[Pelican]

Gene Mauch

I don't want this sim to be seen as a criticism of Gene Mauch, the Manager of the Phils during the ill-fated 1964 Season. Too much blame has been heaped on him for the collapse, particularly his repeated efforts to close out the pennant race by starting Chris Short or Jim Bunning, when he had no other healthy starters (and the concept of a "bullpen game" was far in the future). Or critics say Mauch was too intense (he was in fact intense), forgetting that this intensity drove his unheralded and untested team to overplay most of the season.

As one of the OOTP factoids mentions, Mauch has more wins as a Manager than anyone who failed to get to the World Series. It's a classic backhanded compliment. He made mediocre teams better. Some players wilted under the pressure and tanked. Others took the ball and overachieved for him. He was decidedly old school, and loved to play the hot hand. He platooned. He was a fighter.

As OOTP teaches, a manager can only play the hand he is dealt. He can only work with the players he has, when they are healthy. Mauch literally ran out of players in 1964, despite the GM scrambling to find guys to plug in holes. His young arms (Mahaffey, Bennett) got sore, his old arms (McLish, Klippstein) ran out of gas. There was a bewildering series of injuries to first basemen. (Someone had injury set to frequent?). He played guys all over the field to compensate. He came up short.

So much of the unfair criticism of Mauch is 20/20 hindsight. Sure, if you knew you were going into a tailspin, you would throw in a few rookie starters and rest Short and Bunning, on the theory you only needed a few wins to clinch the pennant. But at the time, and I vividly recall it (albeit as a small child of 11/12), there was the sense that one or two decisive victories would do it, and everybody could rest and prepare for the World Series. Throughout the losing streak, they only needed a single victory to turn things around.

Maybe everybody in Philly was "seduced" by how well the team played. When Bunning pitched his Perfect Game on Father's Day, it seemed like a magical season in Philadelphia. Rich Allen was the sure-fire ROY and a generational talent. Johnny Callison won the ASG for the NL. Only the Giants seriously threatened, and the Phillies dispatched them in August. With so many young players, this did not seem like a team that would run out of gas, or run out of players.

So, the point of the sim is to take very seriously the hints of weakness that were there, if you chose to look, in Spring Training. Problem is, at the time, no one was looking for cracks in the facade, because the Phillies were not expected to contend. An imperfect team could still improve on the 87-75 record from a year before. In other words, these seemingly small issues would have had more emphasis, if anyone had expected this team would be in first place for most of the season.

Hence my worry over first base, SP depth, bullpen depth, middle IF depth, the bench in general. Trading Mahaffey, Klippstein, and McLish is a classic example of "selling high". The two older guys were unlikely to duplicate their 1963 seasons, and Mahaffey had been shut down at the end of 1963 with shoulder trouble. These were known issues in the Spring of 1964. A "pretender" can ride with them; but a contender needs to address them.

Mauch got the most out of his players. Even the ones who didn't really like him respected him. When you read the accounts of the 1964 choke, the players are not blaming the Manager. (The media did.) He kept his foot on the gas, expecting to cross that finish line, any day. Then he could let up. It never happened.