It was 50 years ago today, Nellie Fox taught the Band to Play.   Let’s do a Win Shares and Loss Shares analysis of the 1959 White Sox.    The White Sox in the late 1930s had a string of competitive seasons, finishing over .500 in 1936, ’37, ’39 and ’40, and at .500 in 1941.   They never won the American League, but they finished second and third.

In the late 1940s the sixteen major league teams were being sorted out as to how good a job they did of developing minor league operations.   The teams that got ahead of the game in terms of developing farm systems—the Yankees, Dodgers, Giants, Red Sox, Cardinals, Tigers, Indians, Braves—those teams were doing well.   The teams that didn’t get interested in developing a farm system in the 1930s, by the late 1940s, were in deep trouble—and there was no reverse-order draft then to help them dig out.  

They were in deep trouble, and most of them didn’t get over it until the 1960s or 1970s.  A couple of them did, however.   The Phillies put a lot of money into a farm system in the mid-1940s, and pulled out of it as a competitive team in the early 1950s.  And the White Sox hired Frank Lane. 

Frank Lane was in his early fifties when he was hired to be the White Sox General Manager in 1948.  Over a period of years he pulled off a series of spectacularly good trades, which overcame their weaknesses and put the White Sox back on the map.  For Aaron Robinson, a catcher who would soon be out of the major leagues, he got Billy Pierce, who would win over 200 games.    For Joe Tipton, another catcher of very modest talent, he got a Hall of Fame second baseman, Nellie Fox.   For a package of players, none of them good, he got a catcher who was quite good, Sherm Lollar.   For Gus Zernial—who was a very good slugging outfielder—he got Minnie Minoso, who probably should be in the Hall of Fame.     For $75,000 and two players who couldn’t play at all, he got a veteran pitcher named Virgil Trucks, who still had some mileage left on him.   For cold cash, he picked up Chico Carrasquel, who would be an outstanding shortstop for several years.   Also for cash he picked up a minor league slugging first baseman, Jack Harshman, who had recently converted to pitching, and who would be a rotation anchor for the White Sox for several years. 

  It was one of the best series of trades in the history of baseball—nor did he neglect the farm system.   Lane, a minor league executive for years, also built up the White Sox scouting and development operation.     To make all of this work, he hired a very fine manager, Paul Richards.  Paul Richards is the subject of an upcoming biography, The Wizard of Waxahachie,  which I am told is outstanding.

In fact, the genius who made this work may well have been not Lane, but Richards.    Frank Lane left the White Sox in 1955, had several other GM jobs, and performed very badly in all of them.   He bounced from job to job, made a gigantic ass of himself everywhere, and got fired about five times in a period of just a few years.  Paul Richards, on the other hand, left the White Sox in 1954, took over the Orioles, and built up the Orioles in the same meticulous way he had built up the White Sox.   In any case, regardless of who gets the credit for it, the White Sox moved from 60 wins in 1950 to 81 in 1951, 81 again in 1952, 89 in 1953, and 94 in 1954.

The White Sox had winning records every year from 1951 through 1958, but the Yankees dominated the league.    After Richards and Lane left the White Sox shifted into neutral, but they continued to hang around and do some things right.   They signed Luis Aparicio, a Hall of Fame shortstop.   The hired Al Lopez, a Hall of Fame manager; they stole both of them away from Cleveland, where General Manager Hank Greenberg had pissed them both off.

Charlie Comiskey, a 19^th century player, founded the White Sox, and owned the White Sox through and after the 1919 Black Sox scandal.   After Comiskey died in 1931 the team passed to his relatives, from one to another; Lou Comiskey was listed as the owner for awhile, Grace Comiskey, Dorothy Comiskey.   These people would either die or lose interest, and the team lacked strong ownership.

After Frank Lane left the ownership didn’t hire a new General Manager; rather, the GM duties were split between a couple of Comiskeys.   One of the Comiskeys, however, was Johnny Rigney, a 1930s/1940s White Sox pitcher who had married Dorothy Comiskey.   He wasn’t a bad General Manager, but the team still had not won the pennant since 1919, when the team sold out the World Series, and several key members of the team were kicked out of baseball.

In 1959 the White Sox were purchased by a group of investors “led” by Bill Veeck.   Bill Veeck became the public face of the White Sox ownership, although, in truth, not that much of the money was his.   Veeck new how to sell tickets, and he knew how to generate excitement around a baseball team.   He was always up to something.  In Chicago he put in an exploding scoreboard that sent off fireworks when the White Sox hit a home run, which was a new idea at the time.   He put the player’s names on the back of their uniforms, which was another new idea.  He created a buzz about the White Sox.

The team started out 11-11, and they were four and a half games out of first by early May.   A 10-1 stretch put them in first place by May 18, but then they were under .500 for the next month, and by June 20 were just 33-30.

33-30, however, was just one and a half games out of first; nobody in the league was playing all that well or all that badly.   Everybody knew how these things ended:  the Yankees took over.   By the fourth of July the White Sox were 42-35, two games out of first place, but still two games ahead of the Yankees.   Then they got hot.   They won two, lost one, won five, lost one, won two, lost two, won five, lost one, won six, lost won.  Let’s add that up:

            2-1

            5-1

            2-2

            5-1

            6-1

Totals up to 20-6.  By August 5 the White Sox were in first place—only two ahead of Cleveland, but the Yankees had fallen eleven and a half back.

At this point the nation kind of adopted the White Sox, the can-do kids of the 1950s.  They had little power on the team, no real cleanup hitter, but they had speed and defense and pitching and they could manufacture runs, and they were FUN.   For most of the year they had no first baseman, no right fielder, and no third basemen.   Their infield was a mixture of Hall of Famers and Whoosez, two of each.  They continued to win.   By the end of August they were 80-49, sixteen and a half games ahead of the Yankees, and five and a half ahead of everybody.    They won it in a walk, five games ahead of Cleveland, 15 ahead of everybody else.

The media heroes were:

1)  Nellie Fox, a diminutive second baseman who bunted and slapped the ball through the infield, sort of a combination of Dustin Pedroia and Ichiro Suzuki,

2)  Luis Aparicio, who led the major leagues in stolen bases with the highest totals in fifteen years, and was acclaimed the greatest defensive shortstop since Marty Marion, and

3)  Early Wynn, a crusty 39-year-old pitcher, fat and sometimes surly, who mixed in knuckleballs and fastballs directed at your head.

 Somebody suggested to Early Wynn that he would knock down his own mother if she dug in on him.   “Why wouldn’t I?” he answered.   “My mother was a damn good hitter.”   But while Wynn did not look like an athlete, he was.  In addition to winning 22 games he hit .244 with 7 doubles and 2 homers.

Wynn won the Cy Young Award, and Fox, Aparicio and Wynn finished 1, 2 and 3 in the MVP voting.  All three would eventually be in the Hall of Fame.  But. .. and coming finally to my point. . .I have come to question, as a result of my studies upon the baseball operation, that Luis Aparicio actually deserved the credit that he received for this team’s success.   Aparicio was a brilliant fielder and a brilliant base runner, but his on base percentage for the Go-Go White Sox was .316.  He scored 98 runs, but he made 497 outs—not a great ratio, and then, he drove in only 51.  

But it raises a question:  if Aparicio doesn’t deserve the credit he has been given for the success of the 1959 White Sox, who does?  These are the basic hitting statistics for the members of the 1959 White Sox, including pitchers:

Aparicio and Fox became the stars of the team because they were virtually the only regulars having significant seasons—those two, and Sherm Lollar.   These are the team’s pitching stats:

One of the fascinating things about this team is the extraordinary number of star players who played bit roles for them.   Ted Kluszewski, Del Ennis, and Larry Doby had been huge stars in earlier years.   Earl Battey, Norm Cash, Johnny Callison and Gary Peters would be stars later on.   Earl Torgeson, Ray Boone, Don Mueller, Billy Goodman, Harry (Suitcase) Simpson and Gerry Staley had all been, if not quite stars, very well-respected players.  John Romano, Dick Donovan and Claude Raymond would all become, if not stars, certainly very successful players.   The White Sox that winter made a series of astonishingly bad trades, giving up Callison, Cash, Battey and Romano for basically nothing—and Don Mincher as well.

But this is dragging us afield from our purpose, which is to re-evaluate the contributions to victory of the 1959 team members.  Stated as wins and losses, this is what I have for the hitters on the 1959 White Sox:

We could summarize the performance of the White Sox hitters in seven points:

1)  The catchers were very good, not only because Sherm Lollar was OK but because Romano was an exceptional hitter for a backup catcher,

2)  The first basemen, while unimpressive, were in fact holding their own with the bat.

3)  The second baseman/MVP Nellie Fox was very good.

4)  The third basemen, left fielders and right fielders were not good, but not horrible, either.

5)  Aparicio at short was not very good.

6)  Jim Landis in center, with a .370 on base percentage, was the second-best hitter on the team, and

7)  The pitchers hit pretty well for pitchers.

Turning now to the pitchers:

So there was no hard-luck pitcher on the team, really, nor lucky pitcher.  Almost every pitcher had a won-lost record that reflected his actual contribution to victory.   Wynn was 22-10 (won-lost record) vs 18-11 (win shares and loss shares), but he was also 3-0 as a pitcher, which makes his total win shares and loss 22-12—almost the same as his actual record.   Most everybody on the team is.

And now we’ll go to work on fielding.  I will spare you all their defensive statistics; there is no warrant for that.   This chart puts together the batting, fielding and pitching Win Shares for the 1959 White Sox:

Conclusions:

1)  The 1959 White Sox did overachieve, by a substantial but not historic margin.   They played about seven games over their heads.  Those seven games were critical to their success.

2)  Several players on the team clearly deserve more credit than they usually receive for the success of the team, first among them Jim Landis.   Landis, a brilliant center fielder who had a good year with the bat, comes in in this analysis at 20-9.   Landis finished 7^th in the MVP voting.

3)  Other players who probably deserved more credit than they received included Bob Shaw (19-8),  Sherm Lollar, and the relief twins of Gerry Staley and Turk Lown.   Unlike modern relievers, Staley and Lown pitched more than 200 innings between them, were credited with 17 wins against 7 losses, and had extremely good ERAs.

4)  It was a odd year, in that there was no obvious MVP; the MVP Award could have gone a lot of different directions.  Nellie Fox was the White Sox MVP, but really, he ranks only a little bit ahead of Wynn, Landis and Bob Shaw.   He doesn’t stick out like an MVP normally does.   Mantle had his worst year since 1951, which is not to say that he wasn’t still the best player in the league, but it’s difficult to give the MVP Award to a player who had his worst season on a team that had their worst season.   The MVP could have been Harvey Kuenn or Al Kaline or Eddie Yost of Detroit or Rocky Colavito or Tito Francona of Cleveland, or even Jackie Jensen or Pete Runnels of Boston.  The best pitcher in the league—perhaps the best player in the league, I don’t know—may have been Camilo Pascual.  It’s really difficult to say.  

5)  Cleveland had three outstanding outfielders (Colavito, Francona and Minoso) and probably had a better team than the White Sox, but they didn’t win.   We know from our last blog that Minnie Minoso was 22-9 in 1959, about the same as Fox, and he may have been the third-best outfielder on the Indians.   But you can’t really fault the MVP voters for discounting the individual accomplishments of a team that didn’t produce the wins that they should have had.