"This Is Final"

At Buffalo's airport, as he got off the plane from Chicago, a news photographer flashed a picture of him. The tired old man took a harried, halfhearted swing at his annoyer, and missed. After he got into his car, he let the photographer take another shot, with his pet terrier nuzzled up to him. "At least somebody loves me," he said plaintively. Ailing, 63-year-old Joe McCarthy, baseball's "winningest" manager, was heading into retirement.

He was not quite ready to admit it, however. The next day he told newsmen: "You can bet your last dollar I'll be back as soon as I'm well enough . . . I'll never quit under fire." But two hours later, Joe

McCarthy finally accepted his doctor's advice, told Boston's General Manager Joe Cronin that he could carry on no longer. From St. Louis, where his Boston Red Sox were playing, came the formal announcement: Joseph Vincent McCarthy had quit.

The announcement did not come as a complete surprise. After 23 turbulent years in the major leagues, Joe McCarthy, who never made the grade as a player, had built a reputation as a manager that few others could even approach. His teams had never finished out of the first division, had won pennants in both leagues, nine league titles, seven world series. From 1936-39 his unstoppable New York Yankees won four straight world championships.

But in 1946, McCarthy suddenly resigned from the Yankees "for reasons of health," after a series of front-office rows with President Larry MacPhail. Coaxed out of retirement in 1948 by the Red Sox, he lost the pennant on the last day of the season, two years in a row. Always hard to get along with, never a good loser, McCarthy rushed home at season's end last fall without even discussing a new contract. Last week, after his favored Red Sox dropped eleven out of 13 games, he finally gave up.

This time he seemed to mean it. "When a man can't help his ball club any more," McCarthy explained, "it's time to quit--and a sick man can't help . . . This is final."

To replace him in the depths of the Red Sox slump, Owner Tom Yawkey promptly appointed 58-year-old Coach Steve O'Neill, who had once managed Cleveland and Detroit, and had been a star catcher in his playing days. Florid, easygoing Manager O'Neill would have his hands full getting the demoralized Red Sox back to their winning ways. No one thought a change of managers would solve all of Boston's troubles.

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