Athletes - Chuck Dressen

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	Athletes - Chuck Dressen

Charles Walter Dressen (September 20, 1898 – August 10, 1966) - alternatively nicknamed "Chuck" or "Charlie" - was an American third baseman, manager and coach in Major League Baseball during a career that lasted almost 50 years, but he is best known as the manager of the powerful Brooklyn Dodgers of 1951-53. Indeed, Dressen's "schooling" of a young baseball writer is one of the most colorful themes in Roger Kahn's classic memoir, The Boys of Summer.

Born in Decatur, Illinois, Dressen was a veteran baseball man when he took the reins in Brooklyn after the 1950 season. After a short football career playing quarterback and defensive lineman for the Decatur Staleys (a forerunner of the Chicago Bears) in 1920 and in 1922-23 with the Racine Legion, Dressen was a third baseman for the Cincinnati Reds (1925-31) and a late-season utilityman for the 1933 New York Giants, batting .272 in 646 games.

After a successful minor league managerial debut with the Nashville Vols of the Southern Association, Dressen was called to Cincinnati to manage the last-place Reds on July 18, 1934. The Reds would rise as high as fifth place under him, in 1936, but when they fell back into the basement the following season, Dressen was fired.

Despite his poor won-loss record, Dressen made a valuable ally in Cincinnati in the Reds’ mercurial general manager, Larry MacPhail. A year after MacPhail took over the Dodgers in 1938, he named fiery shortstop Leo Durocher player-manager and Dressen as his third base coach. Under MacPhail and Durocher, the Dodgers became a hard-playing pennant contender, winning Brooklyn's third NL pennant of the modern era in 1941. But when MacPhail resigned in October 1942 to rejoin the armed forces and was succeeded by Branch Rickey, Dressen was fired from Durocher’s staff – reportedly because he refused to eschew betting on horses. He was on the sidelines for the first three months of the 1943 season before being rehired by the Dodgers that July.

When the Second World War ended, MacPhail returned to baseball as a part owner and general manager of the New York Yankees. Following the 1946 season, he raided the Dodger coaching staff, signing Dressen and Red Corriden as aides under his new manager, Bucky Harris, and causing hard feelings between the Yankee and Dodger front offices.

When MacPhail quit after the Yankees' 1947 world championship (gained at Brooklyn’s expense) and Harris was sacked after the following season, Dressen was forced to move on. He was manager of the Oakland Oaks of the AAA Pacific Coast League in 1949-50 and his teams finished second and first, winning 104 and 118 games. Simultaneously, a power struggle for control of the Dodgers ended in Walter O'Malley forcing Rickey out of the Brooklyn front office. When O'Malley fired Rickey confidante Burt Shotton as manager in the autumn of 1950, he gave the big job to Dressen.

The Dodgers charged into first place early in the 1951 season, while the New York Giants - led since July 16, 1948 by Durocher himself - struggled (despite the callup of a 20-year-old rookie phenom named Willie Mays). When the Dodgers completed a three-game sweep of the Giants at Ebbets Field, August 10, the Brooklyn lead over the Giants stood at 12 ½ games. "The Giants is dead," Dressen sang loudly (to the tune of "Roll Out the Barrel") through a door adjoining the teams’ clubhouses. The next day, after another Dodger win and Giant defeat, the Brooklyn lead swelled to 13 ½ games.

But then the Giants began to win. With Sal Maglie, Larry Jansen and Jim Hearn anchoring their starting rotation – and (according to some accounts) with a "spy" stealing opponents' signs from their center-field clubhouse at their home field, the Polo Grounds – the Giants won 16 in a row in August and 37 of their last 44 games to force a flat-footed tie at season’s end and a best-of-three playoff. In the ninth inning of the decisive third game at the Polo Grounds, Dodger starting pitcher Don Newcombe had a 4-2 lead and two men on base when Dressen decided to go to the bullpen, where Clem Labine and Ralph Branca were warming up. "Labine is bouncing his curve," the manager was told by his bullpen coach, Clyde Sukeforth. Dressen summoned Branca, whose second pitch to Bobby Thomson was hit into the lower left-field stands for a three-run homer, a 5-4 Giants' win, and a National League pennant – “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World."

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