Charlie Dressen and the Senators

In October 1954, Charlie Dressen was the last man hired to manage the Senators while Clark Griffith was alive. However, the “Old Fox,” in his 80s, delegated the duty to his informally adopted son, nephew Calvin Griffith.*

Every previous manage hired while the senior Griffith owned the team had played for the Senators. Yet Calvin’s choice of Dressen seemed sensible enough on the surface. Dressen had been let go after leading the Brooklyn Dodgers to two (and nearly three) National League pennants when he demanded a multi-year contract.

Dodgers’ owner Walter O’Malley rejected his manager’s demand and replaced him with Walter Alston. Still, O’Malley predicted Dressen “will steal at least six games for Washington in 1955.”

Clark Griffith was persuaded by Calvin to let Bucky Harris go after Washington fell a notch to sixth place in 1954. The one-time “Boy Wonder” playing manager of the 1924 World Series winner was in his third tenure with the Senators.

Harris had done reasonably well, given the talent he had to work with and Washington’s bare-bones farm system: a 17-game improvement in 1950 over 1949’s 104 losses, two games over .500 in 1952, .500 even in ’53 before falling to 22 games under in ’54, but still in sixth place. (Cleveland won 111 games that season, New York won 103 and Chicago won 94. The Nats were just three games behind the fourth-place Red Sox.)

Dressen scoffed at the ’54 finish. “I guarantee we won’t finish in sixth again,” he promised. Sadly, he was correct. His first Senators team lost 101 times and finished last. It may not have been a coincidence that Clark Griffith died that fall.

Yet Dressen and the senior Griffith in many ways were alike: Both were small of stature (Dressen 5-foot-5; Griffith 5-foot-6) and former players. Both were traditionalists, set in their ways, who loved to talk baseball to all who would listen.

Dressen, hired to manage five different MLB teams, obviously knew the game — and made that clear to everybody.  He had a big ego. A famous quote, perhaps apocryphal, when his team was losing: “Just keep it close for an inning or two. I’ll think of something.”

An article by Curley Grieve in the May 1960 Baseball Digest was headlined “Dressen’s Feudal System.” In it, Grieve wrote that a player once left a book on the Dodgers’ bench titled “What I know about Baseball – By Charlie Dressen.” The only word on every page was “I.”

In Brooklyn, Dressen inherited a team with five future hall-of-famers: Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Roy Campenella, Pee Wee Reese and Gil Hodges, not to mention a 20-game winner and future MVP Don Newcombe.

The only future Hall of Famer on the ’55 Senators was a seldom used “bonus baby” who the Nats were forced by the rules of the day to keep in the majors: Harmon Killebrew. He was five seasons away from playing regularly – and winning his first home-run crown.

An early advocate of waiting for the long ball, Dressen rarely had his batters try to steal. Until they were shortened in 1957, however, the distance to the fences made cavernous Griffith Stadium perpetually the most difficult place to hit home runs. Roy Sievers led the team with 25, but 18 were hit on the road, as were 11 of runner-up Mickey Vernon’s 14.

When they did run, they were woefully unsuccessful. Between them, Pete Runnels, Eddie Yost, Vernon and Sievers stole just nine bases but were thrown out 20 times. The success rate for the Nats’ eight starting players was just 34 percent.

The data-oriented era in baseball, which eventually grew into sabermetrics, began in the late 1940s, when Branch Rickey, general manager of the Dodgers, hired Allan Roth as the team’s statistician. Roth continually updated information he had on how every Dodger pitcher did against every opposing batter and what pitches were thrown. When they managed the Dodgers, Burt Shotten and Leo Durocher relished those stats. Dressen didn’t want them.

“He made little or no use of the information I provided,” Roth told author Lee Heiman, in quotes that appear in Joshua Prager’s “The Echoing Green” about the 1951 Giants-Dodgers playoff. “The man didn’t want help from anybody. He thought he could do it all by himself….. So Charlie just ignored me.”

Dressen’s pythagorean win total, based mostly on run scored vs. allowed, should have been 58, not 53, in 1955. If luck is the residue of design, as Rickey claimed, Dressen’s design didn’t produce that well.

Charlie’s design worked a bit better in 1956. Washington won 59 games, six more than the pythagorean expectation. Thanks to the Kansas City Athletics losing 102 games, the Nats finished seventh.

The team finally and officially became the Senators for the ’57 season, but the Nats’ fortunes on the field got worse. After losing 16 of the first 21 games, Dressen was fired as manager but kept on as an “assistant to the president,” Calvin Griffith.

“Only reason I stayed on for a while was because I was sure Washington would move to Los Angeles,” Dressen told Francis Stann of the Evening Star. Wrong again. The Dodgers, of course, beat Griffith to it.

Dressen returned to the Dodgers as a coach, then went on to manage the aging Braves in Milwaukee and then the Tigers.

He suffered two heart attacks while managing Detroit in 1964,’65 and’66. He suffered the second on May 16, 1966, and had to step aside from managing. Three months later, a third heart attack claimed his life at age 71 on August 10, 1966.

“When had the appropriate players, he won,” Stann wrote of Dressen in 1966. “When he didn’t … he lost.”

*Calvin was Clark Griffith’s nephew. It’s frequently written that Calvin was Griffith’s adopted son. Born in Canada to the brother of Clark’s wife., Calvin’s was the son of a drunken father who abandoned his family and died in the 1920s when Calvin and his sister Thelma were children. Clack Grifith brought them (and eventually the whole family) to D.C. and raised them, but never formally adopt them. Calvin and Thema assumed the Griffith name, abandoning Robertson, their father’s name, and became Clark Griffith’s heirs. Calvin usually referred to the senior Griffith as “Uncle Clark.” Others of Clark’s in-laws named Robertson, were given jobs with the team. One, who had legitimate baseball talent, actually played for the Senators and Athletics.