The Mouth That Roared (14 page)

Pope had a favorite saying for times like these: “Dallas, you gotta have a good offense. It’s your best defense.” So when he got back to his New Jersey home, he’d get himself in a fluster and tell his wife, Marcelle, “That goddamn Dallas Green! I’m never going out with him again. That son of a bitch kept me out all night! I couldn’t get him to leave!” Meanwhile in Delaware, a similar scene played out in my bedroom: “Goddamn it, I couldn’t get Pope to leave that party! I had to keep an eye on him, make sure he didn’t hurt himself.”

Sylvia and Marcelle, who Pope met in Belgium during World War II, would always compare notes later. “Did Paul have a lot of white hair on his socks when he got home?” Sylvia asked the day after one of the parties. “Yes, Dallas did, too.” Then I’d have to explain why I had white hair all over my socks when I wasn’t really sure why I had white hair all over my socks. I ended up blaming it on Pope’s dog, Queenie.

Another year, the holiday party at the ballpark spilled over into a celebration at the house of a friend of a Phillies employee. We got a lift out there and, after a few hours, caught a ride back to the stadium parking lot. It was a typical mid-December night in Philadelphia, and I looked forward to the warmth of my car. There was only one problem. I couldn’t find my car.

“Jesus Christ,” I bellowed at Pope, “someone stole my car!”

“Mine, too!” he responded.

We took a minute to digest the bad news. Then we breathed a sigh of relief, and without exchanging a word, started walking to the hotel parking lot where we’d moved our cars before going to the after-party.

Pope escorted me back to my car, reminiscing about an eventful evening on the Christmas party circuit. He kept yakking as I tried to start the car. It took a good minute or two for my engine to turn over, and when it finally did, I only got a short distance before it cut out again. Pope came back over to check on the situation.

“Open the goddamn hood,” he ordered. “I know what to do.”

Pope had a lot of talents, but I didn’t think car maintenance was one of them. In fact, I was pretty sure he didn’t know a goddamn thing about fixing cars. And even though my dad had been a mechanic, none of his knack for auto repair rubbed off on me.

I decided to give Pope a chance to prove himself. The hood of the car popped open, and Pope took a long look inside. Lucky for us, one of Philadelphia’s finest was out on patrol and saw Pope “working” on my car.

“Officer, you have to help this guy,” Pope told the police officer. “He has to get home.”

The cop, who recognized Pope, got out a pair of jumper cables and connected them to my battery. Pope, still fancying himself a car expert, reacted with disgust: “Goddamn it, you’ve got it on wrong! Let me see that!”

Pope rearranged the cables and took a step back to admire his handiwork.

“Okay, fire her up!”

I turned the key in the ignition…and the battery exploded.

The police officer sized up our predicament. “You gentlemen get home safely now. I’ll catch you later,” he said.

Pope and I went back to his car. I dropped him off in New Jersey and drove his car back to Delaware with another Christmas party story to tell.

*

We didn’t just blow off steam and blow up car batteries. I’d like to think our work ethic as well as our ability to have a good time earned us respect around the majors. At the annual winter meetings, our suite became a command center for 14-hour workdays. Pope always left the door to the suite open so that anyone who wanted to talk about a trade or baseball in general could come in and bend our ears. We also worked to make sure all our minor league affiliates felt connected to the major league club. The officials who ran those teams were welcome to join in our discussions. While our wives were touring Hawaii or whatever locale hosted the meetings, we stayed holed up in our hotel room. Following these marathon work sessions, we’d get our fun in. Pope often spoke of the importance of “bounceability,” which he defined as the capacity to stay up until the wee hours and arrive at work with little or no sleep, alert and ready to go. He had bounceability, and so did I.

Pope and I liked to engage in hijinks on our down time, but the most important thing in the world to us was making the Phillies organization the pride of baseball. People who disagreed with Pope on a baseball matter were likely to end up in a toe-to-toe confrontation with him and his finger in their chest. That’s how we hashed things out. You’d have your say, and he’d have his. And by the end, you could be damn sure you’d settled on the right course of action.

By the late 1970s, we had put together a contending ballclub. In the eighth year after divisions were put in place for the 1969 season, the Phillies finally won the National League East. That breakthrough marked the beginning of an unprecedented period of prosperity in Phillies history.

Ozark, who beat out the likes of Richie Ashburn and Jim Bunning to land the managing job in 1973, was leading the team when it reeled off 101 wins in 1976 and 1977 and 90 wins in 1978. But after enormously successful regular seasons, we went a combined 2–9 in the postseason during that period. The Big Red Machine swept us in ’76 and Tommy Lasorda’s Dodgers beat us three games to one in both ’77 and ’78.

In baseball, “What have you done for me lately?” is a valid question. But so is “What have you done for me in your biggest games?”

Neither of the answers boded well for Ozark.

Despite three opportunities, Danny couldn’t get the team over the hump into the World Series. And when we struggled to win games in 1979, Pope had seen enough. He fired Danny, and I took over as interim manager. We won a lot of games in September 1979, so I returned to the dugout the following season.

That, of course, brings us to 1980.

I felt we could overcome the disappointment of 1979. In my opinion, that fourth-place season was an aberration. Not everybody shared my optimism. Most sportswriters picked the 1980 Phillies to again finish fourth in the National League East behind the Pirates, the Expos, and the Cardinals, the three teams that finished ahead of us the season before.

There had been some rough patches in spring training. Some of my ideas about conditioning and methods of motivating didn’t go over well with cliques of veteran players that had been coddled by my predecessor, Danny Ozark.

At the end of camp, major league players went on a brief strike, wiping out the final week of the exhibition season. The players agreed to open the season as scheduled on April 9 but they threatened that another work stoppage would begin Memorial Day weekend if they couldn’t work out an agreement with the owners on issues dealing with free agency.

During the mini-strike in spring training, all our guys chose to stay in Clearwater and continue working out. To me, that signified a dedication to making the 1980 season special. Fortunately, a Memorial Day strike didn’t materialize.

“We’re not going to out-talent anyone in the National League anymore,” I reminded the team before we broke camp. “We’re at the point where the rest of the league has caught up to us in terms of talent.”

On Opening Day in 1980, we beat the Expos 6–3 at Veterans Stadium for our first season-opening win since 1974. A three-run home run by Greg Luzinski in the first inning got us off and running. Not normally a guy who showed much emotion on the field, Bull pumped his fist in the air as he rounded the bases. After the game, I told reporters I expected Bull to bounce back from an off year and regain the form that had established him as one of the league’s best home run and RBI guys.

For one day, at least, the game looked easy. If only it had stayed that way.

*

I battled with my players the whole year. You’ve heard about player revolts that cause managers to lose the clubhouse? Well, in 1980, I lost the clubhouse almost every day. Luzinski, Mike Schmidt, Larry Bowa, Garry Maddox, and Bob Boone viewed me with suspicion or outright hostility. They scoffed at the “We, not I” signs I hung in the clubhouse in Clearwater. Who was Dallas Green to tell a team that went to the playoffs three out of the past four years how to conduct its business? They viewed my job as easy. Put the team on auto-pilot and watch the wins pile up. At the end of the day, they believed they ran the team.

They were missing one key point, however. As much as I liked winning games in April, it didn’t amount to a hill of beans if we couldn’t win them in October. I set out to develop a culture that valued that way of thinking. As a manager who had the complete backing of his general manager and owner, I felt confident I could accomplish that. It might take time, but I believed it would happen. Thankfully, the baseball season is long.

It helped that I had some of the big boys on my side from the beginning. Steve Carlton was happy as hell. Going into his 16
^th
major league season, all he wanted was his first championship. And he didn’t think Danny Ozark was capable of delivering one.

Pete Rose needed no motivation or babysitting to go out and compete with total pride and dedication; that was the only way he knew to play. He was the only Phillie to appear in all 162 regular season games in 1980.

Bake McBride and Manny Trillo didn’t get too mixed up in the cliques, probably because they hadn’t been on the team as long as some of the others. And I sensed Tug McGraw also had warmed up to me. On a rainy day in Clearwater, Tugger and I shared a light moment after a workout. I saw him sliding headfirst across the muddy infield and decided to join him. It was instinct on my part, but I think it showed I knew how to enjoy myself.

That made five veterans who weren’t going to bitch and moan every time Dallas Green looked at them the wrong way or made a critical comment.

I knew baseball was fun when you’re winning. And I saw no reason not to have a lot of fun in 1980.

*

Our offense carried us to a lot of wins in the first months of the season. Through May, we led the league in runs scored, mainly because Schmidt and Luzinski were first and second in the National League in home runs, respectively.

Starting pitching had emerged as a weakness, however. Dick Ruthven was returning from an injury. Nino Espinosa was sidelined by a shoulder problem. Larry Christenson underwent elbow surgery at the end of May. And Randy Lerch, though healthy, started the season 0–6. After his poor start, Lerch and I got crossways with each other. I sat him for 10 days to see if a little rest might reignite his competitive spirit. Though he won his next start, the time off didn’t have a lasting effect.

That left us with Carlton—en route to 24 wins and his third Cy Young Award—and a lot of question marks.

Few things irritated me more than squandering a quality start by Carlton. Early in the season, Lefty pitched seven strong innings against the Mets, but despite having runners on base most every inning, we couldn’t get on the scoreboard. After the 3–0 loss, I read the team the riot act: “You sons of bitches can’t even play for a future Hall of Famer! You forget where you are! You forget what you’re doing! We’re supposed to have pride and character, but you don’t show it! Well, if you can’t show it for the best pitcher in the game, who the hell else are you going to show it for?”

Injuries and ineffectiveness prompted us to promote 23-year- old Bob Walk from Triple-A Oklahoma City at the end of May. He went out and won 11 games for us in ’80, the third-most of any pitcher on the team.

Somehow, despite our pitching woes, we managed to go 17–9 in May. But we played only average baseball in June and July. With the Pirates and the Expos showing they were every bit as strong as we were, we couldn’t afford to get stuck in a rut. The 1979 season had gotten off to a promising start, too. Then it fell apart.

As it turned out, the team’s biggest headlines in July weren’t generated by our play, but rather by a police investigation of the team doctor for the Double-A Reading Phillies. It was alleged he illegally supplied amphetamines to several members of the major league team. The players implicated in the media reports varied from story to story, so it’s not worth mentioning any names here. But the scandal, if you want to call it that, prompted the
Philadelphia Daily News
to call us “The Pillies.” Players’ use of energy-boosting drugs was an open secret at the time. A year earlier, Pete Rose had admitted in
Playboy
that he popped “greenies” before games. Nobody wants to see the integrity of his team questioned like that, but I left it to the players to answer questions about the whole deal. It was their responsibility, not mine.

*

In early August, a few days after my 46
^th
birthday, we went to Pittsburgh for a four-game series hoping to make a statement. Entering the series, we were 55–48 and in third place, three games behind the Expos. The Pirates were wedged between us and Montreal. If we could pull off a sweep at Three Rivers Stadium, we’d travel to Chicago to play a woeful Cubs team in no worse than second place. If we took three out of four, we’d be neck and neck with the defending champs and still nipping at the Expos’ heels.

But two days and two losses later, the game plan had changed. Having lost precious ground in the standings, a Sunday doubleheader against Pittsburgh felt like a battle for survival.

Before the first game of the twin bill, Schmitty took it upon himself to call a players-only meeting. I had no problem with that. I felt our so-called team leaders weren’t vocal enough in the clubhouse. If Schmitty felt he was finally ready to show some emotion that might motivate his teammates, I wasn’t going to stand in his way.