Al Lopez, who in 1959 managed the White Sox to their first World Series in 40 years, lived just long enough to see his former team return to the Series after a 46-year wait–and win it.
After suffering an apparent heart attack Friday night, he died early Sunday in his hometown of Tampa. He was 97.
Born Alfonso Ramon Lopez on Aug. 20, 1908, in the mainly Spanish section of Tampa known as Ybor City, he went on to play 18 years in the major leagues and manage there 17 more. Along the way he set a record, since broken, for most games caught and as a manager recorded a winning percentage of .584, eighth best in baseball history. He was elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame in 1977.
“I think, in recent years, he was starting to come to grips with [the possibility of death],” said Lopez’s son, Al Jr., a Tampa attorney. “When you’re 97, the body is breaking down. But my father enjoyed life so much. He loved telling stories and visiting with people.”
Lopez recently had done several interviews about the ’59 Sox.
“He really enjoyed that,” his son said. “He knew the White Sox had won the World Series. He thought that was an absolutely wonderful story.”
Sox Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf issued this statement Sunday: “We’re saddened by the news. Al lived a long and good life. We’re so pleased we were able to win the World Series this year and that he was able to see it before he died.”
Lopez won only two pennants–in 1954 with the Cleveland Indians and in 1959 with the White Sox–but he was highly successful. In 15 full seasons, his teams never finished in the second division. Only in his final go-round, when called out of retirement in 1968 to try to rescue the plummeting Sox, did he finish with a losing record. After the first 17 games of 1969, he retired for a final time because of stomach problems.
Sportswriters called him “the Friendly Senor” and “the Happy Hidalgo” because of his sunny disposition and willingness to cooperate. Jack Kuenster, formerly of the Chicago Daily News and longtime editor of Baseball Digest, said:
“He was the finest manager I ever met or had to deal with in my life, not only as a tactician but as a man who got along with the press. He knew we had a job to do.”
Jerome Holtzman, Major League Baseball historian and former Tribune columnist, covered Lopez’s Sox teams for the Sun-Times. The two became good friends.
“I’ve traveled with over 30 managers and he was the best,” Holtzman said. “He worked so hard and was so wound up in the game that most times after a loss he couldn’t eat solid food, so he’d always have soup for dinner.”
Lopez began his managerial career in the Cleveland organization, under Bill Veeck, for whom he had closed his playing career in 1947. His Indians teams–led by Al Rosen, Larry Doby, Bobby Avila and pitchers Bob Lemon, Early Wynn, Bob Feller and Mike Garcia–won 93, 93 and 92 games in 1951 through ’53, finishing second each year to Casey Stengel’s New York Yankees, then won an American League-record 111 games in ’54 to capture the pennant.
But the Indians were swept by the New York Giants in the World Series. The next year, though in first place with two weeks to go, they finished second (93-61), three games behind the Yankees and two ahead of the White Sox. After another second-place finish (88-66) and watching attendance dip alarmingly in 1956, Lopez resigned.
Sox Vice President John Rigney immediately had scout Hollis Thurston, Lopez’s former roommate with the Dodgers, call him and tell him the Sox were interested. A few weeks later, he was introduced at Comiskey Park as the successor to Marty Marion.
From 1957 through the ’65 season, Lopez’s Sox teams went 811-615 for a winning percentage of .569. His first Chicago team placed second, the highest Sox finish since 1920.
Lopez’s strategy upon coming to Chicago from Cleveland, where he’d had slower teams that relied on power and great pitching, was to take advantage of old Comiskey Park’s dimensions by featuring speed, pitching and defense.
The 1958 Sox, though, started slowly and finished 82-72, a distant second to the Yankees. But Lopez’s center-field project, Jim Landis, had a breakout season (.277, 15 homers, great defense). The Sox had added hard-throwing Turk Lown to the bullpen. They had traded for a young pitcher, Bob Shaw, from Detroit. And they had assembled all the parts necessary to make a run in ’59.
Indeed, Lopez’s crowning achievement was winning the pennant in ’59 with a team that was last in the AL in homers and sixth of eight in batting average and had only one .300 hitter–Nellie Fox, the AL Most Valuable Player. The club was first, however, in pitching, fielding and stolen bases. Luis Aparicio, who had stolen 28 bases in 34 tries in ’58, was given the green light by Lopez in ’59 and stole 56 in 69 tries.
Meanwhile, Wynn, acquired in a 1958 trade, won 22 games, Shaw 18. The bullpen duo of Lown and Gerry Staley was superb. The team played 50 one-run games and won 35. Through all the nail-biters, Lopez was firm, confident, unflappable. He commanded respect.
“I never saw the kind of respect given to one man as I did with him,” said Lou Skizas, former Yankees outfielder who broke camp with the Sox in 1959. “He would absolutely take no guff. And I’ll tell you something else: I was with the Yankees for a while, and I went to spring training with them two or three years, and Stengel never had the respect from his players that Lopez had from his. No way.”
At times during his tenure, Lopez was criticized for preferring veterans to rookies and not caring about developing young players. Yet he gave prominent roles to youngsters like Landis, Johnny Callison, Norm Cash, Mike Hershberger, Joe Horlen and Pete Ward, who remembered how Lopez handled him as a rookie in ’63:
“I think I got down to .211 and I had about 15 errors the first month of the season. Lopez called me into his office, and I really thought I was going to get sent down to Indianapolis.
“Lopez just told me, `Pete, when you throw the ball to first, grip the ball across the seams, come up on top and pop it over there. That’s all I wanted to tell you.’ I said, `What about my hitting?’ He said, `Aw, you’ll hit. You’ve hit everywhere you’ve played. Sometimes it just takes a little longer up here.’ He showed confidence in me. Finally, I gained my confidence and I got that thing up there to .295 by the end of the season.”
Lopez was criticized in later years when it was revealed that he, as a member of the Hall of Fame Veterans Committee, had hardly been a pillar of support for Fox’s bid for Cooperstown. No one could understand why Lopez wouldn’t have been Fox’s biggest backer.
One ex-Sox remembered being in the dugout for an incident in Detroit in 1960, one year after Fox’s MVP season.
“We had a runner at second, no outs. And Nellie tried to pull a couple balls, to get the runner over, but they went foul. Then they pitched him outside and he flied out to left, so the runner had to stay at second. And Al’s upset! I thought to myself, `Wow! For one play, the true feelings really come out.'”
But the truth about Lopez may have been best expressed by Dick Donovan, who died in 1997. Said Donovan, who pitched for five teams and under nine managers during his career, most of it with the White Sox:
“Lopez was the best manager I ever played for. In fact, he was the best manager in baseball all during my career.”
Lopez is survived by his son, daughter-in-law, three grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. His wife, Connie, died in 1983. The family will hold a private funeral ceremony this week. In lieu of flowers or other sympathetic gestures, the family requested donations to Tampa’s Jesuit High School in Lopez’s name.
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bvanderberg@tribune.com
