The Mouth That Roared (11 page)

At spring training in 1968, still just 33, I took my place alongside all the older coaches who had been in the Phillies organization for years. I felt accepted right away by Lucchesi, Andy Seminick, Bob Wellman, and Al Widmar. They were all solid baseball guys who made me feel part of the family.

I knew Pope intended to send one of his guys to Huron to check on things. That was fine with me—as long as that person wasn’t Lou Kahn. Lou was Pope’s right-hand man, a real old-school baseball guy whose duties included evaluating the organization’s personnel. He was also a real pain in the ass, in my opinion. Over the course of my playing career, I had crossed paths with him several times. He drank a lot and would often come to the ballpark a little shaky. He’d sit on an aluminum chair and bark orders, instructions, and complaints, all while spitting out tobacco juice which ended up all over his shirt and jacket.

I took Pope aside to make an important request: “Whatever you do, please don’t send Lou Kahn out to me in Huron. I think he’s an embarrassment to the organization, and I don’t want someone like that looking over my shoulder.”

Before I left for South Dakota, I got the nicest send-off I ever could have imagined from the Reading Phillies, who held a “Dallas Green Night” before a game at Municipal Stadium. Though I only played part of one season for the team, I built some solid friendships there. A lot of my friends from throughout the Delaware Valley made the trip out to Reading for the event.

*

In mid-June, Sylvia and I packed up our station wagon with sleeping bags and pillows and drove in shifts from our Delaware home to South Dakota. On our way across the country, we heard on the radio that Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated at a California hotel. Sylvia, who was more politically active than I was, took the news hard. I viewed it with disgust. Just two months after Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed, another nut with a gun had shaken the country with an act of violence.

When we got to Huron, the first people there to greet us were Lou Kahn and his wife, Esther. I made nice with Lou, but as soon as I got inside our rented home, I called Pope and screamed at him for five straight minutes. Then he screamed back at me, “He’s staying! He’s part of the organization, and he’s staying!”

As was usually the case, Pope knew what he was doing.

I didn’t let Lou get in my way as I settled in and surveyed the players I had to work with for the upcoming Northern League season. I didn’t think too much about how I would handle the team. I figured my style as manager would naturally flow from my experiences as a player. I considered myself a hard worker and a fierce competitor, and I would work to make sure the teenagers under my command showed similar commitment and fire.

From the get-go, the team played lousy, losing game after game. That drove me crazy, and I took my frustration out on my players. I started holding workouts twice a day, once in the morning and once again before an evening game.

My No. 1 rule was every manager’s No. 1 rule: get to the ballpark on time.

The day one of my pitchers showed up late for practice, I told him to start running and to keep running until I told him to stop. While he was doing laps, the rest of the team took batting and fielding practice. Then everybody hit the showers. I was under the spray when I remembered the kid was still out there running.

I stressed to my players that they were professionals now and competing against guys with similar backgrounds and abilities. “You’re no better than anybody else until you prove it,” I’d say. “The only way you’re going to do that is to outwork them.”

Other than not winning games, I thought I was doing a pretty effective job running the team.

A couple of experiences in Huron really stand out in my mind. One happened on a summer evening when I was with the team on a road trip. Being from the East Coast, Sylvia and I knew very little about tornadoes. At around 7:00
PM
that night, Sylvia and the kids were upstairs in our house when all the lights started dimming. It was an otherwise sunny day, so Sylvia didn’t know what to make of it. A few minutes later a tornado ripped a path through Huron. Somehow, it didn’t cause much damage, though it did knock out a light standard at the ballpark.

Oddly enough, the other incident also involved damage to Huron’s Memorial Ball Park. We had a kid named Allen Bowers, an outfielder who was the fastest player on the team. In one of our games, an opposing player lifted a fly ball to right field that Bowers went after with great gusto. He sprinted toward the outfield fence, and as the ball left the park, he ran right
through
the fence. The moment was preserved by an almost cartoonish wooden outline of his body.

*

In Huron, I first met Manny Trillo, an amateur free agent from Venezuela. He was 17 years old, skinny as a rail, and didn’t speak a word of English. After taking one look at him, I decided to make my first personnel decision as manager. Manny had been a catcher back in Latin America, but there was no way I was going to put this fragile-looking teenager behind the plate. I tried him out at shortstop and third base that season. Later he found a home at second base.

I had to keep tabs on 38 different players in Huron, but I found time to give Manny a little extra attention. He was one of the few Latin kids on the team. The Phillies didn’t see an influx of Spanish-speaking players until Pope and I hired Ruben Amaro Sr. as a scout in 1973. I could only imagine how difficult it was for Manny at that time. In the lower minor leagues, you make peanuts. Some of the players had pocket money from their parents or past summer jobs. I slipped Manny a few bucks here and there, because I knew he had nothing.

I always admired the Latin players who came to this country with only the shirts on their backs and a dream of making the major leagues. During my first year playing in the minors, I befriended Orlando Cepeda, then 17 and playing for a team in Kokomo, Indiana. I pitched against him one night, and when I saw him off to himself after the game, I invited him out to dinner. I don’t think Orlando ever forgot that. Manny didn’t forget our time together, either. He didn’t hit much that season in Huron and went to the Oakland A’s in the Rule 5 draft two years later. Thankfully, Pope reacquired him a few years after that, and I got another chance to manage him.

Manny and Greg Luzinski took strikingly different paths to Huron. Before he became known as Bull, Greg was a kid from Chicago chosen by the Phillies in the first round of the 1968 draft. He was a natural hitter who slugged about half our team’s home runs that season. He and Manny were the same height, but Bull outweighed Manny by nearly 100 pounds. I thought he was a little heavy, so I worked his ass off with running and drills. If he hadn’t been 17 years old and trying to impress the organization, I’m sure Bull would have told me off. Instead, he was willing to do whatever was asked of him. That wouldn’t be the case later in his career, as I found out all too well when I became the manager in Philadelphia.

A few weeks before our last game, Sylvia, in the eighth month of pregnancy, flew back to Philadelphia. Around that time, Pope and Phillies general manager John Quinn came out to South Dakota to announce the organization was moving its Class-A team out of Huron. So there I was, alone in South Dakota, managing a lousy baseball team in a town the Phillies were about to abandon. The invitations to dinners and other functions suddenly stopped coming. That’s the fickleness of minor league baseball. The town elders could forgive me for not winning games, but they didn’t want to have anything to do with a lame duck manager. The greatest help to me during those days was Lou Kahn. We talked a lot of baseball. Now that I was a manager, I came to see him as a valuable resource. He and Esther ended up becoming good friends of mine.

We went 26–43 and finished next to last in the Northern League. By winning our last game of the season, we moved past the Aberdeen Pheasants and out of last place. Our whole team was proud of that.

You never know how careers are going to turn out. At Huron, my best pitcher was Denny Lortscher, who accounted for eight of our 26 wins. My best hitter by far was John Magnuson, whose average was 50 points higher than anybody on the team who got more than a couple of at-bats. Neither guy made it past Class-A ball. Luzinski and Trillo were two of only four players from that Huron team who ended up making the majors.

*

When Pope and I met after the season, I hoped to hear my apprenticeship as a minor league manager was over. No such luck. Pope still didn’t think I was ready for the front office. He told me he wanted me to manage a year of rookie ball in Pulaski, Virginia.

I wished I could say, “For chrissakes, Pope, I just led a team to a championship! What more do you want from me?” But in reality, I had managed a team that barely avoided last place.

When I got down to Pulaski in the summer of 1969, I couldn’t believe what a mess our stadium was. The grass at Calfee Park was long and the infield was rocky. I called Pope right away, and he dispatched one of the Phillies’ best grounds crew guys down to Virginia. Between the two of us, we redid the entire field and rebuilt the pitcher’s mound.

Crisis averted, I went into the season determined to improve on my dismal record in Huron. We had some quality ballplayers on the Pulaski team. One of them was Mike Anderson, our first-round pick in 1969. He crushed the ball that season, giving me every reason to think he’d develop into a wonderful major leaguer. Because of his athletic ability, some of us thought he had more promise than Luzinski. By the time Anderson was 22, he had been penciled in as the Phillies’ starting right fielder. But during spring training in 1973, he got beaned in the head by Clay Carroll of the Reds. He suffered a severe concussion and that probably curbed his potential as a player. Baseball can be a cruel sport sometimes.

Pulaski was a different kind of place. And by that, I mean it was a redneck Southern town. There’s no other way to put it. Sylvia was working on a research paper the summer we spent down there. The topic was President Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in 1861. She had become an expert on the Civil War and was pretty enthralled with Lincoln and his presidency. Well, one night we were at a cocktail party at the home of the owner of the Pulaski club, and Sylvia happened to mention her thesis to him.

“You’re writing about that sumbitch!” he said, almost spitting out his drink.

This was a time when race relations in the South remained tense.

We had a black base-running coach named Spence Henry. One night he was in the stands watching a game when a black player came to the plate. A guy behind Spence shouted, “Throw him a watermelon!” Spence turned around and scowled at the man. He then surveyed the rest of the stands and saw dozens of white faces glaring back at him. Sensing he might be in trouble, Spence turned back around and before the next pitch shouted, “Throw him a watermelon!”

I was glad I wasn’t spending more than a few months in Pulaski. And I know Sylvia was, too. But it ended up being time well spent. We won the Appalachian League championship, which made me very proud.

Back in Philadelphia, I had another confab with Pope and Ruly.

“Dallas, you know how we do things now,” Pope said. “I want to focus on scouting, and I’m going to let you run the minor leagues the way you see fit.”

And with that, I became the Phillies’ assistant director of minor leagues and scouting.

In the Phillies front office, I gained a completely different perspective of the game. As a player, I had no control over anything other than my own performance. I went out and tried to pitch well enough to earn a contract and keep myself in the majors. I was constantly being judged. Now, I was one of the judges.

A few days after I started my new job, the Phillies pulled off a trade with the Cardinals that created a stir in the baseball world.

Following a 99-loss season in 1969, the Phillies cut ties with disgruntled first baseman Richie Allen, who had carried the team offensively for years. The biggest name we got in return was outfielder Curt Flood.

I was sorry to see Richie go. In addition to respecting his athletic ability, I genuinely liked the man. It disappointed me that he couldn’t control the devils in him that led him to drink and act out. Nobody could hit a ball farther than Richie, who possessed tremendous raw talent and baseball instincts. If he had been in a better frame of mind during his career, I have no doubt he would have become a first-ballot Hall of Famer. But the racism he experienced at Triple-A Little Rock in 1963 took a toll on him. So did some of the treatment he received from Gene Mauch.

Over the course of his seven seasons with the team, Richie developed a turbulent relationship with the Phillies and the city of Philadelphia. He was regularly subjected to verbal abuse and occasionally hit by flying objects at the ballpark. Then there was his well-publicized fistfight with teammate Frank Thomas, who swung a bat at Richie during the dust-up. Richie once commented, “I can play anywhere: first, third, left field…anywhere but Philadelphia.”

The time had come to grant his wish. Richie took the next flight to St. Louis.

But Flood never arrived in Philadelphia.

It upset Flood that the Cardinals traded him. It disgusted him that he had been dealt to a team with such a long history of losing. As a Cardinal, he saw the futility of the Phillies firsthand. In 1969, the expansion Montreal Expos, managed by Gene Mauch, lost 110 games but still managed to beat the Phillies 11 out of 18 times. That was atrocious.