“Tough?” said former player Mike Shannon. “I’ll tell you about tough. There was a guy about 200 pounds who tried to get on the team bus in Chicago. Red was sitting in that first seat and he grabbed him by the lapels, picked him up and set him down outside the bus and said, ‘You don’t get to come onto this bus.’”
“What I liked best about him,” said meal ticket pitcher Bob Gibson, “was that he only did things when they needed to be done. He wasn’t a control freak. Let’s put it that way. He knows the game really, really well and if there was nothing to do, he didn’t do it.