Playing Career
Born in Salina, Kansas, and raised in Los Angeles, California, Mauch had played parts of nine seasons from 1944 to 1957 with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Pittsburgh Pirates, Chicago Cubs, Boston Braves, St. Louis Cardinals and Boston Red Sox. In 304 games and 737 at-bats, Mauch hit .239, with 5 home runs and 62 RBIs, striking out 82 times.
He first became a manager at age 27 in 1953, when the Braves named him the player-manager of their Double-A Atlanta Crackers farm team in the Southern Association. His team finished 84–70, in third place, three games behind the Memphis Chickasaws, and fell in the first round of the playoffs to the eventual league champion Nashville Vols.
From 1954 to 1957, Mauch was strictly a player, first for the Pacific Coast League Los Angeles Angels, then the Red Sox. In 1958–59, he managed the Bosox' Triple-A affiliate, the Minneapolis Millers of the American Association, reaching the Junior World Series as American Association champion each season, and winning the 1958 JWS championship. He was slated to begin a third season as the Millers' boss in 1960 when, in mid-April, just prior to the start of the American Association's season, the Phillies chose him to replace Eddie Sawyer, who had resigned after the club's opening game of the regular season.
Read more about this topic: Gene Mauch
Famous quotes containing the words playing and/or career:
“In any case, raw aggression is thought to be the peculiar province of men, as nurturing is the peculiar province of women.... The psychologist Erik Erikson discovered that, while little girls playing with blocks generally create pleasant interior spaces and attractive entrances, little boys are inclined to pile up the blocks as high as they can and then watch them fall down: “the contemplation of ruins,” Erikson observes, “is a masculine specialty.””
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)