Making An Impact in Detroit
DeWitt then served as assistant general manager of the New York Yankees from 1954–1958 and as president and general manager of the Detroit Tigers in 1959–1960. As Tigers' GM, DeWitt participated in three significant trades with swap-happy Cleveland Indians GM Frank Lane during the 1960 season.
- On April 12, he swung one of the most successful deals in Tiger history, obtaining future star first baseman Norm Cash for little-used infielder Steve Demeter. Cash would win the 1961 AL batting title and play 15 years in Detroit.
- Then, five days later on April 17, DeWitt traded reigning AL batting champion Harvey Kuenn (who hit .353 in 1959) to the Indians for '59 AL home run king (with 42 homers) Rocky Colavito. Colavito played four seasons in Detroit, and continued to hit home runs, smashing 139 round-trippers (an average of almost 35 home runs per season). Kuenn, meanwhile, spent only one year in Cleveland and never again hit above .308.
- Finally, on August 3, DeWitt and Lane completed the only trade of managers in MLB annals, when the Tigers' Jimmy Dykes was dealt for Cleveland's Joe Gordon. But Gordon only lasted the final weeks of the 1960 campaign, going 26-31 with the Tigers before his resignation.
Read more about this topic: Bill De Witt
Famous quotes containing the words making and/or impact:
“Television is becoming a collage—there are so many channels that you move through them making a collage yourself. In that sense, everyone sees something a bit different.”
—David Hockney (b. 1937)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)