The Mouth That Roared (3 page)

A new manager would need time to get acclimated. During my brief stint in the dugout, the players had gotten a taste of what I was all about. More importantly, they knew I was a “company man” who had the strong backing of Pope and Ruly Carpenter.

A few weeks after the ’79 season ended, Pope announced I’d be returning for a full season in 1980. I told reporters that my first order of business was to set up an off-season exercise program for the team. I didn’t buy the idea that guys could play their way into shape during the season. I wanted everyone to report to spring training in good physical condition and ready to work on some of the baseball fundamentals I felt had been neglected in recent years.

The players had returned home for the winter, but I imagine some of them let out a loud groan when they heard I was coming back. My time in the dugout was supposed to be temporary.

Now they were stuck with me a while longer. Not only that, but I was going to make them sweat during the off-season!

*

I’ve always believed a manager is only as good as the coaches around him. With that in mind, I made tweaks to my staff. I brought in Lee Elia as third-base coach, Ruben Amaro Sr. as first-base coach, and Mike Ryan as bullpen coach. Herm Starrette, Billy DeMars, and Wine stayed on as pitching coach, hitting instructor, and bench coach, respectively. I felt these guys could help implement my program.

My program was a tough sell, however.

During spring training in Clearwater, Florida, I posted signs in the clubhouse that said, “We, not I,” another way of saying, “Check your egos at the door and play team baseball.” That message didn’t sit well with the cliques, which thought of me as some kind of High School Harry.
We’re seasoned vets
, they thought.
How dare this guy try his crap motivational ploys on us.

My tactics really got under Bowa’s skin. Though he didn’t like talking to reporters, he did like to talk. That’s why a local radio station gave him his own call-in show. His favorite topic became me and how full of horseshit I was.

Luzinski was another guy inclined toward disliking me. We had a long history. I managed him during his first year of professional baseball in South Dakota, and he remembered how much I yelled and how hard I pushed players. In 1979, he didn’t play like the All-Star he had been the previous four seasons. And by midseason, he heard a lot of boos at Veterans Stadium. He admitted that the fans in Philadelphia got inside his head. He ended up hitting over .300 on the road but under .200 at home.

To his credit, Bull got in shape before the ’80 season. When he showed up to camp, he was 25 pounds lighter than he’d been the previous October. Physically, he looked ready to play. He talked about the importance of going into the season in the proper frame of mind. I think he feared a few insults from me might set him back mentally.

It irritated the hell out of me at prior spring trainings that a lot of veterans seemed more interested in hitting the links than hitting baseballs. I’m sure a lot of tee times were missed as we worked on hit-and-run plays, advancing runners, and scoring guys from third base with less than two outs.

In certain situations, I was willing to bend my rules. For example, while all the other pitchers on the team ran their butts off in Clearwater, I let Steve Carlton do his own program. Lefty came to camp in tremendous shape every year and worked out rigorously once he got there. His guru was strength coach Gus Hoeffling. During the off-season, I told Gus to run me through Steve’s regimen, which included a lot of agility and stretching exercises. It worked for me. I came to camp more flexible than I had been in years.

Rose and Lefty bought into my program right away. Others, like Tug McGraw and Bake McBride, were on the fence. Then there were Bowa, Luzinski, Schmidt, Boone, and Garry Maddox, who saw me as a threat.

Whether we won, lost, or just ripped each other to shreds, 1980 was going to be a memorable season.

*

Call me a loudmouth or honest to a fault. Or call me a jackass, as I’m sure a few baseball people have. I like to speak my mind. Always have. I look at it this way: if you’re asked a question and don’t give an honest answer, you’re not doing what you’re paid to do. And I don’t like to lie. Discretion has never been my strong suit, and I credit that for my greatest successes. I also blame it for my greatest failures.

I’ve worked for teams in the most passionate sports towns in America—Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York (for both the Yankees and the Mets). That’s a chronological list, not one that ranks the cities in order from most passionate to least passionate, or vice versa.

A long time ago, I was a pitcher for 13 professional seasons, five of them in the majors. I played nearly my entire big league career for a manager who didn’t believe in communicating with players. In my opinion, his inability or unwillingness to connect with his team kept him from being one of the all-time greats. We’re all shaped by our experiences, and playing for Gene Mauch certainly helped shape me. When I managed, I had an open-door policy. Any player who came into my office got an honest evaluation of where he stood.

Throughout my career, I’ve been accused of not protecting my players by freely and publicly discussing their on-the-field mistakes. I always found that accusation ridiculous. Here’s why: if 40,000 fans in a stadium saw a fielder make an error, and another million or so watched it on TV, how could I be expected to say the player fielded the ball cleanly? If a player struck out three times, how could I have argued he had a decent day at the plate? The alternative would have been to say nothing at all. But that’s never been my style.

Other than occasionally calling someone an “asshole,” I was never into name-calling. I didn’t see any point in getting personal. I also saw no value in holding grudges. If someone took my criticism personally and decided to hate me forever, well, that was his problem. In all my years, I never beat up on anyone I didn’t think deserved it. Again, I’ve always sought to tell the truth. In some cases, my version of the truth might have been open to debate. But that’s what makes life—and baseball—interesting.

After all my years in baseball, I still adhere to the same philosophy: play the game hard, play the game right, and play up to your potential. Any player who follows these instructions gets along with me pretty well.

Over the course of my career, a lot of people have asked me about my loud voice. I do seem to talk (and scream) louder than most. My mom, Mayannah Green, often said I cried and screamed louder than any youngster in the neighborhood. She claimed it was colic—I think it was just practice for the future. Throughout school, I maintained a good, loud voice. But it really became an instrument all its own during my time in professional baseball.

Time and again, I asked players to “look in the mirror” and to judge whether they were getting the most out of their abilities. When I look in the mirror, I see six decades of triumphs, defeats, and heartbreak in the game I love. And while there are certain things I wish I had handled differently, I see no real regrets.

Before I became an ogre, I was a middling ballplayer just trying to keep my head above water.

In 1964, I was almost 30 years old and going into my fifth year in the big leagues.

Too young to be considered a journeyman and too banged up to be touted as a player with a bright future, I wished I could have looked in the mirror and seen a more seasoned version of the 21-year-old flamethrower who had blazed his way through the minors.

But that wasn’t what reflected back at me. I still looked like a pretty good ballplayer, but my lame pitching arm told a different story. Every day, I wondered if I still had what it took to be a major league pitcher.

I set a goal for myself in 1964. Through hard work, I would stay in the majors and find a way to contribute to my team, the Phillies.

I didn’t know what my role on the team would be. Phillies manager Gene Mauch, “The Little General,” wasn’t big on assigning roles. If he handed you the ball, he expected you to get hitters out. That was your role. In my first four seasons with the team, I pitched in short relief, long relief, and started some games. Thanks to the team’s improved pitching rotation in 1964, I realized without Gene telling me that I was destined for the back end of the bullpen.

Sure enough, I became a mop-up guy. But there’s always a place in baseball for the mop-up guy.

Some days I was able to keep us in ballgames. I made quality pitches and got outs when I needed them. I started the season with a nine-inning scoreless streak and notched a win in the process.

When I was bad, however, I had a helluva time retiring anyone. A May night in Pittsburgh when I gave up six runs in just 1⅓ innings provided evidence of that.

I accepted the fact that I’d rarely get the ball in pressure-filled situations. We had an experienced sinkerball pitcher named Jack Baldschun who closed most of our games. And if Jack didn’t come in to earn the save, Ed Roebuck, who the Phillies purchased from the Washington Senators early in the season, usually got the job done.

I tried to hang in and battle, because from a team standpoint, we were looking awfully strong. Jim Bunning, who we picked up in a trade with Detroit the previous December, threw a perfect game at Shea Stadium on Father’s Day. At the top of our pitching rotation, Bunning and Chris Short gave us a reliable chance of winning every time they took the mound. And Dick Allen and Johnny Callison had emerged as two of the best young hitters in the game. We lacked the experience of other teams in the league and didn’t have an established star along the lines of Willie Mays or Henry Aaron. But a Phillies team that had lost 23 straight games just a few seasons earlier had started to look like it could compete with anybody. We went 9–2 in April, 16–13 in May, and 18–12 in June and found ourselves at the top of the National League standings at the All-Star break.

Gene stressed the importance of playing smart baseball. By bunting and scoring runners from third base with less than two outs, we won games that otherwise might have been lost. Gene had plenty of faults, but focusing on fundamentals was one of his positive qualities. Otherwise, he was a tyrant who made the whole team jumpy when he was around. He had his favorites, like Callison and some of the veterans, but the rest of us felt barely acknowledged, except for when Gene barked at us for doing something wrong. I didn’t feel it was an atmosphere conducive to long-term success, but we were doing well, so I didn’t question it too much. Later, when I became a manager myself, I barked a lot, too. I tried to pound into my players that they needed to play the game the right way, with focus and energy, and alert to game situations. They weren’t going to be able to simply out-talent opponents anymore.

*

We entered play on July 25 leading the National League by two games over the second-place San Francisco Giants. A game that day at Connie Mack Stadium became very memorable for me, but not for the right reasons. We trailed the St. Louis Cardinals 6–2 when I came in for mop-up duty in the eighth inning. I yielded a pair of unearned runs in the top of the eighth and another couple of runs in the ninth. Down 10–2 going into our last at-bat, we strung together four singles and four walks to cut the lead to 10–8, all before making our first out of the inning. We put another run on the board, but the comeback fell one run short. I wasn’t the reason we lost, but my shaky performance helped the Cardinals get the insurance runs they needed to hang on to win.

That outing came exactly one week after the Reds bombed me for eight runs in 4⅓ innings, a miserable performance that featured the first and only grand slam of Pete Rose’s career. And he still loves to remind me of it.

Gene’s scowl made it obvious he didn’t like what he’d seen from me of late. After the heartbreaking loss to the Cardinals, he gave me the bad news. About a week shy of my 30
^th
birthday, the Phillies were sending me down to pitch for the Triple-A Arkansas Travelers. I would swap places with right-handed pitcher Gary Kroll, who appeared in two games with the Phillies before getting traded to the New York Mets.

I signed with the Phillies in 1955, and it took me five years to get to the majors. Once I made it, I stayed there—until I got called into Gene’s office in July 1964.

It hurt like hell to leave my teammates at such a critical point in the season. It stung even more to have to pick up the phone and tell my dad I had been demoted. It wasn’t that he was a huge baseball fan or even a vocal supporter of mine. At 64 years of age, he was a recovering alcoholic who had recently been diagnosed with lung cancer.

I shared a name, George Dallas Green, but not much else with my father. His drinking had brought a lot of financial and emotional hardship on our family. We didn’t play catch when I was a kid, and he didn’t push me into sports—or anything else, for that matter. When he wasn’t working at the garage he operated in Wilmington, Delaware, he’d sit down in the cellar of our house drinking hard wine and smoking cigarettes like a fiend. It’d just be him, a small heater, and a couple of overhead light bulbs. He never laid a finger on me, my mom, or my sisters. He was a very quiet drunk.

When I reached the majors in 1960, a switch inside of him seemed to click. His son had “made it,” and I guess he started to regret missing out on my journey to that point. He started drinking less and then stopped altogether. He never came to see me play, but I could sense he was proud. I felt he had gotten his life back on track. And that’s when the cancer whacked him. My mom and sisters took care of him as his body became increasingly weak.