Room At The Top

Among all sports, baseball executives are the managerial mix-masters. Baseball people have been playing and refining managerial musical chairs for the better part of a century. While it may seem a complicated and inefficient way to get everyone back more or less to where they started from, it is a very compassionate employment and deployment system. Once a man enters the charmed circle, he may have to do a lot of moving around, even occasionally sit out a season or so, but with a few breaks these men keep on managing until an NBC producer or their Maker calls. It is one of the interesting phenomena of the Grand Old Game that the more often a manager is fired, the better his chances of being hired.

The newest Detroit Tiger manager is Ralph Houk , who has been a member of the managerial club for nearly 15 years. Houk is a large straight arrow who while being interviewed wears what might be called a serious smile, as though he were constantly on guard against being molested by a teller of shaggy-dog stories.

"Ralph," he is asked, "why do you think the same managers keep getting hired again and again? Aren't there enough people around who can manage?"

"I couldn't answer that. You'd have to ask a general manager," says Houk with a serious smile. "Maybe there is a tendency to go with an experienced man because he can handle the problems that come up because he is experienced."

"You don't believe it is a good thing to change managers every now and then, just to shake things up?"

"No, no. Definitely not," Houk says, and smiles seriously. "A man has got to get to know the organization from the farm system on up. The more stability you have, the stronger the organization."

"When you were the Yankee general manager you hired Johnny Keane and fired him a year later."

"Well, there were some problems there. We lost a lot of the players who had carried us. Keane maybe was not familiar with the organization."

"But Berra must have been with the Yankees 97 years and you fired him after he'd managed for just one year."

"Well, there were other problems there. There is no point in going into that."