Best of BP 2025: Chuck Dressen, A Man For Our Times

In 1951, newly anointed Brooklyn Dodgers majority owner Walter O’Malley hired Chuck Dressen to manage his team. O’Malley was motivated to make the change not because Dressen would be a better manager than the incumbent, Burt Shotton, but that unlike Shotton he wasn’t an acolyte of his recently-deposed partner, Branch Rickey. O’Malley’s resentment of Rickey was so thorough that for a while he had a joking-not-joking swear jar requiring $1 from any front office personnel who spoke the Mahatma’s name.

Dressen, 56, had been a five-foot-five major league third baseman in the 1920s (despite his short stature, he also played in the early NFL under George Halas), a successful minor-league manager, and a second-division manager of the Cincinnati Reds in the mid-1930s. In between he became famous as Leo Durocher’s right-hand man in Brooklyn, a practiced sign-stealer, and so zealous a horserace-gambler that Commissioner Landis asked Rickey to fire him when the latter came to Brooklyn in 1942. Rickey did so, then quietly hired him back eight months later.

The most frequently-told Dressen story relates to his two-year stint coaching for the Yankees. He desperately wanted Joe DiMaggio to benefit from his sign-stealing, not because DiMaggio needed the help, but because, as John Lardner once wrote, Dressen’s entire motivation in life was “to be sure that nobody, anywhere, has to go without advice from Dressen, if Dressen is in a position to give it.” DiMaggio finally gave in to his badgering, at which point Dressen promptly screwed up, conveying that the next pitch would be a curve; DiMaggio, comfortably dug in at the plate, was confronted by a head-high fastball and ended up with his face in the dirt.

DiMaggio didn’t find the mix-up funny and told Dressen to cut it out before he got someone killed, or words to that effect. Brooklyn Eagle columnist Harold Parrott once wrote, “Even if you doubt the nutritive help to the team of Dressen’s pitch-stealing, you cannot doubt his nuisance value.” As the DiMaggio story suggests, the question was nuisance value to which side? This would be the key question regarding Dressen in all of his many roles.

By most measures Dressen’s three-year run as Dodgers skipper was highly successful despite not resulting in a championship. Maybe his widely-noted egocentricity was irrelevant to his managerial skills or the team won in spite of it. The 1951 team won 97 games, though the club blew a late lead and wound up dropping the resultant three-game playoff to the Giants on a certain Bobby Thomson home run. Undeterred, the 1952 team won 96 games and advanced to the World Series. Finally, the 1953 team emerged as one of the most-dominant of all time, winning 105 games and the pennant via a deep offense that hit 208 homers (they were just the second team ever to reach 200) and scored 955 runs.

As that total suggests, these Rickey-built teams were loaded with talent, if just a little bit below the ideal on the pitching side. It won under Shotton, it won under Dressen, and it won under Dressen’s successor, Walter Alston. This suggested that with this particular team the manager’s main job was not to get in the way of a good thing. That seemed to be Alston’s understanding of his job, and no doubt that was part of the reason he held it—for good or ill—for an unlikely 23 seasons. Dressen was too needy for affirmation to do the benign minimum. Simultaneously, contradictorily, he was not eager to accept responsibility for his decisions. As catcher Walker Cooper once observed, “When Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic, he called his book ‘We.’ When Charlie Dressen wins the World Series, if he ever does, he’ll call his book ‘I.’ If he loses it, he’ll call it ‘Them Blankety-Blanks Blew It.’”

This tendency nearly derailed the great ’53 team before it even got started. Going back to 1948, the Dodgers’ starting third baseman had been Billy Cox. Cox was considered to be a defensive standout (“That ain’t a third baseman,” Casey Stengel said during the 1952 World Series, “that’s a fucking acrobat”), but he couldn’t hit up to the standards of the hot corner: Through 1952 he had hit .257/.316/.364 (80 OPS+) in 565 games as a Dodger. He was also injury-prone and, as Dressen observed, at 33 neither his hitting nor his durability were likely to improve.

The Dodgers had been trying to upgrade on Cox for years, but somehow he always held onto his job. In the spring of 1953 the Sporting News ran a picture of him being dragged off of third by Jim Baxes (24 years old), Don Hoak (25), and Bobby Morgan (27), who were all claimants to his job. “You’ve taken that picture for three years,” Cox complained. “It’s old stuff. Do you have to do it again?” They did, but they should have included Jackie Robinson in the photo. At 34, Robinson was slowing on defense and Dressen realized he wanted to take him off of second base. Simultaneously, he had second baseman Jim Gilliam, the 1952 International League MVP (.311/.411/.451 at Montreal), in camp and ready for a shot at a job. It was obvious to Dressen what he had to do. First he talked about switching Robinson and Cox, then he remembered Gilliam and dropped Cox into a bench role.

All of this took place in Dressen’s mind just before spring training began. “It gives me greater maneuverability,” he said, with both Cox and Robinson free to shift around the diamond. He tried to sell this move as one that would extend Cox’s career. The only problem was he told the press about it—repeatedly—but he never told Cox. Confronted with his uncharacteristic reticence, he made excuses: “When I was playing baseball I played where the manager told me,” Dressen said, “and he didn’t have to explain it to me.” As days went by and Cox and his friends on the team grew increasingly angry at both the prospective benching and the look of the players motivating it, the writers asked Dressen if he had addressed the third baseman. “Why should I?” he asked back. “You guys have told him all about it. Since when do you have to tell a player where he’s going to play?”

Trying to fill a void that Dressen refused to occupy, Dodgers general manager Buzzie Bavasi denied that Dressen had intended to bench Cox at all, a lie. “Casey Stengel has moved men all over the place for four years, not only in spring training but during the season, and he’s called one of the greatest managers in history,” Bavasi complained. “Yet Charley Dressen moves a man out of his old position and there’s hell to pay. He’s a dumbbell. I don’t get it.”

The problem wasn’t the change, which was defensible, but that Cox was so angry that in his rage he unlocked a heretofore suppressed racism. Somehow it wasn’t just that he was losing his job, the eventual fate of all ballplayers, but that Gilliam was black. Somehow being benched for Baxes, Hoak, or Morgan, all white players, would have been okay, and sitting for Robinson was—inexplicably—also fine with him, but being displaced by Gilliam was reflective of some kind of racial overreaching. Cox told Roger Kahn, then the Dodgers beatwriter for the New York Herald Tribune, “How would you like an [N-word] to take your job?” He clarified: “I don’t mean Jack. “I mean the [N-word], the kid.”

“What an infinitely barren ending for the Robinson experience,” Kahn later wrote, “if Dodgers called other Dodgers ‘[N-words].’”

Most of the Dodgers beatwriters wrote handwringing stories about Cox’s newly-revealed bigotry without quite quoting him directly. “Has discretion become the better part of bigotry?” asked Milton Gross of the New York Post. “And—most important of all—why and how could this have happened on a team which served as the classic demonstration that whites and Negros can work side by side, not with tolerance but with respect? Not with acceptance but with admiration and amity.”

These questions would remain unanswered, in part because injuries meant that Cox still got a decent amount of playing time right from the start of the season, in part because they remain unanswerable—there are aspects of human psychology that remain frustratingly susceptible to blame and scapegoating when adverse circumstances arise. It was also true that Dressen’s baseball instincts were correct: Spared pitchers he couldn’t hit, Cox had his best offensive season; Gilliam played every day and went on to win the NL Rookie of the Year award; Robinson, freed from second base, appeared at six positions and thereby gave the manager the strategic flexibility of a great supersub. At least one of Cox’s outspoken supporters apologized to Robinson, who chose to let the matter go.

As Bavasi pointed out, it was nothing Stengel hadn’t done to great acclaim with the Yankees. Yet, Dressen had nearly let the team get away from him over the move by abdicating his responsibility to communicate with the players. Worse, he denied he had any such obligation. In doing so, he helped free a retrograde, reactionary quality on the part of some of them; their self-pity gave them permission to deny baseball’s essential nature as a meritocracy—they overthrew the basic understanding that if one is outplayed he loses his position and slapped an asterisk on it: A challenge to one’s position is valid only if the challenger is of the right complexion, or there aren’t too many of “them” at once, or some other thing that is the last refuge of the incompetent. “I don’t mind them in the game,” said an anonymous Dodger, “but now they’re really taking over.”

In the end, it was Robinson who had the last word. Acting as a team player, he supported Bavasi, who insisted, “The players have assured me there is no racial problem and I have been assured there never will be.” Cox was upset, Robinson said, because he had lost his position. “I don’t think it makes any difference to him whether that someone is a white or a Negro.” In the end, he said, “It all boils down to one thing. Charlie didn’t want to tell Cox.”

He was right in the same sense that it only takes the irresponsible movement of a single pebble to begin a chain reaction that ends in an avalanche.