Before the Machine. Mark J. Schmetzer
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went from hitting a washer to hitting a piece of paper inside of a washer. Then we got it down to three feet in front you.”
Shooting at BBs was just one of several unusual methods tried by the Reds in their efforts to get the franchise turned around. When the pitchers and catchers reported on February 22 to Plant Field at Tampa for the team’s twenty-eighth spring training in the city, most of them—if not all—had little idea of what was waiting for them.
One new person on hand to greet them was Otis Douglas, a coach described as a physical conditioning consultant. The fifty-year-old Douglas was a fascinating character, sort of a Renaissance man of sports.
The Reedville, Virginia, native, who owned with his wife, Eleanor, a 3,300-acre pheasant preserve in Hague, Virginia, lettered and served as team captain in football and track while earning Bachelor of Science, Master of Arts, and Doctorate of Education degrees at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. He taught physical education, directed intramural athletics, worked as an assistant football and track coach and as head swimming coach while also serving as head athletic trainer for all of the Indian teams before moving on to the University of Akron in 1939 as assistant and then head football coach.
Besides teaching physical education Douglas also coached wrestling, swimming, track, gymnastics, and freshman basketball and again served as athletic trainer before being named Akron’s athletic director in 1941.
Douglas served as an officer in the Naval Aviation Physical Fitness Program from 1943 to 1945 and was player-coach with the Jacksonville, Florida, Naval Air Station football team in 1945. After the war, he embarked on a professional football career as a player and trainer with the Philadelphia Eagles while coaching football at Drexel Tech at the same time before landing the job as head coach at the University of Arkansas, which he gave up for a job as an assistant with the Baltimore Colts. From there, he spent a year as an assistant at Villanova and another on the staff of the NFL Chicago Cardinals before going north to be head coach of the Calgary Stampeders of the Canadian Football League.
After a year of scouting talent for the Minnesota Vikings in 1960, Douglas joined the Reds.
“He put the Reds through a sprightly course of calisthenics designed to stretch shoulder-girdle muscles, loosen hamstrings and strengthen ankle and knee joints,” Sports Illustrated reported. “The Reds, a bit wary of all this exercise, finally were won over by the diffident but appealing personality of Mr.—or Dr.—Douglas and went into the regular season as well-conditioned a baseball team as there was in either league.”
Frank Robinson, who’d had problems with his throwing arm since 1954, overcame them with Douglas’s help. Robinson’s arm was so bad that he spent most of the 1959 and 1960 seasons at first base, though he was an outfielder by trade.
“Douglas had been hired by the Reds to get the ballclub in condition, and he did just that, though he nearly killed us in the process,” Robinson recalled in his autobiography. “He had us doing pushups and situps and all sorts of impossible exercises that baseball players are never supposed to do. He had us out there until our tongues were hanging out and we were screaming for mercy. But then he would come around and work on my arm, and that made up for all his tortures. He had real strong hands and he was able to massage my arm and dig down deep and break up the knots that always formed in the arm, and he got it in good shape.”
Not right away, though. Robinson missed some time in spring training because of his arm, exasperating manager Fred Hutchinson, who had no room for Robinson at first base with Gordy Coleman ready to take over.
“He’s had enough trouble with that arm to know by now how to take care of it,” Hutchinson growled to reporters, pointing out that Robinson consistently unleashed long throws from the outfield instead of hitting cutoff men and, in the view of the manager, didn’t warm up properly. “Damn it, I want his arm ready to go for the season. If Robinson isn’t ready to play the outfield, he’ll sit on the bench until he is—and he’ll take a [pay] cut.”
Douglas, who also possessed a commercial pilot’s license, was one of three newcomers to Hutchinson’s coaching staff. Antioch, Tennessee, native Jim Turner, who’d pitched on Cincinnati’s 1940 World Series-championship team and spent eleven seasons as pitching coach for the Yankees, returned to the majors as the Reds pitching coach after spending the 1960 season as general manager and manager of the Class A minor league team at Nashville. Turner, known as “The Colonel,” replaced Cot Deal as the Reds’ pitching coach.
Another newcomer was hitting coach Dick Sisler, an outfielder in his playing days who was most famous for the tenth-inning home run he hit off of Brooklyn’s Don Newcombe in the last regular-season game of the 1950 season to help the Philadelphia Phillies—the “Whiz Kids”—clinch their first National League championship since 1915 and their last until 1980. Sisler had spent three seasons as Nashville’s manager before taking Hutchinson’s old job as manager at Seattle in 1960. Sisler replaced Wally Moses as the Reds hitting coach.
Also missing from the previous season’s staff was Whitey Lockman. The only holdover coach was Cuba native Reggie Otero, who was helpful in communicating with Latin American players such as infielders Elio Chacon and Leo Cardenas.
Visa problems, which hamper players and coaches trying to get to baseball training camps from outside of the country, teamed up with airline labor issues to keep Otero and several players from reporting on time, but the other coaches had no problems getting there and gleefully participating in Hutchinson’s ambitious workout schedule. The schedule for February 28, the first day the entire squad was due, called for the players to workout from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., with a half-hour lunch break.
“Fred Hutchinson had his Redlegs sweating this spring,” Sports Illustrated observed. “They ran, did push-ups, ran some more, worked on fundamentals, did more running and even went to night school. Hutchinson’s reasoning was simple. The Reds last year were a dead team. They finished sixth—comfortably. If they finish sixth again this season, as far as Hutchinson is concerned, they will do it uncomfortably.
“The running that took place at the end of each practice was enough to drop a tough Marine. In spring training running usually consists of a friendly jog of perhaps 50 yards across the outfield, then a leisurely walk back over the same course. Generally, the players are left to themselves: they decide when they have run enough. But at Tampa Jim Turner, the old Yankee pitching coach, stood beside the outfield fence, a counting device in his hand, his cool blue eyes surveying the drooping athletes. When some of them cut the length of the course from, say, 50 yards to 30, old Jim told them to stretch it out again. When one of them insisted that the 20 laps he was supposed to run had been completed, old Jim just smiled and said that his indicator had registered only 17. When the running was finally over and the exhausted athletes walked to the clubhouse 100 yards away, they looked as if they would never make it.”
“Yeah, I’d say things are a little different this spring,” O’Toole told reporters.
On several days, the work didn’t end with the end of the workouts. Fundamentals such as hitting cutoff men also were primary focuses of several night classes convened by Hutchinson in Cincinnati’s 1961 spring training. They were mostly closed to the media, except for one newspaper photo showing the skipper operating a film projector. He also diagrammed on a blackboard the proper ways to execute rundowns and pickoff plays and which players should be backing up which bases in different situations.
Fred Hutchinson puts his players through rigorous exercise during spring training.
The camp looked more like one Vince Lombardi might have run for the NFL Green Bay Packers than a baseball camp. The only things missing were helmets, shoulder pads, footballs, and tackling dummies.
“Hutch was a good teacher,” O’Toole recalled. “The night classes were game situation fundamentals—don’t miss the cutoff man—that could lose a ballgame. Actually, it seemed like there was always some innovation.”
If nothing else, the innovative approaches and increased focus on conditioning and fundamentals