Vern Rapp

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Vernon Fred Rapp (born May 11, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri) is a retired American manager and coach in Major League Baseball. A career minor league catcher and a successful skipper in the minors, Rapp had two brief tours of duty as a big league pilot, with the 1977-78 St. Louis Cardinals and the 1984 Cincinnati Reds.

Rapp signed his first playing contract out of high school in 1945 with his hometown Cardinals. A righthanded batter and thrower, he reached the AAA level with the Columbus Red Birds in 1948, but rose no higher. After missing two seasons due to military service during the Korean War, Rapp was released by the Cardinals in 1955 and signed with the independent Charleston Senators club of the American Association. The experience provided him his first managing job, when, at age 27, he succeeded Danny Murtaugh as field boss of the last-place Senators. A catcher-manager, Rapp guided his club to only 19 victories in 59 games that season, and he was strictly a player, or a player-coach, through 1960, eventually joining the farm system of the New York Yankees. During three seasons with the Denver Bears, he became associated with Denver owner Bob Howsam, who would play an influential role later in Rapp's career.

In 1961-62, Rapp resumed his managing career in the Yankees' system at the Class C and Class B levels. After spending two years out of baseball, he rejoined the Cardinals in 1965 — now led by GM Howsam — as manager of their Class AA Tulsa Oilers and Arkansas Travelers affiliates. In 1969, Howsam, by now running the Reds, hired Rapp as manager of the AAA Indianapolis Indians, and in seven years Rapp won two American Association pennants there. He returned to Denver and continued his success in 1976 as manager of the Bears (by then a farm team of the Montreal Expos), winning both the regular season Association pennant and playoff championship.

His success in Denver led to his appointment as Cardinals' manager for 1977. A disciplinarian, Rapp succeeded the popular Red Schoendienst, a longtime favorite as a Redbird player and pilot. While the 1977 Cardinals improved by 11 games and placed third in the National League East, Rapp was not a popular skipper and he lasted only 17 games into the 1978 campaign before his ouster on April 25. Coach Jack Krol succeeded him on an interim basis, but another former Cardinal star, Ken Boyer, was ticketed for the permanent job.

Rapp then spent five seasons (1979-83) as a coach for the Expos. He was planning to retire from the game at the close of the '83 season when he received a surprise phone call from Howsam, who had returned from his own retirement to try to arrest the declining fortunes of the Reds. Howsam had just fired Russ Nixon and he turned to Rapp, who had had such success at the top rung of the Cincinnati farm system. Rapp became the Reds' manager for 1984. But after only 121 games, and only 51 victories, Rapp was on thin ice, and when Cincinnati icon Pete Rose — absent for almost six seasons — was acquired from Montreal on August 15, he was named the Reds' playing manager, and Rapp, fired again, retired for good. His career MLB managerial record was 140 wins in 300 games, for a winning percentage of .467.

[edit] References

• Howard M. Balzer, ed. The Baseball Register, 1980 edition. St. Louis: The Sporting News.