Oak Brook, a mecca of major-league baseball thought and theory? Even Bo probably doesn’t know that.
But to the hardest-core baseball-philes, the village does hold that distinction, and it’s all because of a remarkable resident who, with proper coaxing, will humbly tell his tales of the game.
Johnny Sain was the last man to pitch to Babe Ruth in an organized baseball game and the first to face Jackie Robinson in a regular-season major-league contest. As a big-league player and coach, he earned nine World Series rings. But on a recent morning at the checkout counter of an Oak Brook book store, Johnny Sain was just another face in the crowd.
Now 76 and five years from his last major-league job (as the pitching coach of the Atlanta Braves), the tall, graying Sain and his choice of literature-a copy of Niccolo Machiavelli’s “The Prince”-offered no hint whatsoever as to his status as one of the living legends of baseball in the 20th Century.
“It’s for a friend,” said Sain, almost apologetically. “I was trying to explain some of Machiavelli’s concepts, especially the parts on cunning, to him, but I just figured it might be easy to get him one of the books and let him read it for himself.”
Machiavellian theory has probably wound its way into few baseball conversations over the years, but then again there have been few baseball men who have ever viewed the possibilities of the game from as many intellectual planes as Johnny Sain.
Part philosopher, part mechanic, part positive mentalist, part design engineer, full-time thinker, subtle salesman, Sain remains one of the greatest tactical minds to ever don a major-league uniform.
“A lot of baseball people to this day think that John is a little bit off the wall, but that’s because he always frightened most of them with the depth of his thinking and with his emphasis on the mental aspects of the game,” said Jim Kaat, a CBS Sports major-league baseball analyst who won 20 or more games three times during his four full seasons as one of Sain’s pitching disciples in Minnesota (1965-66) and with the White Sox (from mid-1973 to 1975).
“Personally, I think he’s a genius when it comes to pitching theory and that his thinking has always been about 30 years ahead of its time. He really has forgotten more about pitching than most people will ever ever know.”
A comfortably retired empty-nester in Oak Brook with his second wife Mary Ann (who works in computer operations for Metropolitan Life), Sain made success a remarkably consistent habit both as a pitcher and as a pitching coach during his 47-year run (1942-88) in major-league baseball.
“Oh, I had my moments, that’s for sure,” said Sain, a soft, engaging Arkansas drawl coloring his words. “Actually, I’ve always felt I had four careers in the big leagues, one as a starting pitcher, one as a spot starter, one as a relief pitcher and one as a pitching coach.
“And actually, even beyond that, one of the things that I’m most proud of is that I was also a good hitter. Back when I played, being a good hitter meant that a manager might keep you in games a little longer if you were struggling a bit out on the mound.
“According to some statistics that some friends back in Arkansas sent me a few years ago, I’m still one of the few pitchers (29 at last count) to ever hit better than .300 and win 20 games in the same season.” (In fact, he hit .346 and won 21 games with the Boston Braves in 1947.) “Yeah, I had my moments.”
Those moments included the nine trips to the World Series (four as a player, five as a pitching coach), four seasons winning 20 games or more as a pitcher, the special status of being the highest-paid pitcher in the game during the late 1940s, and friendships and/or professional associations with such a disparate lot of mythic names as Ruth, Robinson, Grantland Rice, Tris Speaker, Cy Young, Casey Stengel, Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, Hank Aaron and Ted Turner, among others.
“When you factor in the number of baseball eras Johnny Sain’s career has crossed you get an idea of exactly how enduring the man’s standing in the game has been,” said Cubs-WGN broadcast legend Harry Caray, himself no stranger to baseball era-crossing.
“He was completely non-traditional in his approach as far back as 1946, which was the first year I saw him pitch when he was with the Boston Braves and I was breaking in as a broadcaster in St. Louis with the Cardinals. He was never truly accepted by the game’s traditionalists, especially back then, which was before he built the track record he has now. He thought too much for the sake of most old-time baseball people. They wanted to consider his successes back then an aberration, an oddity, an awful lot of luck. Now we know that those successes weren’t.”
That Sain would ever be in a position to be considered aberrant by major-league baseball old-liners was in itself remarkable considering his humble professional baseball roots. The son of an auto mechanic from Havana, Ark., Sain had little impact during four seasons with Class D teams in the Northwest Arkansas League from 1936-39, playing in backwater burgs like Osceola and Newport.
“The pay was low, about $50 or $60 a month, and the fields and roads all seemed dusty,” Sain recalled. “That probably should have been it for me as a baseball player. But I really wanted to play and I was convinced that I could. Also, I was still barely out of my teens and it was basically a summer job, so I had all of the optimism and time of youth at my back. Then I caught a few breaks around the start of World War II.”
The first break came when Larry Gilbert, the owner of a Class AA team in Nashville, liked something he saw in the lanky 22-year-old right-hander.
“He was the first person outside of my circle of friends back in Arkansas who suggested that I could play in the big leagues, although he thought that with my hitting it might be as an outfielder,” Sain said. “I pitched well but hardly great during two seasons in Nashville. But I was still relatively young and I had a good arm and was developing a true sense of how to pitch to people, how to think to get batters out.
“Then, in 1942, there was a growing shortage of good pitchers at major-league spring training camps (because of World War II). My draft board back home in Arkansas was a little slow to take me because I was classified as basically the man of my family. Because of that, in 1942 I was invited to the Boston Braves camp in Sanford, Fla. Casey Stengel was the manager. On the final train trip north, he came up to me in one of the coach cars and told me I had made the team.”
Young Sain didn’t exactly bowl them over that first season at the old Braves Field, but he did manage to show some promise and hint of belonging with a 4-7 record against the increasingly war-depleted rosters of the National League. But the specter of Uncle Sam lurked.
“It was pretty much a foregone conclusion that a lot of us would be going in the service after the season, so a handful of us from the Braves and the Red Sox, people like myself, Ted Williams, Johnny Pesky and some others, tried to control some part of our destiny by enlisting in the Naval Air Corps.”
War wasn’t exactly hell for Sain, who earned his wings at Corpus Christi after a circuitous military routing through Amherst College, Chapel Hill, N.C., and the Glenview Naval Air Station, “where I learned night flying,” Sain said. While he was at Chapel Hill, Sain played on a military baseball team called the University of North Carolina Pre-Flight Cloudbusters, which included other major-leaguers such as Williams, Pesky and Harry Craft.
On the afternoon of July 28, 1943, Sain found himself on the pitching mound at Yankee Stadium in a wartime relief game between the Cloudbusters and a team consisting of the reserves from the Yankees and the Cleveland Indians, the two teams that had opened the charity double-header that day with a regular-season game. Ruth, who had retired as a player after 22 seasons eight years before, was managing the makeshift team, the Yank-Lands, to help draw a crowd. Suddenly, responding to the cheers of the 27,281 fans in the sixth inning, Ruth left the third-base coaching box to pinch-hit against Sain in what would prove to be the final at-bat of his fabled life.
“Ruth was chubby, actually almost fat, but he got around with that odd tippy-toe jog of his and you could tell that the New York crowd absolutely idolized this man even well into his retirement,” Sain remembered. “They went crazy when he went to pick up a bat. I wasn’t nervous, but I did want to get him out because this was kind of a big audition for me. There were a lot of baseball people, scouts, front-office types, in the stands and I was thinking maybe if I did well that day, they’d remember who I was after the war.
“Anyway, Al Sabo, the catcher, came out to me as Ruth walked to the plate and said, `Don’t throw him any curveballs,’ because no one wanted to embarrass him and he was more likely to get fooled bad with a curve. Taking away my curveball was liking cutting off two of my fingers, but it was Babe Ruth in Yankee Stadium. Then, it became obvious that the home plate umpire wasn’t going to call any strikes on him. So I threw five medium fastballs, almost batting practice pitches. Ruth took one, then hit a long foul ball and then walked on the last three pitches.”
Sain threw an eight-hitter that afternoon and the Cloudbusters won 11-5. Ruth never batted in any sort of organized game again and was dead of throat cancer five years later at age 53. But three years after the exhibition confrontation at The House That Ruth Built, Sain’s career was on a serious uptick, primarily because of the finishing school in pitching that his service years had provided.
“I had pitched every chance I had in the service,” Sain said. “I also learned to throw the same pitch three or four different ways and then to throw it at four or five different speeds.
“On top of all that, Ted Williams, who was then the greatest hitter in the game, became one of my most vocal boosters because of our time together on the service teams and what he had seen that I was capable of. By 1946, when I was back with the Braves, all of that had combined to make me something of a formidable presence.”
To say that Johnny Sain was something of a formidable presence with the Boston Braves from 1946-50 is like saying that Michael Jordan has helped the Bulls a little bit during the past three years. During those five seasons, Sain won 96 games, including four campaigns with 20 victories or more. He pitched an amazing 115 complete games during that span. In 1948, in one of the most remarkable two-man pitching performances in big-league history, Sain combined with Warren Spahn to pitch the Braves to the National League pennant. Sain finished at 24-15, completing nine games during 29 days late in the year to help clinch the title.
As Caray recalled: “Hell, the Braves had only Sain and Spahn and everyone knew that you can’t win a pennant with only two good arms. But Boston did that year. The big phrase around Boston that season was `Spahn and Sain, then pray for rain.’ “
In Game 1 of the 1948 World Series, Sain faced Bob Feller and the Cleveland Indians in a contest that is still regarded as one of the greatest pitching duels in Series annals. Feller pitched a two-hitter and Sain countered with a four-hitter. Both went the distance. The Braves squeaked out a 1-0 win in the eighth inning when a batter walked, was sacrificed to second and scored on a base hit.
After watching Sain’s brilliant clutch performance in that game, 81-year-old Cy Young, the turn-of-the-century pitcher who won more than 500 games in his career, was quoted as saying, “I think Sain is wonderful. . . . He’s a lot like some of us old-timers.”
Boston lost the Series in six games, but Sain was riding high. Time magazine listed his salary as $40,000 per year, an enormous sum in those days and reportedly the highest of any pitcher in the game at the time.
But in 1949, he experienced the first serious spate of arm trouble, a malady that would eventually induce the Braves to trade him to the Yankees late in the 1951 season. Though he was only a spot starter and frequent reliever for the Bronx Bombers, Sain returned to World Series play with the Yankees for three straight years from 1951-53. Finally, at 38, his playing career ended in 1955 with the Kansas City Athletics. His lifetime record closed out at 139-116.
Initially after retiring as a player, Sain, by then the father of four, returned to Arkansas with his first wife and opened a car dealership in Walnut Ridge. But in 1959, he returned to baseball as the pitching coach of the Athletics. Two seasons later, capitalizing in part on a friendship forged in the Yankees bullpen, Sain came back to New York when new manager Ralph Houk was hired. Three American League pennants resulted in quick succession from 1961-63.
New York hurlers such as Whitey Ford, who had his only 20-win seasons under Sain in 1961 and 1963, had the best years of their careers. “You learned under John but only if you wanted to,” Ford said. “His sell was a very soft sell but you were a fool not to buy.”
The specter of new manager Yogi Berra (“I thought that a player so recently retired as Yogi was back then would have trouble managing his friends, and I was right,” Sain said) led Sain to leave New York after the 1963 campaign. In 1965, he resurfaced with Minnesota. That fall, while Sain worked his magic with an unheralded crew including Kaat (18 wins), Mudcat Grant (21), Jim Perry (12) and Al Worthington (10), the Twins made it to their first World Series.
But one year later, in 1966, Sain left the Twins only to be back the next season with the Detroit Tigers. In 1968, the Sain spell resulted in an enormous year for Denny McLain, who became the only pitcher of the last half-century to win 30 or more games with 31 wins, and the Tigers made it to the World Series.
But off the field, Sain’s first marriage was in pieces. “My first wife went back to college and got her degree at age 50 and it changed the tone of our relationship,” he recalled. “My life in baseball seemed more and more trivial to her. The divorce was an enormous financial strain on me. I pretty much lost almost everything I had, to the point that I had to declare bankruptcy.”
Then at 52, Sain took a job as a roving minor-league instructor with the California Angels in 1970.
“Roving was the key word,” he said. “I pretty much packed everything I owned into a Winnebago and criss-crossed the West Coast into Utah and Arizona, working with the Angels’ farm teams. I was something of an easy rider.”
But that job also led to a lasting friendship with an Angels minor-league manager named Chuck Tanner, and one year later, when Tanner was hired as the manager of the White Sox, Sain moved his traveling road show to the South Side of Chicago.
“When I first came to Chicago, I lived in the Winnebago not far from Midway Airport,” Sain said. “I kind of liked the life, because I was ready to be back in the big leagues, the mess in Arkansas was being put behind me and I had a lot of privacy. And then best of all, July 3, 1972, I met Mary Ann.”
Mary Ann Zaremba was the young (35) widow of a Chicago policeman. On that fortuitous holiday eve in 1972, she was with friends at a restaurant-lounge in Lisle called the King’s Palace.
“I knew the owners, a couple named Rose and Sam Sutter, and it turned out that they knew Johnny,” Mary Ann said. “They introduced us, and there was something very special about him to me from the beginning. It turned into a courtship really before I knew what was happening.
“Anyway, Johnny proposed barely a month later. I’ll never forget the soft sell he gave me. He said, `Even if it doesn’t work, we’ll still be very good friends.’ Well, it’s worked. A lot of times, we take it day by day, but it’s really been a wonderful marriage. My son is grown now and Johnny’s four kids are, so we’re at the point in our life where we have the freedom to really do what we want to. In a lot of respects, much of the time it seems like one long honeymoon.”
Sain’s baseball honeymoon on the South Side of Chicago lasted until 1975. During his five seasons with the White Sox, pitchers like Wilbur Wood and Stan Bahnsen turned into 20-game winners. And Kaat was reunited with his mentor long enough to win 21 games in 1974 and 20 in 1975.
“Johnny will throw a thousand ideas at you, but it’s up to you to select what you want,” Kaat said. “He never ever forces any theory or approach on a person.”
The sale of the White Sox from John and Art Allyn in 1975 to Bill Veeck ended the Tanner-Sain regime at Comiskey Park. The following season, Sain took a job with the Atlanta Braves organization, shuttling at first between the Georgia city and their top farm team in Richmond before settling in as the Braves pitching coach from 1985-88.
These days, Sain remains a vociferous reader (“Reading is John’s way of updating his theories on everything,” Mary Ann Sain said) and a free-spirited traveler.
“I keep the Winnebago parked a little distance away from our townhouse set to go,” he said. “To me the great part of the charm of travel is the feeling that there’s always something new, something to be learned, just down the road.”
Those roads have been many for Johnny Sain, both inside and outside the base lines, with ample ups and downs. But the same simple underpinning anchors the basic Sain philosophy just as it did almost six decades ago when a rural Arkansas teen aimed for bigger things.
“I think the biggest thing anyone should realize is that if you’re afraid to fail, you’ll never truly succeed,” Sain concluded. “And if you can think, you can succeed.”
