The good news, a little more so in baseball than beyond it, is not that a lesson so clearly learned gets internalized. Weaknesses unaddressed that come back to haunt a te are just about never ignored the following year
1950 - NECESSITY IGNORED = BURNT WEENY SANDWICH
Never ignored, that is, unless you’re the 1950 Tigers.
You read Rolfe’s journals, and his sharp observations, his passion for winning, his revulsion for limited talent all come through. He’s honest in his words — at the time, his journals were private, so he wasn’t sanitizing his thoughts for the public. fender guitar string
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Rolfe fretted consistently about three things: the need to reinforce his pitching staff, lack of power and poor execution. He was close to desperate for a first baseman who could slug, and some pitcher who could close out ges for the younger Tiger hurlers. The Tigers tried one long-shot experiment for improving 1st base production by sending their star batter Dick Wakefield to the Yankees for a second-tier Yankee 1st base prospect, Dick Kryhoski. Kryhoski had had a bit of a shot in 1949 for the Yanks, and was okay; while he hadn’t been a success, it wasn’t unreasonable for the Tigers to play Management By Wishful Thinking and it certainly beat the heck out of the previous off-season’s stand-pat pose. Not a battle-tested vet like Pearson, but at least something new to try out. The sole off-season acquisition Rolfe mentions is not the waiver acquisition of totally-proven dreadful Paul Leo Emile Calvert, who at age 32 had spent the previous year going 6-17 with an ERA of 5.43 for the Washington Senators (that is, he had been given up on by a te that finished next to last in the league in pitching…hardly a glimmer of hope there). Rolfe was realistic in his ; he didn’t expect jack cheese out of Calvert. So one of two problems sort-of addressed, neither given a kick-axe chance of successful remediation.
But here’s the odd thing. Never, in Rolfe’s journals, did he ever bring up the idea of recruiting a one of the many successful players who labored in all-back baseball or in Cuba. This relentlessly analytical individual who was striving for excellence and a pennant never once mentioned the possibility of reaching outside the standard channels to grab for the talent he believed he so desperately needed, even though others had already reached for and succeeded with the new pool.