In a nine-day span in June of 1949, the New York Yankees signed two 17-year-old prospects from the Midwest; one a shortstop out of a town called Commerce and the other an outfielder from a place called Belleville. The Yankees gave each of them a $1,500 signing bonus and something to dream about.
The shortstop was a kid named Mickey Mantle.
The outfielder was Rellie Herzog. Well, Rellie was a nickname. His full name was Dorrel Norman Elvert Herzog. A few months later, while playing in an Oklahoma town called McAlester, a local sportscaster noticed his light hair and gave him a new nickname.
And that’s how he became Whitey Herzog.
Funny thing: Whitey Herzog, who died on Monday at age 92, was not a particularly fast player, nor was he especially known for his defense. He did have a little bit of speed before he served in the Army Corps of Engineers for two years during the Korean War, but shortly after he got to the major leagues in ’56, he suffered some leg injuries and, after that, couldn’t run much. In his big-league career, which lasted for parts of eight seasons, Whitey Herzog tried to steal 31 times. He was caught 58% of the time.
This matters only because it tells you that Whiteyball, the breakneck style of play that Herzog created as manager of the Kansas City Royals and St. Louis Cardinals, was not a natural outgrowth of his own game. No. Herzog very deliberately saw the hand he was dealt—sprawling stadiums covered in artificial turf—and came up with the great-defense, base-stealing, big-bench, triple-centric, pitch-to-contact, never-let-their-best-guy-beat-you approach that he felt sure was the best way to win.
As Bill James has written, if Herzog had been hired to manage the Detroit Tigers or New York Mets, he surely would have come up with something else.
He expected to manage the Mets. He was the club’s farm director in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Mets’ system was flush in those years—Nolan Ryan, Jerry Koosman, Amos Otis, Ken Singleton and Jon Matlack, among others—and when Cleveland and Oakland approached him to become their manager, the Mets assured him that he was next in line after Gil Hodges.
But when Hodges died in April 1972, the Mets went with Yogi Berra instead, and Herzog bitterly took the first managing job offered to him, which was—unfortunately—the 1973 Texas Rangers mess. Herzog knew all about messes; he had spent three years as a player with the late 1950s, early 1960s Kansas City A’s. Those A’s lost a lot of games and inspired countless punchlines, but it has to be said that the teams had a shocking number of players who would shape the game for the next quarter-century. In addition to Herzog, those teams had: