Al Lopez

Manager

• Born: August 20, 1908
• Birthplace: Tampa, Florida
• Died: October 30, 2005
• Place of death: Tampa, Florida

Sport: Baseball

Early Life

On August 20, 1908, Alfonso Ramon Lopez was born in the Spanish-speaking section of Tampa, Florida, called Ybor City. His parents had immigrated to the United States from Spain to work in the cigar industry. Lopez grew up in a Spanish-speaking neighborhood where the children learned Spanish before English. The neighborhood was filled with the smells from the cigar factories, which Al detested. As a youngster, he promised himself that he would never work in those factories. His childhood love of baseball allowed him to keep this promise.

The Road to Excellence

In 1924, Al was offered $150 a month to play baseball for the Tampa Smokers. “I took it before they changed their minds,” he said. In that first year of his professional career, he played in an exhibition game, catching for Walter Johnson, often considered the finest pitcher of all time. After the game, Johnson praised Al, saying, “Nice game, kid. You’re going to make a great catcher someday.”

Al spent a year playing for Jacksonville in the Southeastern League. At the end of the season, Jacksonville sold him to the Brooklyn Dodgers for ten thousand dollars after having purchased him for a mere one thousand dollars. He was hitless in the only three games he played, and the next season he was back in the South, playing for Atlanta in the Southern Association. In that season, however, he hit .327 in 143 games and was back in Brooklyn in 1930.

The Emerging Champion

Al excelled during his six-year stint with the Dodgers, hitting .309 in 1930 and .301 in 1933 and playing on the all-star team in 1934. For the next four years, Lopez played for the financially troubled Boston Bees under Casey Stengel. In order to meet payroll, the team sold him to the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1940, after Stengel’s assurance that he could stay. “You and Eddie Miller are the only ones we can get money for,” Stengel told him. “So we’ll sell Miller.” Lopez lost a bet for a one-hundred-dollar suit of clothes to Miller because of that broken promise. During this period, Lopez married Evelyn M. Kearney, and the couple had a son, Alfonso Ramon, Jr.

Al’s stay with Pittsburgh from 1940 to 1946 was highly successful. In 1941, he was named to the all-star team. He was a strong presence on the Pirates, although for the last year and a half, he usually played defensively, coming in at the end of games. His popularity was so great, however, that when the management publicly announced the possibility of firing manager Frankie Frisch, a fan opinion poll conducted by a Pittsburgh newspaper showed that fans overwhelmingly supported Al Lopez as a replacement for Frisch. In his final season, 1947, Al played for the Cleveland Indians.

Most ballplayers would be content to have completed such a successful seventeen-year career in the majors, but Al’s greatest achievements were still to come. In 1948, he was named manager of Indianapolis in the American Association. After the team finished in second place in 1949 and 1950, Al was named manager of the Cleveland Indians on November 10, 1950, at a salary of thirty-five thousand dollars a year, replacing Lou Boudreau. In his six-year stay with the Indians, the team never lost more than 66 games of the 154-game season. They won the pennant in 1954 and became the only team other than the 1959 Chicago White Sox to disrupt the New York Yankees’ string of fourteen pennants between 1949 and 1964. The Indians lost the 1954 World Series to the New York Giants in a four-game sweep.

Continuing the Story

The greatness of Al’s career did not stop in the mid-1950s. In 1956, Al left the Indians and signed with the Chicago White Sox for forty thousand dollars. The next two seasons the White Sox finished in second place. In 1958, Al was named manager of the year, and, amid talk that he would retire because of his frustration over competing against the invincible Yankees, he signed on for the next season. “I love baseball and I think we have a good chance of winning the pennant,” he said.

In 1959 the Yankees underachieved, leaving the Indians as the strongest competition for the White Sox. On September 22, 1959, Chicago won the pennant in a game against the Indians. The World Series with the Los Angeles Dodgers did not go as well; the Dodgers won four games to two. Al, ever the “nice guy,” commented that the Dodgers and manager Walt Alston “played good ball, real good ball.”

Mentioned as a successor to Casey Stengel at the helm of the Yankees, Al chose to stay on with the White Sox for sixty thousand dollars in the 1960 season. He remained with the team through 1969, with years off in 1966 and 1967, retiring with the team in fourth place. He was named to the National Baseball Hall of Fame as a manager in 1977.

Summary

One of the few ballplayers whose excellence was seen in both his playing and managing, Al Lopez was a major leaguer who was reliable, smart, and likable. For many years, he held the record for the number of games caught, 1,918, and he was able to steer two dissimilar teams to the only American League pennants not won by the Yankees in the 1950s. His teams finished second ten times. Without the stellar New York Yankees of the 1950s, Al’s career would have shone even more brightly in the history of baseball.

Bibliography

James, Bill. The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. New York: Free, 2003. Print.

Koppett, Leonard, and David Koppett. Koppett’s Concise History of Major League Baseball. New York: Carroll, 2004. Print.

Shatzkin, Mike, Stephen Holtje, and Jane Charlton, eds. The Ballplayers: Baseball’s Ultimate Biographical Reference. New York: Ideal Logic, 1999. Print.

Singletary, Wes. Al Lopez: The Life of Baseball’s El Señor. Jefferson: McFarland, 1999. Print.