out the rest of his life. He returned to his alma mater in 1954 and began serving as its athletic director. At the time of his death on July 8, 1962, former coaches and players praised his effective leadership of the Dartmouth athletic program. He was just sixty years old, having retired as director ‹ve years earlier. As I sought out those whom Rolfe had managed, I made arrangements to interview Tony Lupien, the former ‹rst baseman who was acquired by the Tigers in 1949 but failed to make Red Rolfe’s springtraining cut and never played a regular-season game in a Detroit uniform. But Lupien had a long association with Rolfe as a coach at Dartmouth. On the day of the interview, Lupien informed me that he was a very frank person and that this exchange would be dif‹cult for him. After a few 309 prefatory comments that alerted me to what was coming, he proceeded to read a prepared statement that I recorded. When he ‹nished, he instructed me to prepare a copy and mail it to him for his approval. Lupien, a Harvard grad, stated: “Over twenty-‹ve years ago, the classmates of Red Rolfe at Dartmouth College presented a memorial to him on the baseball ‹eld at Dartmouth and asked me as a former professional player and present coach at Dartmouth to make the presentation of the memorial. It was not the easiest thing I had ever done. Even though I had known the man in one capacity or another for over thirty years, he had never been what I would call a friend. I mentioned to the alumni that it might surprise them to know that he had a Ph.D. as a player for the Yankees —the degree being for perseverance, hustle, and determination. He was strictly a loner, with very few friends. The only two I knew were his charming wife, Isabel, and Bill Dickey, the very famous Yankee catcher. It is important to note that he did not have a single former associate working with him as manager of Detroit. In fact, I do not know anyone who regarded him as a close friend. My life’s experiences have been that you never have enough friends to help you over the rough spots in life. Evidently Red had never heard of this observation. I remember as a student at Harvard hearing an old Latin professor quote: ‘Experientia est magister optimus’: Experience is the best teacher. To attempt to manage a ball club without experience would be tantamount to trying to teach physics without having taken mathematics. Let us remember him for his Ph.D. as player.” As Dan Daniel explained in his 1950 Sport magazine article “Why Managers Get Fired,” there were many reasons for Rolfe’s demise, most beyond his control: “The most deadly ingredient was the collapse of the administrative side of the Detroit organization. The farm system had long been neglected. The slow moving Tigers long had been virtually static as a team. Chances to make trades had been ignored. Veteran players had grown older and older, slower and slower.” After reviewing the symptoms of a failing team, including the replacement of the general manager, big trades that didn’t pay dividends, and strained player-manager relations, Daniel concluded: “The ‹ring of Rolfe can be tied to player hostility and front-of‹ce failure. The manager may have harped too much on how the Yankees used to do things. But he is pretty much out in the clear.” During his years with the Tigers, George Kell often wrote a newspaper column. Being an articulate former schoolteacher and the biggest star on the team, he naturally ‹lled the role of player spokesman. In his SepEPILOGUE 310 [18.219.22.169] Project MUSE (2024...