Cookie Lavagetto Archives - Twinstrivia.com

He managed the Minnesota Twins to their first World Series in 1965

Sabath Anthony “Sam” Mele

Mele, Sam — Sam Mele managed the Twins for 1961-1967.

Sabath Anthony “Sam” Mele was born in Astoria, New York on January 21, 1922. Although they met in America, Sam Mele‘s parents were born in Avellino, Italy. Mele’s mother was sister to big league brothers Al Cuccinello and Tony Cuccinello. Mele, a natural all-around athlete and a Queens Park baseball legend attended New York University, where he excelled as a basketball player before serving his country in the Marines during World War II. But Mele wanted to play pro baseball and was signed as a free agent by the Boston Red Sox in 1946. In his first year of organized ball, Mele played 119 games for Scranton (A ball in the Easter League) hitting .342 with 18 home runs before being moved up to Louisville in the AAA American Association where he played all of 15 games. Mele made his major league debut with the Red Sox the following year against the Washington Senators on April 15, 1947. His rookie season may have been one of the best of his career as Sam hit 12 home runs and knocked in 73 runs in 123 games while hitting .302. Mele would never hit over .300 again in his 10 year major league career. During his playing career spanning 1947 to 1956, Mele, who batted and threw right-handed, saw duty with six major league clubs: the Boston Red Sox, Washington Senators, Chicago White Sox, Baltimore Orioles, Cincinnati Reds and Cleveland Indians, batting .267 with 80 home runs in 1,046 games. Sam Mele played his final major league game as a Cleveland Indian on September 16, 1956. Mele played AAA ball with for the White Sox and Athletics in 1957 and 1958 but never returned to the majors as a player.

Mele turned to coaching and served under manager Cookie Lavagetto in 1959 and 1960 for the Washington Senators before the team moved to Minnesota in 1961 and became known as the Twins. With the ‘61 Twins struggling, Calvin Griffith asked Lavagetto to take a week off in early June and during this period Mele filled in as manager. When Cookie Lavagetto was fired on June 23, 1961, Sam Mele stepped in as manager full-time and became the Minnesota Twins second manager. The Twins moved up two places in the standings under Mele, finishing seventh when the 1961 season ended.

But the Twins, building with young home-grown players like future Hall of Famer Harmon Killebrew, Jim Kaat, Zoilo Versalles and Bob Allison, challenged the powerful New York Yankees in 1962 before finishing second. After finishing third in 1963, the team suffered through a poor season in 1964, leading to speculation that Mele would be replaced by his new third base coach, Billy Martin.

Finally, in 1965 the Twins broke the Yankees’ string of five World Series appearances by winning their first ever American League pennant and sent the Bronx Bombers on a tailspin where the New York Yankees would not appear in another World Series for 12 years. Led by Zoilo Versalles, who was named the American League’s Most Valuable Player, batting champion Tony Oliva, and pitcher Mudcat Grant, who won 21 games, Minnesota won 102 games and coasted to the league title. The Yankees finished sixth, 25 games out. No Twins team has ever won 102 games since and Mele was named as the 1965 Sporting News Manager of the Year and back then there was only one manager of the year named for both the AL and NL. Minnesota took a two-game lead in the 1965 World Series, but the superior pitching of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale and Claude Osteen took its toll, and Los Angeles won in seven games. During the 1965 season Mele was involved in a an incident with home plate umpire Bill Valentine. The usually mild-mannered Mele’s hand apparently hit Valentine’s jaw and he was fined $500 and suspended five days.

The 1966 Twins won 13 fewer games, and ended up as runners-up to the Baltimore Orioles. Mele had clashed publicly with two of his coaches, Hal Naragon and pitching tutor Johnny Sain and both were fired after the 1966 season much to the dismay of star pitcher Jim Kaat who wrote an “open letter” to Twins fans voicing his displeasure on the Sain firing. The “letter” made national news and caused a ruckus during the 1966 World Series when major league baseball wanted the World Series front and center. The club swung a major trade for pitcher Dean Chance during the offseason and unveiled star rookie Rod Carew in 1967. Hopes and expectations were high in Minnesota, but when the Twins were only .500 after 50 games, Mele was fired. His successor was not Martin, as had been anticipated, but long time minor league manager Cal Ermer. Mele’s record as a manager was 524-436 (.546). He never managed again, but returned to the Red Sox as a scout for 25 years.

Sam Mele passed away on May 1, 2017 at the age of 95. I was lucky enough to interview Sam Mele back in May of 2009 and the interview is about a 1/2 hour-long so grab the beverage of your choice, sit back, relax and listen to Sam tell you a little about himself and what it was like to manage the Minnesota Twins.

Sam Mele New York Times Obituary

Sam Mele interview

The Sam Mele SABR Baseball Biography is available here.

Minnesota Twins open first spring training camp in Orlando

Manager Cookie Lavagetto explains how it will be done in 1961. (Credit Star Tribune) Click on image to make it larger

The Twins opened their first spring training on this day back in 1961 at Tinker Field in Orlando with manager Cookie Lavagetto at the helm. Back then the team had just three coaches, Eddie Lopat, Clyde McCullough and Sam Mele. The team brought in Floyd Baker and Tony “Angelo” Giuliani as spring training coaches to help out.

The number of players in camp was different back then too, in their first camp the Twins had 33 big leaguers and 14 farmhands as they called their minor league invites back then. The PDF below will show you who was invited to the Twins first spring training at Tinker Field.

1961 Twins Spring Training Roster

The Twins of course had a medical staff made up of Dr. William E. Proffitt Jr. and Trainer “Doc” George Lentz. Some of their techniques might be questioned today. The main tool trainers used back then was ethyl chloride, which had long been used by physicians as a local skin anesthetic to reduce pain when lancing boils and making small incisions. The numbness is produced by freezing the skin, however; the use of too much ethyl chloride results in frostbite.

The Twins have 28 spring training games scheduled with the first game to be played at Tinker Field on March 11.

Angelo Giuliani (credit newspaper archives)

The Minnesota Twins first center fielder – Lenny Green passes away on his birthday

Leonard Charles Green (born January 6, 1933, in Detroit) was the middle of three sons born to Eugene and Anna Green and passed away on his 86th birthday on January 6, 2019 in Detroit, Michigan.

After graduating from Pershing High School, Lenny Green was signed as an amateur free agent by the St. Louis Browns late in 1952 to play for York of the Class B Inter-State League. But before he ever put on a York uniform or a Browns uniform for that matter the Army called and he spent 1953-1954 in the service of his country during the Korean War. Green was stationed stateside and ended up playing on a baseball team with and against players like Willie Mays, Don Newcombe, Billy Martin and Zach Monroe. After being discharged from the Army as a corporal, Green was free to resume his pro baseball career but thing had changed and Green experienced his first MLB franchise shift as the Browns became the Baltimore Orioles.

Looking back at the Minnesota Twins in the 60’s

The Minnesota Twins started play in 1961 after moving from Washington D.C. where they were known as the Washington Senators. In their final year as the Senators in 1960 the team had a 73-81 record. Between 1946 and 1960 they had one, just one, winning season and that was in 1952 when they barely made it over the .500 mark with a 78-76 record.

Nevertheless the baseball fans of Minnesota were excited about getting a major league team (some might disagree with that description) to move to their state. Team owner Calvin Griffith felt he had some good young players that were just starting to make their mark.

The 1961 team was managed by Cookie Lavagetto until he was fired by Griffith after a 23-36 start and replaced by coach Sam Mele. The team went on to finish seventh in the ten team American League with a 70-90 mark and 38 games out of first place. The team won 91 games in both 1962 and 1963 but in 1964 they fell back to a 79-83 record and fans were calling for manager Mele to hit the road. However; Griffith stuck with his man and in 1965 Mele’s Twins won 102 games and found themselves in the World Series playing the Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale led Los Angeles Dodgers. The Twins came out on the short end of that Series losing four games to three but baseball was exciting in Minnesota.

The 1966 Twins were not able to defend their 1965 pennant and finished with a 89 win season but they were nine games behind the Baltimore Orioles. The 1967 season saw the American League with a pennant race like none before it with the Red Sox, Twins, Tigers, White Sox and Angels battling down to the very end of the season. The Twins started the season at just 25-25 and that was not what the Twins owner was expecting so he fired Mele and brought Cal Ermer to lead his team. The team responded to Ermer and had a one game lead with two games to play with the Red Sox at Fenway Park and they lost both games allowing the Red Sox to win the 1967 AL pennant by one game over Minnesota and Detroit, three games over the White Sox and 7.5 games over the Angels.

The Twins started the 1968 season with six straight wins, five of them on the road but that was their high-water mark for the season and when the season ended so did the managing career of Cal Ermer. Less than two weeks later Calvin Griffith hired Billy Martin as his new manager.

1969 saw the AL break in two divisions with the Twins being part of the six team AL West along with the Oakland Athletics, Chicago White Sox, California Angels, Seattle Pilots, and the Kansas City Royals. 1969 was also the first season that had a best of five ALCS. In this case the West Division winning Twins played the East Division winning Baltimore Orioles and the Twins lost all three games. They lost the first game in Baltimore in 12 innings 4 to 3, the lost game two again in Baltimore in 11 innings 1 to 0 and their third and final game was a blowout 11-2 loss at the Met when Billy Martin went on a hunch and started Bob Miller, a part-time starter/reliever and he lasted just 1.2 innings. Martin’s decision to start Miller turned out to be one of the key reasons he would be fired by Griffith after just one season.

The Twins played winning baseball (.542) in the 60’s and had a record of 789-666. So who were the key Twins hitters and pitchers in the Twins first decade of baseball in the Minnesota? It is difficult to determine the value that a player brings to the team without being arbitrary so the best way that I know of to measure a players worth is WAR. I know of lot of you either don’t like it and don’t know how it is calculated exactly (either do I), but if we apply the same measurement to everyone it will serve our purpose here. The position player with the highest WAR for the period of 1961-1969 probably is no surprise to anyone, it is Hall of Famer Harmon Killebrew and the pitcher for that same time period is Jim Kaat.

Baseball lifer and former Twins pitcher Bill Fischer passes away at the age of 88

Bill Fischer – Royals senior pitching adviser with credit to John Sleezer

Bill Fischer was born in Wausau, Wisconsin on October 11, 1930 and passed away at his home in Council Bluffs, Iowa on October 30, 2018 at the age of 88. A baseball and basketball player at Marathon High School, Fischer was taken by his high school principal and baseball coach to a Chicago White Sox tryout camp and quickly signed the right-handed pitcher to a $150 a month contract to pitch in Class D Wisconsin Rapids in 1948. The 17-year-old Fischer won his first 10 starts, the first three being a two-hitter, a three-hit shutout, and a two-hit shutout. He had a streak of 26 scoreless innings and finished 14-3 with a 2.63 ERA.

According to his SABR Bio written by Bob LeMoine –

Fischer was drafted into the US Marine Corps in 1951, at the height of the Korean War, and served as a drill sergeant. “I hated it, but I had a job to do,” he said. “I was in charge of a platoon of 75 men. When I wanted my boots shined, I hollered for my personal shoeshine boy to do it, on the double. Everything was on the double. … I had those platoons sick of looking at me, I guess.” Wryly, he recalled that “The only two-year contract I ever had in my life was when I was drafted into the Marines.” His baseball talents kept him in stateside while the war was waging. His San Diego team won the Marine Corps championship and played in Wichita, Kansas, at the National Baseball Congress Tournament.

According to Fischer, he never saw a big league ball game until he pitched in one during spring training. In 1956 Fischer was invited to spring training by the White Sox and pitched well enough to make the team. In his major league debut against the Kansas City A’s on April 21, 1956 Fischer had the misfortune of being called in to relieve White Sox starter Sandy Consuegra in the second inning and promptly gave up a single, triple, single, single before being pulled himself before retiring a single Athletic in what turned out to be a 13 run inning for the home-town Kansas City ballclub. Fischer’s White Sox lost the game 15 to 1 when A’s starter Art Ditmar pitched a complete game with Earl Battey getting the only hit for the Mighty Whitey’s.

Bill Fischer in 1958 with Washington Senators

In 1958 the White Sox traded Fischer to the Detroit Tigers where he struggled and was picked up on waivers by the Washington Senators late in the season. Fischer credited Senators pitching coach Walter “Boom-Boom” Beck and manager Cookie Lavagetto with helping him find rhythm and relax. “I learned more about pitching in three weeks with Washington than I had learned in all my other years in baseball,” In 1960 Fischer struggled and the Senators traded him to the Tigers who moved him to the KC A’s the following season (1961).

In 1962 Bill Fischer set a record that stands to this day of pitching a record-breaking 84 1/3 consecutive innings without allowing a walk shattering Christy Mathewson’s record of 68 innings. His streak began on August 3rd when he walked Cleveland third baseman Bubba Phillips and ended on the last day of the season on September 30th when Fischer walked Detroit center fielder Bubba Morton, so the streak began and ended with two guys named Bubba.

In December of 1963 the #MNTwins selected Fischer who already had spent parts or all of 8 seasons in the major leagues in the Rule 5 Draft which operated differently than the Rule 5 Draft operates today. The move by Minnesota move reunited Fischer with manager Sam Mele, who was on the Washington coaching staff when Fischer was with the Washington Senators a few years earlier. Fischer struggled in nine appearances out of the Twins bullpen in 1964 and his final major league pitch was hit for a walk-off home run by Oriole catcher John Orsino in a 6-5 win over the Twins giving Fischer the loss in his only decision as a Minnesota Twin. Shortly there-after he was returned to Kansas City and then placed on the retirement list.

Fischer then hooked up with his original team, The Chicago White and pitched for their AAA teams through 1968 before retiring as an active player. He retired from playing in 1968 and moved into coaching with stops in Cincinnati, Boston, Tampa Bay, Atlanta and Kansas City, where he spent the past eight seasons as a senior adviser.

Fischer is survived by his wife, Val, and children, Mike and Melissa. Funeral arrangements are pending.

Thank you for the memories Bill Fischer.

Bill Fischer SABR Bio

Bill Fischer, Royals’ senior pitching adviser and former KC A’s pitcher, dies at 88

Former MLB player and Royals coach Bill Fischer of Council Bluffs dies at 88

Sam Mele – First Twins manager to take team to a World Series gone at the age of 95

Sabath Anthony “Sam” Mele was born in Astoria, New York on January 21, 1922 and passed away in his home in Quincy, Massachusetts this past Monday at the age of 95. Sam Mele‘s parents were born in Avellino, Italy although they met in America. Mele’s mother was sister to big league brothers Al and Tony Cuccinello. Sam Mele was a natural all-around athlete and a Queens Park baseball legend and went on to attend New York University where he excelled as a basketball and baseball player before serving his country in the Marines during World War II. But Mele wanted to play pro baseball and was signed as a free agent by the Boston Red Sox in 1946. In his first year of organized ball, Mele played 119 games for Scranton (A ball in the Eastern League) hitting .342 with 18 home runs before being moved up to Louisville in the AAA American Association where he played all of 15 games. Mele made his major league debut with the Red Sox the following year against the Washington Senators on April 15, 1947. His rookie season may have been one of the best of his career as Sam hit 12 home runs and knocked in 73 runs in 123 games while hitting .302. Mele would never hit over .300 again in his 10 year major league career. During his playing career spanning 1947 to 1956, Mele, who batted and threw right-handed, saw duty with six major league clubs: the Boston Red Sox, Washington Senators, Chicago White Sox, Baltimore Orioles, Cincinnati Reds and Cleveland Indians, batting .267 with 80 home runs in 1,046 games. Sam Mele played his final major league game as a Cleveland Indian on September 16, 1956. Mele played AAA ball with for the White Sox and Athletics in 1957 and 1958 but never returned to the majors as a player.

Know your Minnesota Twins closers

The folks at Baseball-Reference.com describe a save as follows:

A save (abbreviated SV or S) is a statistic awarded to a relief pitcher, often called a closer, who enters the game under certain conditions and maintains his team’s lead until the end of the game. The save rule was first adopted for the 1969 season and amended for the 1974 and 1975 seasons. Baseball researchers have worked through the official statistics retroactively to calculate saves for all major league seasons prior to 1969.

The first save credited to a Minnesota Twins pitcher occurred on April 16, 1961 long before the save rule was actually in existence in 1969.

This Day in Twins History – First ever walkoff loss is a strange one

April 28, 1961 – The Twins and the Los Angeles Angels are tied 4-4 after 9 innings at Wrigley Field. The Twins score an unearned run in the top of the 12th and take the lead 5-4. Twins skipper Cookie Lavagetto pulls starter Pedro Ramos who has pitched the first 11 innings and brings in reliever Bill “Shorty” Pleis to close out the victory. Pleis gets the first out but then gives up a game tieing home run to Ken Hamlin. The next two hitters get singles but Pleis retires Leon Wagner for the second out. The Twins decide to intentionally walk Ted Kluszewski to load the bases. So what happens next? Shorty Pleis hits Ken Hunt and the Angels have a walk-off hit-by-pitcher win. Yikes!! It was the thirteen game the new formed Minnesota Twins had ever played and it turns out to be their first ever walkoff loss. Boxscore

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