Manager of Giants and Cubs
When Durocher quit the Giants after the 1955 season, Franks left, too. From 1956 to 1964, Franks was a Giants' scout and general manager of the PCL Salt Lake City Bees. He also spent two additional one-year terms as a Giants' coach before succeeding Alvin Dark as the club's manager after the 1964 season.
Even though the team featured future Hall of Famers Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal and Gaylord Perry, Franks' four seasons (1965–1968) managing the Giants, by then based in San Francisco, each produced frustrating second-place finishes in the National League. The club lost close pennant races to the Los Angeles Dodgers by two games in 1965 and 1½ games in 1966. It finished farther behind the Cardinals the next two years, 10½ lengths out in 1967 and nine back in 1968. After he stepped down as skipper following the conclusion of the 1968 season, he was quoted as saying, " Is finishing second so evil?" He was replaced by Clyde King.
A successful businessman off the field, Franks spent the next eight years out of the major league spotlight, apart from a partial season (1970) as a coach under Durocher with the Chicago Cubs. After the 1976 campaign, Franks returned to the major leagues when he replaced Jim Marshall as manager of the Cubs. In 1977, he led the Cubs back to the .500 level, but the team lost ground in 1978 and was just one game above the break-even mark in September 1979 when Franks resigned (issuing a number of complaints about certain players ). He was the interim general manager of the Cubs from May through November 1981. However, most of his tenure was taken up by the 1981 players' strike. He lost his chance to be named full-time general manager when the Tribune Company bought the Cubs and replaced him with Dallas Green.
Although Franks compiled a poor record as a player (a batting average of .199 with three home runs in 188 games over parts of six seasons), he notched a winning record as a manager - 605–521, .537.
Read more about this topic: Herman Franks
Famous quotes containing the words manager of, manager, giants and/or cubs:
“I knew a gentleman who was so good a manager of his time that he would not even lose that small portion of it which the calls of nature obliged him to pass in the necessary-house, but gradually went through all the Latin poets in those moments. He bought, for example, a common edition of Horace, of which he tore off gradually a couple of pages, read them first, and then sent them down as a sacrifice to Cloacina: this was so much time fairly gained.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“Nothing could his enemies do but it rebounded to his infinite advantage,—that is, to the advantage of his cause.... No theatrical manager could have arranged things so wisely to give effect to his behavior and words. And who, think you, was the manager? Who placed the slave-woman and her child, whom he stooped to kiss for a symbol, between his prison and the gallows?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.... The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.”
—Omar Bradley (1893–1981)
“An unlicked bear”
—Trans. by Johanna Prins.
Dutch expression meaning “a boor”: from the old belief that bear cubs are licked into shape by their mothers.