Contrary to popular opinion, Alchemy is alive and well. How else do you explain a man like Dick Williams? Time and again, he found ways to turn scrap metal into gold—first with his own playing career, and then with countless players as the manager of the high-achieving Boston Red Sox, Oakland A’s, Montreal Expos, San Diego Padres and Seattle Mariners.

Baseball’s newest Hall of Fame skipper got to Cooperstown with a combination of strength and flexibility. Dick had the fortitude to stand up to owners and superstars, yet bent easily when it came to building winners around the talent he had on hand. Few managers were better when it came to righting a sinking ship. In a JockBio originally crafted for SABR’s Biography Project, Jeff Angus (author of Management by Baseball: The Official Rules for Winning Management in Any Field) looks at the life and career of baseball’s great turnaround artist.

Richard Hirschfeld Williams was born on May 7, 1929, in St. Louis, Missouri. (Click here for today's sports birthdays.) He was the second of two children. According to his autobiography, No More Mr. Nice Guy, his father Harvey struggled through the Great Depression. The elder Williams was hard-headed but willing to do whatever came his way. But when he didn't find any work, he took it out on his boys in ways that today would be called child abuse. He taught his sons to be determined competitors—or suffer his wrath. At the same time, Dick learned to be resourceful and to never try to escape accountability for every single thing he did.

Dick and his family lived with his maternal grandfather near Sportsman's Park, home to both the National League Cardinals and American League Browns. "I was a member of the Knothole Gang [the club that gave free tickets to kids], and those tickets were in the left field bleachers, so my favorite players were Chet Laabs, the Browns' left fielder, and Joe Medwick, the Cards' [left fielder]," Williams said.

When Dick was 13-years-old, Harvey took the family to California, first to Hollywood and then to Altadena. Dick's formal athletic career started at Pasadena Junior College (then covering 11th and 12th grades followed by two years of college). He just about majored in sports, lettering in baseball, football, basketball, track, tennis, and swimming. In handball, he didn't just letter, he was city champ.

Dick was first noticed by Los Angeles Dodger scout Tom Downey in 1946. During a game hosted by a semi-pro team in El Monte, Downey watched as the teenager went from bleacher fan to emergency fill-in for the center fielder, who was knocked out by a fly ball. The next year, the Dodgers signed Dick to his first pro contract. He received a bonus of $1,200. After his 12th-grade graduation, Dick immediately joined LA's Class C team in Santa Barbara. He got into 79 games as an outfielder, batting .246 with an adequate .115 isolated power mark and eight stolen bases. What he lacked in superstar numbers, he made up for in hustle and picking fights.

The following year, Dick attended his first pro spring training. It was an historic event, the premiere of Branch Rickey's industrialization experiment, Dodgertown at Vero Beach. Dodger management standardized drills and certified standards of accomplishment for every key fundamental that could be measured. Prospects participated in sunrise-to-sunset repetitive drills designed to teach the standard approaches to skills ranging from sliding into home plate to throwing to second base with a runner in scoring position. This fit well with Dick’s natural predisposition—he believed there was a right way to execute every action on the baseball field and that intensive commitment was the best way to reach a goal. Not surprisingly, Dick started to internalize the drills, adding them to the toolkit he would employ later in less disciplined organizations.

Back in Santa Barbara for the 1948 campaign, Dick chewed up Class C pitching. In 97 games, he hit .335 with 29 doubles, 16 homers, 16 steals and 90 RBIs. The Dodgers promoted him to Double-A Fort Worth, where he found himself overmatched. In 41 games, Dick's batting average was just .207 with .064 isolated power and no steals.

Perhaps it was the adjustment to better pitching or meeting two of the most important people in his life, but Dick put up the best numbers of his pro career the following year and earned All-Texas League honors. He posted a .310 average for Fort Worth in 1949, with 109 runs, 30 doubles, 23 homers and 114 RBIs.

And the two important connections he made? The first was Norma Mussato. The two had a mutual milk delivery man, and he insisted that the pair meet. Norma would become Dick's wife.

Bobby Bragan was the second. A rookie manager, Bragan was a Rickey disciple who went about his business transparently to better communicate with his minor league trainees. He was a strict enforcer of top-down discipline, which Dick loved.

"I joined Fort Worth, and Bobby Bragan took over ten days after I was sent down from Brooklyn. I had a bad start, but he stuck with me, gave me every benefit he possibly could," Dick said. He learned the Dodger Way—and learned to reign in his aggressive tendencies, if only to avoid doing extra running in the 100-plus degree West Texas heat.

Dick talked more about Bragan in his autobiography: "There should be a note under every one of my records that says, 'See Bobby Bragan.' Because a bit of every one of my wins belongs to him."

Bragan was a master at mind games, which also intrigued Dick. For example, Bragan would warm up a left-handed starter but switch to a right-hander after the opposition had committed to a lineup card. Bragan also worked the running game aggressively to distract opponents from more important aspects of the game. Dick internalized these techniques, as well.

Between the 1949 and 1950 seasons at Fort Worth, Dick returned to the Los Angeles area to earn money to subsidize his baseball career. He had an unusual temp job as an extra in a low budget movie, "The Jackie Robinson Story."

"How low budget?" Dick recounted. "In one scene, I'm the pitcher and Jackie's playing for Montréal in Jersey City and he hits a homer. And the fans are booing him. Then in the next day's scene, they were doing a shot of him rounding second base ... and I was playing the second baseman, too."

At the start of spring training in 1950, Dick had his heart set on a move up
to Class-AAA Hollywood, where he would face a better brand of ballplayer,
and be closer to home. To his dismay, he found himself reassigned to Fort
Worth. Dick was told by Rickey that he would have a better shot at
the majors playing every day in Texas than riding the pine in California.
Rickey’s words were prophetic. Dick established himself as a .300 hitter and placed himself firmly on Brooklyn’s radar as a solid option for 1951.

Dick played for the Almendares Alacranes (Scorpions) in the Cuban League in the winter of 1950-51. He was the only American on the squad. His Cuban League season ended prematurely in February—he had to report for military training. A high-school football injury kept him from combat duty. A baseball injury in a camp game that same year got him a medical discharge.

Minor leaguers returning from military service had to clear waivers before they could report back to their teams. This reshaped Dick's playing career. He was claimed by both the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Cardinals. The Dodgers, determined to keep him, had but one option under the rules: bring the young outfielder up to the big club in Brooklyn.

When he arrived in New York, he found he had something in common with the other bench players. All were shunned by the starters. The one vet who showed Dick encouragement was Robinson. They had already met, not because of the movie, but because Robinson was from Pasadena, too. Dick was buddies with Robinson's older brother, Mack.

On June 10, Dick debuted in a double-header against Pittsburgh. In the first game, Brooklyn manager Chuck Dressen sent the right-handed rookie to pinch-hit for left-handed Gene Hermanski against southpaw Bill Werle. Dick grounded out.

Dressen installed Dick as his left fielder and leadoff man in the second game. Aiming to make an impression in his first plate appearance, he beat out a bunt for a single. Dick collected three more hits to go 4-for-5 with a triple. Unfortunately, that game contained the sum of his highlights for the season. As the 26th player on a roster of 25 (Brooklyn did not have to count the returning military veteran against their 25), he eked out only 64 plate appearances for a team in a tight pennant race that already had three accomplished starting outfielders in Carl Furillo, Duke Snider and Andy Pafko.

While Dick was riding the pine, he did get experience that would serve him later. Dressen kept the youngster close to him on the bench and taught him the fine Dodger tradition of bench-jockeying. Dick was a natural at it. As Dressen's "designated smartass," he became so notorious around the league that he was occasionally ejected from games for wisecracks other players made.

Dressen taught Dick another critical managerial lesson. The rookie watched his manager's palpable anxiety as the Dodgers' lead vaporized—from 13 1/2 games ahead on August 10 to tied on the next-to-last day of the season. Dick believed Dressen's pacing, screaming and whining weakened his team's ability to hold the lead. He decided that a skipper needed to radiate calm confidence more than the shared worry.

In 1952, league rules again required Dick to be Brooklyn's 26th man, depriving him of the opportunity to play in Triple-A where he could have built his skills. He could not be sent down until May 29, when his ex-serviceman roster status would expire. But as the date approached, Dick made a few fundamental plays Dressen appreciated, including a 3-7 putout of a runner at second base when he crept in from left field unnoticed after a bunt. Dressen decided to keep him, and in August Dick started in three consecutive games in St. Louis. In the third game, he raced in to throw himself at a dying quail off the bat of Vern Benson. Dick dove, extended his right arm and heard a crack. It was a three-way shoulder separation that essentially destroyed his ability to reach his highest potential. His arm became a launcher of Texas League bloopers. Later, when he played third base, a manager told Dick to throw the ball to first on a bounce.

Dick felt this career-sapping injury helped him become a good manager. “My injury forced me to watch, to listen, to learn every tiny detail about this game that once I could play in my sleep," he said. "Because if I ever wanted to play it again, I could no longer be faster or stronger than anyone. Now I had to be smarter."

“I would sit on my butt in the dugout for nine innings and watch both the game and its players like I'd never watched them before. I studied opposing pitchers. I studied strategy. More than anything, I studied human nature."

And through it all, Dick evolved. He became someone who thought before he acted, who took nothing on the field for granted, who wanted to leave nothing on the field to chance. Slowly, painstakingly, in a process that took 12 years, he turned into a topflight manager.

Dick bounced between Brooklyn and the team's minor league system until the middle of the 1956 season, when Baltimore snatched him off the waiver wire. The O's, a losing team building themselves into a multi-decade behemoth and innovation factory, were led on and off the field by Paul Richards, a management titan and another important mentor for Dick. Richards loved having the full-tilt competitor on the team so much that he acquired him through trades three more times. Dick played the role of "designated smartass" for Richards, the same position that Dressen had taught him. He was a fundamentally sharp and aggressive base runner (Richards liked to use him as a leadoff hitter) with decent home-run power. Added to that was his intensity and versatility.

On July 15, 1956, for example, Richards inserted Dick as the leadoff batter in both ends of a double-header against the Detroit Tigers. Playing center field and second base in the first game and third base and first base in the second, Dick went 6-for-9 with two doubles, a home run, a walk and a stolen base. He scored four runs and drove in two.

Dick hit .286 for Baltimore in 1956, primarily as an outfielder. He split 1957 between the Orioles and Indians after a trade to Cleveland, then returned to the Orioles in 1958, dividing his time between the outfield and third base. On August 26, 1958, Cleveland's Don Ferrarese shut out the O's for 11 innings, but loaded the bases in the 12th. Dick came to the plate and yelled at the little lefthander, "I'm not swinging at a ball." Dick then folded himself into a deep crouch, as his teammate Gene Woodling would do. Ferrarese walked him on four pitches to force in a run, losing what he called the best game he ever pitched. Dick added a further insult when next facing the pitcher. Three weeks later, he batted leadoff for the Birds against Ferrarese and eked out a walk to start the game.

Dick played for the Kansas City A’s in 1959 and 1960, logging his two best seasons a major leaguer. He had 33 doubles and 16 homers in ’59 and 31 doubles and 12 home runs a year later.

Richards reacquired Dick for the Orioles in 1961. The veteran's skills were starting to erode, and he was basically a utility man for the next two seasons. Richards snatched Dick up again for the Houston Colt 45s after the 1962 campaign, but he was traded to the Red Sox for Carroll Hardy before the season started. In Boston, Dick was a bench player, getting into 140 games over the next two seasons. He batted .159 in his final season, retiring with a lifetime mark of .260. He hit 70 homers and slugged .392 in 2,959 at-bats.

The Red Sox were the American League's big-market team with the weakest front office. Dick witnessed—and despised—what he called the "country club" atmosphere in Boston. Fathered by owner Tom Yawkey and his royal court of drinking companions and yes-men, the organization was driven primarily toward pleasing Yawkey rather than pursuing excellence. The Red Sox hadn't risen above .500 for six years before Dick arrived, a frustration they extended the two years he was with them. Dick struggled to amp up the team's intensity from the bench, hoping to teach them to hate losing as much as he did. To his dismay, he believed he was associated with "a bunch of losers."

While Dick’s playing skills were slipping at age 35, his intensity, flexibility and passion were not. He caught the eye of Boston's minor league director Neal Mahoney and business manager Dick O'Connell. First, Mahoney invited Dick to manage a rookie team in a spring intrasquad game. After the Sox released Dick following the 1964 season, Mahoney offered him a player/coach position with the team's Triple-A affiliate in Seattle. When the farm team moved to Toronto during the winter, manager Edo Vanni, a Seattle Homeboy, decided not to move with the team. Mahoney gave Dick his first professional managing job as skipper of the Toronto Maple Leafs.

For Dick, it was an enlightening experience for several reasons. First, according to Dick, he had to make the transition from bench jockey (criticizing others' mistakes) to accountability enforcer (judging his own). Given the years he spent with his hyper-critical father and his own similar tendencies, Dick worked to see that no mistake went unanalyzed or uncorrected. His relentless pursuit of excellence was rough on his players—and even rougher on opponents. Dick was doubly intense because he was working within the "country club" organization that, to him, represented the opposite approach.

With Toronto, Dick also got to manage a lot of the young talent that would play for him in Boston. His roster included 1965 International League batting champ Joe Foy, 1966 IL batting champ Reggie Smith, and catcher Russ Gibson.

Dick led the Maple Leafs to International League championship in both 1965 and 1966, with records of 81-64 and 82-65. In those two seasons, the Red Sox finished ninth, 40 games and 26 games out of first place. When O'Connell became Boston's general manager, he let manager Billy Herman go. The '66 squad had played at about .500 after the All-Star break, a possible indicator that with the right leadership, the team might be ready to excel. O'Connell had the choice of two successful minor league managers, Dick and Eddie Popowski. In September, he settled on Popowski as a coach and Dick as his manager for the following season. O'Connell sensibly gave the rookie manager, at 37 the youngest in the league, the full off-season to prepare.

Dick’s preparation evolved from lessons learned from his principal teachers. "I had three managers that you could call my mentors: Dressen, Richards and Bragan," he said. "You could put them in a room and they wouldn't agree on anything."

Dressen was a counter-example for Dick—for all his smarts, he was a narcissist who wasn't happy if the credit went to anyone else. Richards was the innovator and tactician, seeking edges small and large every minute of every day. And Bragan was personally loyal, a straight-shooter and a transmitter of the Rickey method. Dick picked up valuable insight from all three. "I managed right along with them," he said. "I learned from every manager what to do and what not to do."

From the first day of spring training in 1967, Dick made it clear that there would be only one person in charge—him—and there would be an avalanche of changes in management processes and rules. He stripped outfielder Carl Yastrzemski of his role as captain. All players who were single had to stay in the team's hotel, and players had to show up on time or be fined. With the standard practices he had learned with the Dodger organization as a baseline, Dick stressed fundamentals. He didn't just borrow from successful precedents; he innovated, too. He was one of the first managers to use videotape for studying opponents and coaching his players—though he had to borrow equipment from local television stations to execute his idea.

Dick hated the way the Red Sox had conducted workouts in the past, especially for pitchers, who had a ton of down time built into their schedules. He sopped up the slack by making all the pitchers play volleyball in the outfield, a drill that developed footwork skills and pushed the competitive instincts of his players even during the laid-back environment of spring baseball. The volleyball games incensed spring training coach Ted Williams, and he went home in disgust. Things were different now, and as the manager noted, the Splendid Splinter was extremely happy to join the team's celebration when they won the pennant.

Before the season began, the press and oddsmakers predicted that the Red Sox were no different from years past. Dick promised that the team would "win more games than we lose." Opening Day at Fenway Park drew only 8,000 fans, but by the end of the season, all the home games were sellouts.

Even with the new passion that Dick injected into the Red Sox, the team started 11-11, the same as it had the previous year. An injury to second baseman Mike Andrews forced Williams to use center fielder Reggie Smith as an emergency fill-in. The club slipped to 18-20 and into sixth place by May 27.

In the balanced AL, a 10-game winning streak in mid-July put Boston a half-game out of first place, brawling for first place along with the Minnesota Twins, Chicago White Sox and Tigers. By August 17, the Red Sox were in fourth place, 3 1/2 games behind the Twins. Their fate might have seemed sealed the following day when right fielder Tony Conigliaro, usually the team's clean-up or number-five batter, was knocked out for the season by a fastball to the head. But O'Connell acquired a bevy of veteran subs to complement young José Tartabull as a replacement. Boston stayed in the race and took a 1 1/2 game lead, its biggest of the season, on August 30. On September 6, there was a four-way tie for first with 21 games to play.

The Twins came to Boston for the final series of the regular season, leading the Red Sox and Tigers by a game. Many people expected Dick to start his ace, Jim Lonborg, on short rest, but the skipper decided to stick with his normal rotation. He needed to win both games, and Lonborg couldn't start both, so Dick sent gritty right-hander José Santiago to face Minnesota. The Twins scored a run in the top of the first, the Bosox caught up and passed Minnesota in the fifth, and then put the game away in the seventh on a three-run homer by Yastrzemski.

The 162nd game of the season was as dramatic. The winner would play in the World Series. The Twins started their best pitcher, Dean Chance, and the Bosox trotted out theirs, Lonborg.

The Twins scored a run in the first and one in the third. Then Dick’s infusion of relentless, aggressive baseball paid off. With his team down 2-0 in the sixth, Lonborg led off, and on his own initiative, the 6' 5" pitcher laid down a surprise bunt and legged it out for a hit. The Twins came apart—three batters, three singles, a run in with the bases loaded. Minnesota replaced Chance with elite reliever Al Worthington, who uncorked a pair of wild pitches. The crowning blow was an error by first baseman Harmon Killebrew. The inning ended with a 5-2 lead the Bosox would not yield.

Yastrzemski went 4-for-4 to seal the Triple Crown (no one has led the league in batting average, homers and RBI in the same season since), and the Red Sox finished at 92-70, a 20-win boost from the previous year. They claimed the pennant by a game over the Twins.

In the World Series, Boston faced Red Schoendienst's 101-win St. Louis Cardinals, led by future Hall of Famers Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, and Orlando Cepeda. Even minus his clean-up hitter, Conigliaro, Dick played his hand well enough to take the Series to a seventh game. Unfortunately, Boston faced Gibson, who won for the third time in the series. He poured it on with a complete game three-hitter and 10 strikeouts.

Boston's season was one of the great turnaround jobs in 20th-century baseball history. It was the first of many that Dick engineered.

But successful management requires more than operational success. The country-club attitude Dick detested was an overarching ethos cast by Yawkey. Dick recognized no privileged characters in the clubhouse, while Yawkey played favorites, granting special treatment to his favorite players. Dick tried to enforce glacial emotions—don't get too high when winning and don't get too low when losing. That was a trademark of Paul Richards.

Yawkey was, Dick believed, a "front-runner" who would come to the clubhouse and share the good times, then duck and cover when the team was going badly. While Dick worked to suppress some of his intensity, everyone knew what he really thought.

In spite of his shaky relationship with the owner and his courtiers, Dick was insulated by his tightness with O'Connell and Mahoney. The three produced a benefit that ownership couldn't ignore. Boston had led the American League in attendance for the first time in more than 50 years—since Babe Ruth was a 20-year-old Red Sox pitcher—and had put more fannies in the seats than in the two previous seasons combined.

The following season saw increased attendance but not more wins. Baseball's 1968 campaign featured stifled offense that seemed a throwback to the Deadball Era. Pitching depth would shape the final standings more than usual. This worked against the Bosox in some ways a manager couldn't control. Lonborg was injured while skiing in the off-season and did not come back until late June. At that point Santiago's arm came up lame. Conigliaro, unable to recover from the previous year's beaning, was lost for the entire season.

The Red Sox finished 86-76, in fourth place. Dick had led the Red Sox to their two best records since 1951, but the skipper wasn't behaving any more humbly toward the owner or the press. He was on a tight leash now, more vulnerable to office politics and without the victor's garlands to deflect the toxicity of the unhealthy organization. And the great Baltimore teams, built on the foundation laid by Dick’s mentor Richards, were blossoming.

The Red Sox' performance in 1969 could not overcome the manager's poor relations with Yawkey and his "bobos." When Dick called out Yaz for a mental error on the basepaths and pulled him from the game as an abject lesson to all, he smudged his relations with his squad. On September 22, with the team in third place at 82-71, Yawkey fled Boston for his South Carolina vacation home and had O'Connell tell Dick he was fired.

Dick worked as Gene Mauch's third base coach with the Expos in 1970. He credits Mauch for advancing his knowledge of how to think ahead two or three innings, how to balance work and rest for bullpen pitchers, and how to engage the entire team in a game by enlisting them to steal opponents' signs. He wasn't happy, though. After a tantalizing taste of managing, it was hard to be a subordinate, and harder to be a subordinate on a last-place team. At age 41, Dick silently wondered if he could already be washed up. After the season, though, he got an offer to manage again, with an organization that was 180 degrees from the Red Sox ethos.

The owner who rescued Dick was Oakland's Charles O. Finley, a nonconformist, showman, and executioner of managers, even those who achieved winning records. Finley was as uninterested in conventions and niceties as Dick was, and just as determined to win. While Dick had taken over a Boston team that seemed content with losing, Finley had collected an exaltation of talented young players. While the Boston team Dick inherited had finished next to last two years in a row, Oakland had had three straight winning seasons, the last two in second place in their six-team division. While Yawkey looked for managers with whom he was comfortable socializing, Finley was interested in winning. Even with Oakland's recent success, he had changed managers eight times in eight seasons. The winners didn't win enough for his taste. Finley wanted it all.

The Oakland players were in synch with the monomania of their new manager and owner. This made the skipper's experience much different from his first managing job.

“Number one, this team was basically 25 versions of me, 25 guys who didn't give a shit about anything but winning," said Dick. "They didn't care about their appearance (we looked like damn hippies) or their deportment (we fought like sailors) or their safety (we led the league in Games Played With Death Threats Hanging Over the Players' Heads). The score after nine innings was their only interest, the rest of their world was like recess. So when I looked at them, it was like looking in a mirror ... This team was 25 guys who hated their owner, Finley. How did this help me? Well, it's impossible for even baseball players to truly hate two of their bosses at once.”

Oakland’s roster included pitchers Catfish Hunter, Vida Blue, Rollie Fingers, and Darold Knowles, and everyday players Reggie Jackson, Joe Rudi, Sal Bando, Rick Monday, and Bert Campaneris. Where Dick had had no real leader on his Bosox teams, the A's had three: Jackson, the noisy, vocal leader; Bando, the quiet, stoic leader, and Hunter, the class clown. Dick went into the 1971 season with sky-high hopes.

The Athletics lost four out of their first six games. Finley was calling Dick every single day to co-conspire and wheedle and whine, and it was driving the manager nuts. A sophomoric practical joke by players on the team plane was the final straw. Dick had a meltdown, spewed some fire and either by design or coincidence, the A's won 12 of their next 13 games. They moved into first place in their division. Oakland stayed there all year long, finishing 101-60, the franchise's best record since 1931.

Oakland lost the AL Championship Series to the pitching-rich and more experienced Orioles. Dick took the blame for the playoff loss. In Game 1, he had to decide whether to relieve Blue in the seventh inning with a three-run lead. He stuck with his ace, and the tiring starter yielded the game. In Dick's thinking, by a cascade of events, the series had been lost.

The owner and manager concluded that they needed one more top-notch starting pitcher. Within days, Finley acquired Ken Holtzman from the Chicago Cubs. The 26-year-old would produce dividends not only through his starts, but in helping Fingers mature.

Fingers was a struggling starter sent to the bullpen to get work in '71. Along with A's pitching coach Bill Posedel and bullpen coach Vern Hoscheit, Dick analyzed the righty's struggles and came to realize the problems were emotional. "We made him who he was," Dick said. "As a starter, he was very nervous. Leading up to the day of his start he'd get flustered if he knew when he was going to pitch."

Dick surprised Fingers with a relatively low-stress relief assignment on May 11, with a game essentially lost to the Cleveland Indians, and another mop-up job 10 days later against the Twins. Having found he was effective if he didn't have time to over-think, the Oakland braintrust committed Fingers to relieving. The pitcher used the rest of 1971 to refine his art, appearing in 38 games, all in relief, yielding only 43 hits and 14 walks. He inherited 36 runners and allowed only nine to score. It was a career-changing move. Fingers acknowledges he wouldn't be in the Hall of Fame if not for Dick Williams and Bill Posedel.

With the addition of Holtzman, Dick knew Finley's determination to win would make the manager a target if the team fell short of a World Series victory. Winning the 1971 Manager of the Year Award was not enough protection from the mercurial owner.