Boston Red Sox GM's Past And Present

I'm going to rewind a little bit to the late 1950s to try to understand how Dick O'Connell came to power in 1965, assumed full control of baseball operations in the 1966-67 time frame, and then ultimately was unseated in 1977 when Jean Yawkey decided to sell the team to Haywood Sullivan.

First of all, from today's perspective, the Red Sox of the late 1950s were in disarray as an organization. After early successes, especially in acquiring talent from the St. Louis Browns, Joe Cronin had presided over the inexorable decay of the team throughout the decade. By 1958, Ted Williams was 40 years old, Jimmy Piersall was slowing down, and Jackie Jensen, while still in his prime, was in his early 30s and a liability because the coming age of air travel was going to drive him from the game. Frank Malzone was an outstanding third baseman; like Boggs, he was a late bloomer who spent his first real year in MLB at age 27. The rest of the Boston infield (Buddin, Runnels, Wertz/Gernert) was patchwork. Sammy White was a top-flight catcher, but he was also heading into his 30s and his productive years were behind him. The positional depth was abysmal, especially in terms of young players from the minors. The pitching staff was consistently mediocre - Frank Sullivan, Tom Brewer, Ike Delock, Willard Nixon, surrounded by cast-offs from other clubs. Bill Monbouquette arrived in 1958, and Earl Wilson in 1959, and they were the only good young arms coming out of the minor league system. 

Then, of course, we have the race issue. Wilson, of course, might well have supplanted Pumpsie Green as the Red Sox' first African-American player in 1959, but was on military reserve duty for the Minneapolis Millers at the time. There's no need to hijack this thread -- we've all read millions of words about the Red Sox and integration -- but let it just be said that they had an almost complete absence of nonwhite talent in their minor league system throughout the 1950s; I just scanned their 1958 affiliates in B-Ref, and found two nonwhite past or future MLB players (Green and Jose Valdivielso, a journeyman shortstop who played for Washington) among their six affiliates.

It must have been obvious, even to someone as loyal as Tom Yawkey, that Cronin needed to be replaced. So when the 70-year-old American League president, Will Harridge, retired in January 1959, Yawkey pulled the strings needed to get Cronin elected as the league's chief executive. However, having given Cronin a safe landing into a higher-profile job, Yawkey needed to find someone to replace him. So for some reason, he turned to the 62-year-old Bucky Harris, the old "boy wonder" skipper of 1924 fame then working as Cronin's top assistant, and made him the new general manager. Harris had managed in MLB for 30 years but had never been a big-league GM. With the team suddenly in rapid decline in 1959, Harris made a number of trades for marginal players, replaced Pinky Higgins with Billy Jurges as Sox manager in July 1959 (supposedly without Yawkey's permission), and broke the Sox' color barrier by promoting Green in July. His high-profile trades (trading White, who retired rather than play for Cleveland, and dealing away bonus baby Frank Baumann, who led the AL in ERA in 1960 with the White Sox) blew up in his face. Significantly, Yawkey bypassed the team's farm and scouting director, Johnny Murphy, the old Yankee relief ace, for the GM vacancy. Murphy had been in his job about the same amount of time as Cronin was in his, since 1948, and he certainly had not set the world on fire either. (In fairness, and as a footnote, Murphy was the farm/scouting director in 1959 when Carl Yastrzemski was signed by Bots Nekola to his first Red Sox contract, so credit must be given there.) 

By 1960, Ted Williams was in his last season. The team went 65-89 and finished ahead of only the atrocious Kansas City A's. Yastrzemski was in Triple-A at Minneapolis; he was the only bright light on the horizon. Jensen, 33, had retired because of his phobia about flying. Harris' hand-picked manager, Jurges, was self-destructing because of nerves. Pinky Higgins, lurking in the wings as a "special assistant" to Yawkey, reclaimed the managerial job in June when Jurges was fired -- and surely the handwriting was on the wall for the overmatched Harris as well. The owner was 57 and at the helm of a rudderless ship.  I've looked through the Globe archives and there were multiple articles from 1960 speculating that Williams would become manager, Higgins would become general manager, etc. The Sox were supposedly trying to get Ralph Houk (a coach then for Stengel) or Yogi Berra (coming to the end of the line as a player) from the Yankees to take over the managerial job. Just an ungodly mess.

So in late September, a day or so after Williams' final game, Yawkey fired Harris and Johnny Murphy. Williams became an executive assistant to Yawkey. Dick O'Connell, who had come up through the Red Sox front office on the business side and held the title of business manager by 1958, was made executive vice president. Higgins was given a new three-year contract as field manager and given authority over all playing personnel, major and minor league, in the Boston organization. Neil Mahoney, perhaps the unsung hero in the 1967-and-beyond revival of the Red Sox, was appointed to Murphy's old job as farm and scouting director. Per the Red Sox media guide, the position of general manager was abolished, although it appeared to be shared between O'Connell (business) and Higgins (baseball). Two years later, after the 1962 season, Higgins quit as manager and became full-time GM.  He and O'Connell, still in charge of business affairs, shared the same title of EVP and (one assumes) each reported to Yawkey. That structure was in place through 1965, when Higgins, finally, was fired on September 16.

Higgins' firing made O'Connell the unquestioned boss of the Red Sox, reporting to Yawkey, and the team began a search for a "director of player personnel" to function under O'Connell as his top baseball operations executive. The Globe archives from the autumn of 1965 include a number of candidates, like Danny Murtaugh, Sam Mele (manager of the AL champion Twins), Grady Hatton and Eddie Lopat. But the job went to the 34-year-old rookie manager of the Athletics, former Sox catcher Haywood Sullivan.

Sullivan soon created his own pipeline to Tom and Jean Yawkey, with whom he became exceptionally close. He also was widely liked by the Boston press. Nevertheless, O'Connell slowly broadened his authority within baseball operations, especially during 1967 with his hiring of Dick Williams and his acquisitions of Adair, Bell and Howard. It's unclear what Sullivan's diminished role in the early 1970s was, except perhaps as O'Connell's special assistant. Then, after Mahoney died in May 1973, O'Connell moved Sullivan into the scouting director role.

I think it's interesting to note that, while O'Connell held the title of executive vice president and general manager from 1965-77 he was responsible for both the baseball and business operations of the team -- more of a chief operating officer working directly under Tom Yawkey. I recall that O'Connell himself was not simply involved in player transactions, hiring managers and coaches, etc., but also in areas like the awarding of the Red Sox' television rights to WSBK-TV in 1975. O'Connell did begin to hire assistants on the business side in the 1970s -- John Donovan, John Harrington, John Alevizos, and finally Gene Kirby -- presumably to take some of the administrative load off his plate while he focused on baseball operations. Then, after the 1975 World Series, O'Connell made a significant move in baseball operations when he hired John Claiborne as assistant general manager and his official #2 guy. This may have confirmed to Sullivan that, apart from being scouting director, his path to promotion and resumption of power had been blocked.

Tom Yawkey's death in July 1976 and Jean Yawkey's inheritance of the team changed the entire dynamic. She and O'Connell did not get along. Sullivan may have had her ear and she was highly critical of how the team was operated. Surprisingly, she waited until October 1977 before firing O'Connell (Kirby and Claiborne), and handing the team over to Sullivan and Buddy LeRoux. When the American League rejected the sale as it was initially constituted (without her part ownership), she joined Sullivan and LeRoux' group herself. The team began to decline after 1978, endured multiple PR disasters, and finally found itself torn apart by the Coup LeRoux ownership squabble. (Which O'Connell found himself embroiled in, as noted above. It's interesting that his departure was so bitter in 1977, he refused to set foot inside Fenway Park until the day of the coup.)

Dick O'Connell's Wikipedia bio.

Haywood Sullivan's Wikipedia bio.

Pinky Higgins'.

Buddy LeRoux'.