The Mouth That Roared (21 page)

Ruly, who took over as team president at the age of 32, was liked by everyone in the organization, including the players, and we all took the news hard. I felt a lot better when I found out Giles was leading a group that planned to buy the team. We had all been around Bill long enough to know he was a stand-up guy. As much as I hated to see the end of the Carpenter era in Philadelphia, I understood that business was business.

*

Despite the uncertainty over our ownership situation, it was just like old times at spring training. Pope, Hughie Alexander, and I spent most of our time away from the baseball field at a Clearwater hangout called the Island House. An incident took place there one night that said a couple of things about Pope: one, winning a World Series hadn’t changed him a bit; and two, he would always be fiercely loyal to the Carpenter family.

We were in the Island House around dinnertime when we saw former Phillies pitcher Russ “Monk” Meyer sitting at the bar. Pope invited him to join us at our table, where we proceeded to reminisce about Phillies baseball in the 1950s. Russ had a pretty decent career, winning 94 games in 13 seasons and playing in three World Series, one with the Phillies and two with the Dodgers. He was also notorious during his playing days for losing his cool on the mound if he didn’t pitch well or if errors were committed behind him. Those outbursts led to a revised nickname: Mad Monk. Once, while pitching for the Dodgers against the Phillies, he got into a heated argument with the home-plate umpire over balls and strikes. Monk got so upset that he heaved his resin bag high into the air. A few seconds later, it came down squarely on his head. That self-inflicted wound earned him an ejection from the game. Back in the dugout, he was caught by television cameras spewing profanity and making obscene gestures toward the umpire.

In Monk and Pope, we had two volatile personalities at the table.

The conversation eventually turned to the Carpenter family’s impending sale of the Phillies. After a few drinks, Monk started railing against Bob Carpenter, who ran the Phillies in Monk’s playing days. It started off slowly and built to a crescendo. Monk went on and on about Mr. Carpenter’s cheapness, mistreatment of players, and lack of baseball knowledge.

Mr. Carpenter had hired Pope and put me through college, so obviously we had different feelings about the man. Monk was our guest at the table, so I held my tongue. Pope let it go for a while, too. But when Monk kept bashing away, Pope issued an ultimatum: “Knock it off, Monk, or I’m going to knock you on your ass!”

“Bob Carpenter was a cheap son of a bitch,” Monk growled slowly.

As promised, Pope turned to Monk and nailed him in the face. Monk fell off his chair, and Pope went down after him. Everybody in the crowded restaurant turned to see what all the commotion was about. I’m sure they were taken aback to see the Phillies general manager and some other guy underneath a table swinging at each other and wrestling around.

Hughie and I figured we needed to intervene, so we got on the floor and tried to separate them. We might have been better off staying in our seats. In the confined space underneath the table, Pope took a swing at Monk and accidentally hit Hughie right in the jaw. So Hughie, one hand and all, started fighting with Pope!

With all the jostling of the table, a couple of glasses fell and shattered on the floor. That noise, like a bell in a boxing ring, seemed to signify the end of the round.

I got Hughie calmed down, but Pope was a little harder to bring under control. He and Monk wanted to continue the bout outside. I decided the best course of action would be to keep Pope with us and get Monk the hell out of the restaurant. Once that was accomplished, however, Pope directed his anger at Hughie, whom he accused of trying to help Monk. When he finished his tirade, Pope stormed out of the restaurant, too.

Since we were regulars, and the restaurant staff knew we didn’t ordinarily cause so much trouble, they let Hughie and me stay. He and I returned to the table and had another couple of drinks. After about an hour, the door of the Island House swung open and Pope came back in. We noticed someone was behind him, and they both seemed to be having a good old time.

It was Monk Meyer. He and Pope had their arms around each other’s shoulders and were suddenly best buddies.

Whether identifying the potential of a player who went on to become the best third baseman ever to play the game or crawling through a Chicago restaurant to illustrate a story about a lion, Pope worked hard, and he most definitely played hard. We all did.

*

In our pursuit of back-to-back titles, we kept the team largely intact—with one notable exception. My relationship with Greg Luzinski hit a low point during the postseason after I benched him a couple of times. Years would pass before he and I mended fences. The sad part about it was that I liked Bull. He and I had gotten along well when I managed him in the minors in 1968. What changed? Simply put, I think Bull had become complacent and stopped working on his game. He also wasn’t focused on keeping his weight down.

Pope sold Bull to the Chicago White Sox, and to fill the void in left field, we traded Bob Walk to the Braves for veteran outfielder Gary Matthews. I had always liked the way Matthews played, and Bobby was a high-strung, high-maintenance kind of pitcher. Though he was coming off an 11-win season, which included a gutsy performance in Game 1 of the World Series, we weren’t sure how high his ceiling was. Plus, we felt we needed Sarge more than we needed Bobby in order to compete for another title.

Sarge hadn’t played on a lot of winning teams, but he exuded the qualities of a winner. I liked his hustle and businesslike approach to the game. I also knew he had been taught the game the right way. No organization groomed outfielders better than the San Francisco Giants, who took Gary in the first round of the June 1968 draft. That same year, they selected another outfielder—Garry Maddox—in the second round of the January draft. Now we had both on our team.

*

For the first two months of the 1981 season, we were in and out of first place. A June 10 win against Houston that improved Steve Carlton’s record to 9–1 put us two games ahead of the Cardinals in the National League East.

It was the last game played before the players went on strike.

Among the squabbles that led to the strike was a proposal by owners to compensate teams that lost players to free agency. But it was about more than any single issue. There was a lot of antagonism between the two sides in the years leading up to the strike, and it was bound to boil over sooner or later.

The whole situation felt like a double-edged sword for me. I was a player rep for the Phillies during an era when the pendulum was totally on ownership’s side. As a front office guy in the 1970s, I had a different view of the game. I learned what it took to run a successful organization. By the early 1980s, I saw that the pendulum had swung the other way. I empathized with owners who feared the union was becoming too mighty.

The power shift away from the owners started in 1966 when Marvin Miller became executive director of the union. Having worked previously on behalf of America’s auto and steel workers, he had impeccable credentials. Before Marvin, there was no such thing as collective bargaining in baseball. When I was a player rep in the early 1960s, our most significant lobbying effort was for a television in the Connie Mack Stadium clubhouse.

Under Marvin’s leadership, the floodgates of free agency opened, putting an end to the days when owners and general managers controlled players’ destinies. At the time of the strike, the players were well on their way to running the game themselves.

I respect what Marvin did for the players union. He was a marvelous negotiator and a tough sucker. Our lawyers could not match up with him at all. A couple of the Phillies—Bob Boone, who was the National League player representative, and Larry Bowa, who was the team’s player rep—got closely involved in the labor negotiations.

By the second week of August, enough issues had been resolved to the union’s satisfaction to put an end to the strike.

With a bitter taste in my mouth, I went back to trying to defend our title.

*

In light of the strike, which bit a two-month chunk out of the season, Major League Baseball cooked up a revised plan for the playoffs and World Series. It went like this: the four teams leading their divisions before the strike would automatically advance to an opening round of the postseason. In our case, we would play whichever National League East team posted the best record in the “second half” of the season. If that turned out to be us, then we’d play the team that had the second-best record in the second half.

When play resumed, I told the press we didn’t view the rest of the schedule as exhibition games. Maybe that was lip service on my part. I wanted us to stay hungry, but as we went on a six-game losing streak at the end of August, I realized our players were just going through the motions. It didn’t matter how they performed, because they were already in the postseason.

After a while, going 0-for-4 at the plate didn’t hurt. Losing a game didn’t sting. The media started pounding me. It reached the point where I couldn’t keep up the charade any longer. “It’s a horseshit rule,” I told Jayson Stark, who was covering the Phillies for the
Philadelphia Inquirer
. “We’re in the playoffs. So, yeah, I want them to play hard, but they have no incentive to win.”

That on-the-record quote was preceded by a more colorful rant, prompted by Jayson’s question about whether the team lacked motivation. It started with a “Fuck you, Jayson!” and went from there. Another writer, I think it was Hal Bodley, recorded the outburst, which included 30 or 40 variations of the word
fuck
. Sylvia took a transcript with her to school the following day. The English teachers had a ball noting how I utilized the f-word as a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, and gerund.

We went 25–27 in the second half of the season and limped into a division playoff against the Expos, the second-half winner of the National League East.

*

In fairness to my players, my attention during the second half wasn’t squarely on the field, either. While serving a five-game suspension in late August for bumping an umpire, I took a call from the Tribune Company, the new corporate owners of the Chicago Cubs.

Initially, they contacted Ruly Carpenter, who had yet to turn over daily operations of the Phillies to Bill Giles, seeking permission to talk to me about a job.

I had no intention of leaving Philadelphia. But this was a time of transition for the Phillies. With Ruly on his way out, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to at least listen to what the Cubs had to say.

Andy McKenna, the liaison between the Tribune Company and the Cubs, told me the company wasn’t interested in me managing the team. They wanted me to be their general manager.

McKenna flew into Philadelphia and met me at the Holiday Inn across from Veterans Stadium. It was there that he spelled out his vision for my future with the Cubs.

“We like what you did with the Phillies’ minor league system, and obviously we’re impressed by what you accomplished last season,” McKenna told me. “We think you’d be perfect for the Cubs.”

At the end of his pitch, he proposed scheduling a follow-up meeting between him, me, and Tribune president Stan Cook.

“When the Phillies are in Chicago later in the season, let’s have dinner and discuss this further,” he said.

The talks were in an early stage, but I realized they couldn’t continue without the participation of my wife. Intrigued enough by the idea, I agreed to the chat with Cook in late September. The Tribune Company agreed to fly Sylvia to Chicago for the meeting. But rather than just booking her a ticket on a commercial airline, they flew their corporate jet to Wilmington to pick her up. Sylvia finished teaching school on a Friday afternoon and boarded the Tribune plane for the short flight to Chicago. That was the first clue I got about the Tribune Company’s largesse.

By the time Sylvia arrived, we had polished off a matinee victory over the Cubs. A few hours later, we were at Cook’s house for dinner. The conversation that night dealt mostly with my ideas about how to build an organization and my general philosophy of the game. I have to say I laid my BS on them pretty heavy that night.

Whatever I said must have convinced them that I was their guy, because on the limousine ride back to the hotel, McKenna cut to the chase. “Here’s what Chicago’s willing to do,” he told me, launching immediately into dollars and cents. The numbers knocked our socks off. It was a helluva lot more than the nearly $100,000 I was making with the Phillies. Some covert inquiries in the following days about other executive salaries around baseball led me to believe the Cubs were willing to make me one of the highest-paid general managers in the game. This surprised me. I’d never been a GM before, after all. But I knew I was up to the task. And the Tribune Company obviously had studied my background enough to reach the same conclusion.

I was still very much on the fence about leaving the Phillies, however.

Sylvia and I discussed it. Pope and I discussed it. But I didn’t make any final decisions. We still had postseason baseball to play. As we were preparing to take on Montreal, news leaked that I was a candidate for the Cubs job. I didn’t confirm the reports. That would have turned a rumor into a fact and created a major distraction.