SP: I hope you don’t mind talking about the
incident which brought about the umpire strike in 1951.
CR:
Right, well I don’t mind. I was at fault, strickly at fault. You just
don’t do that (strike an umpire) and I knew better than that. He was a rookie,
just a guy that they had put in (to the league) and he really wasn’t an umpire,
and there had been a lot of problems in the league. A guy had been killed with
a pitched ball….
SP: Ottis Johnson.
CR:
That’s right. He was a friend of mine. A lot of things
were happening that had a lot of people disturbed, but I was definitely wrong.
I didn’t exactly hit him, I think, but somebody said I did.
SP:
What lead up to the problem.
CR: It
was an arguement over a call. Bill Farrar, who’s here today, was playing left field
for us. We were playing at Headland. The ball was hit to the outfield and
Bill went after it, then he just put on the brakes and stopped. There was a little
embankment in the outfield there and the ball landed there. There were two
men on base and the umpire starts doing this (circling motion with finger indicating
a home run). I said to him, « The ball didn’t go out of the ballpark, it’s
out there on the bank ». I was protesting to the umpire and I said, « Get some help.
See if the infield ump can help you ». Anyway, to make a long story short,
I told Bill Farrar to pick up the ball out there. Bill walked over and picked up
the ball and held it up. The ump said, « I don’t care where you got that ball,
when I saw the ball, it went out of the park and it’s a home run. So that’s when
I lost my cool and that lead to that (the suspension) and that was a mistake.
I had been playing long enough to know better than that.
SP:
And you were suspended for the rest of the season.
CR:
Yeah, the rest of the season! I was lucky I didn’t get suspended forever.
He was a new umpire and there were a lot of problems in the league…
SP:
The league almost folded a couple times……
CR:
They almost folded, the managers and owners
were pickin’ at each other a little bit, and there was just no harmony in the
league what so ever.
SP: You knew Ottis Johnson well?
CR:
Yes, I went to school at Troy State with him and he was
a good friend of mine. He was a power hitter and it was known around the league
that he had a little trouble getting out of the way of a pitched ball and whatever,
but he was hit in the head, then they brought Clifton (Jack Clifton, the
Headland pitcher who beaned Johnson) back and pitched him against Dothan again
(Johnson’s team). Dothan prefered that Clifton play the outfield for the rest
of the season instead of pitching some more, but he did pitch some more (that
season).
SP: You obviously hit against Jack Clifton
yourself. He was a dominant pitcher that season.
CR: He was. He knew
how to pitch and he did have a tendency to pitch inside to you on occasion.
A lot of pitchers still do that. It was just unfortunate that he (Johnson) got
hit in the head. The turmoil that went on after that certainly caused problems
and the Dothan and the Headland clubs were having problems over the Clifton incident.
The league just had no stability at the time.
SP:
After all this you ended up back at Troy State.
CR: Well, that
year (1951) was my first year as a player manager. After that, I came back the
next season to Ozark where we won the pennant. Then I went to Panama City and
we won the pennant there too. From there I went to Galveston, Texas. We had a
working agreement there with the Dallas ballclub. I went do there and about June
I was doing some good hitting so they brought me up to Dallas. I finished the
season out at Dallas and after that, I didn’t want to do a lot of travelling,
so I came back to the Dothan Cardinals. That was 1955, and I stayed with the Cardinals
for 23 years in some capacity. I was a player/manager for about 9 years,
and I spent the rest of those 23 years as scouting supervisor for the southeast
and the Caribbean. Then I had wanted to retire and get off the road and an
opportunity opened up to coach Troy State University, my alma mater. That was my
home. I had been living in Troy for all those years.
SP: It was called
Troy State Teachers College back then, wasn’t it?
CR: That’s right.
I went to school there in ’46 after I got out of the service, then played
baseball and scouted, then ended up right back there and coached.
SP:
Troy’s diamond, Pace-Riddle Field, is named after you. Who was Pace?
CR:
Pace was president of the university at one time.
SP: That’s
an honor to have the field named after you.
CR: Yes it is. Those were
some of the happiest years of my life. I was from Georgia originally, then I
came down to Troy because my brother was in school there and I just made my home
in Troy and never did leave. When I was travelling around with the Cardinals,
I always did come back to Troy.
SP: Do you mind if I see your (World
Series) ring?
CR: That’s a World Series ring with the St. Louis Cardinals.
I was very fortunate, I got 3 of these rings with the Cardinals and I
have 2 NCAA championship rings from Troy State.