The Mouth That Roared (8 page)

I had reached the majors, and my next challenge was to stay there. I knew my sore arm would make that a daily struggle. Would I be in the big leagues for one year? Five years? Ten? I had no idea. I wish I could say I was simply enjoying the moment, but in reality I walked around with the anxiety that comes with knowing you’re a borderline major leaguer.

*

Gene came up with the brilliant idea of rooming me on the road with Turk Farrell. Turk was a decent pitcher, but his true love was the nightlife and all that came with it. Turk, Jim “Bear” Owens, and Jack “Bird” Meyer were known as The Dalton Gang. Compared to Turk and his buddies, I was a real goody-two-shoes.

After a game in Chicago, Turk approached me in the Wrigley Field clubhouse with an urgent request.

“Dallas, I’m in trouble, and you gotta help me out,” he said. “I’ve got a stewardess flying in tonight, and I promised to take her to dinner. But I found this other gal I want to stay with for a while.”

“What do you need me to do?”

“When the stewardess gets to the hotel, I need you to have dinner with her. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Late that evening, there was a knock on our hotel room door. I opened it to find a 6'0" blonde staring back at me. I hadn’t done much to prepare for her visit, other than to throw on some clothes. Normally I slept in the nude, so for me, I had already gone above and beyond the call of duty.

I ordered room service for the gal and told her Turk would be back shortly. He was meeting with our manager, I explained. She and I chitchatted for a while about Turk, her life in the skies, and my rookie year with the Phillies. Soon after finishing our meal, Turk bounced in and took her off my hands.

The next day, he gave me a box from one of the Chicago department stores.

“Here, roomie, I got a present for you,” he said.

I opened it to find a pair of silk pajamas.

“If you’re going to entertain my broads, I want you looking good,” Turk said, walking away.

Turk was a real piece of work. One time, our team plane got caught in a hellacious thunderstorm and was jerking up and down like a yo-yo. We were all pretty scared, especially Turk.

“Oh, dear God, if you get us down safely, I’ll quit drinking and fooling around!” he blurted out.

The plane landed without incident. After the close call, I figured Turk would keep his word for at least a little while. No chance.

“Okay, guys, let’s go get a drink and find some broads,” he said as he grabbed his bags.

*

Through her travels with me in the minor leagues, Sylvia knew a lot about the life of a ballplayer. When I returned from road trips, she got a real kick out of my Turk stories. Off the field, the early 1960s were a special time for Sylvia and me. When I got called up to the Phillies, we moved out of my mom’s house in Newport and bought a small brick house in Eastburn Acres, another suburb of Wilmington. Not long after that, Sylvia learned she was pregnant with our first child.

Like thousands of other workers from the Wilmington area, I commuted by rail to Philadelphia. On days the Phillies had a home game, I’d board a train bound for North Philadelphia station. From there, I’d make the 15-minute walk from Broad and Glenwood to Connie Mack Stadium. After games, I’d catch the train back home. That was sometimes an adventure, because the last train from North Philadelphia left at 10:30
PM
. With most night games running until about 10:00, I had to hustle to get to the station on time. That meant no showering or lingering around the clubhouse. If I missed the last train from North Philly, I’d have to spend $10 on a cab ride to 30
^th
Street Station.

I looked forward to the times when friends from Wilmington came to games—that meant I had a lift home. Sometimes Sylvia would come along with them. By all accounts, she fit right in with the other Philadelphia fans. Whenever Gene made a decision she didn’t like, she let him have it. Most of the time, the decision involved removing me from a game. On one occasion, he had a light-hitting infielder named Bobby Malkmus pinch-hit for me. When Sylvia saw Malkmus walking into the on-deck circle, she loudly blurted out, “Oh no, not Malkmus!” Her exclamation prompted the woman in front of her to turn around. The woman was Malkmus’ wife, who had probably heard worse considering her husband had a lifetime batting average of .215.

With so few people in the stands, voices tended to carry at Connie Mack Stadium.

At the start of the 1961 season, Gene promised his team would “win more games than anybody expects.” He was wrong.

The Phillies went 22–55 at home en route to a 107-loss season. During a stretch in July and August, we dropped 23 straight games. On August 20, we mercifully got a win in the second game of a doubleheader in Milwaukee. Frank Sullivan, a pitcher who liked to say he was in the twilight of a mediocre career, came up with a plan for dealing with the hundreds of Phillies fans waiting for us at the airport upon our return from Milwaukee. “Okay, guys, we gotta spread out,” he instructed. “That way, the rocks won’t hit us all at once.”

Despite the historic losing streak, Phillies owner Bob Carpenter and general manager John Quinn insisted Gene’s job was safe. For his part, Gene seemed shell-shocked by all the losing. “I’ve tried everything,” he told reporters after our 21
^st
loss in a row. “If there’s anything else, I’m willing to try that, too.”

My 1961 season couldn’t have started off better. After breaking camp with the Phillies for the first time in my career, I went the distance in my first start against San Francisco, blanking the Giants on five hits. Hall of Famers Willie Mays and Willie McCovey went a combined 0-for-8 against me.

It went downhill from there.

Later that season, Mays and the Giants got the better of me. In the first inning of game in late June, Willie whacked what I thought was a nasty curveball into the lower deck at Connie Mack Stadium. Gene wasn’t pleased. “Green, you big donkey, what the hell are you throwing him curveballs for?” he yelled. “Throw him a fastball!”

When I faced Mays again in the top of the third, I started him off with two fastballs, both for strikes. My instincts told me to keep Willie on his toes by throwing a breaking ball in the dirt. But mindful of Gene’s instructions, I came back at him with an inside fastball. He hit it over the roof of Connie Mack. As Willie rounded the bases, I gave my manager a piece of my mind.

“I hope you’re satisfied, Gene!” I yelled into the dugout. “He hit yours a lot further than he hit mine!”

Following several rough outings, Gene relegated me to bullpen duty. After the season, the Phillies put me on a list of unprotected players available to the expansion New York Mets or Houston Colt .45s. Those teams passed on me, however, so I returned to Philadelphia.

The Phillies shocked a lot of people in 1962, finishing a game over .500, an amazing turnaround from the season before. I chipped in with six wins, including a complete-game victory over Houston. We went a combined 31–5 against the two expansion teams.

In accepting
The Sporting News
Manager of the Year Award, Gene said, “I don’t want to be just another big league manager. I want to be the best in the business.”

He never made it.

*

More than individual games, what I cherish most from my days in the major leagues are the relationships I forged. In 1963, I got to continue my friendship with Richie Ashburn, who returned to the Phillies as a broadcaster after finishing up his playing career with the Cubs and Mets.

Richie was one of the most honest and decent guys I ever came across in baseball. Sylvia and I first got to know him during spring training in the late 1950s. In an atmosphere where veterans and farmhands didn’t mix too much, Richie took me under his wing and treated me like an equal. That kind of gesture from a future Hall of Famer meant the world to me.

When I became manager of the Phillies decades later, Richie, Harry Kalas, Andy Musser, Chris Wheeler, and the rest of the broadcast team flew on the team plane with us. Their narration of 1980 is preserved on every highlight reel of that special season.

On camera, Richie gave a family-friendly performance. But behind the scenes, he wasn’t shy about using salty language to question my in-game strategy. On the rare occasion I had runners on first and third with less than two outs and the pitcher up to bat, I’d call for a bunt to advance the runner on first. It was a conservative strategy intended to prevent the pitcher from hitting into a double play. Richie hated that move with a passion, because he saw it as giving up an out. “Goddamnit, Dallas, you can’t do that!” he yelled one time right before the cameras started rolling on a pregame interview. “Let the pitcher swing the bat!” Not that Richie was opposed to bunting. An outstanding bunter himself, he’d sometimes work with our players on how to best lay one down.

When Richie returned to Philadelphia in ’63, he joined a group of us who played pick-up basketball games during spring training and the off-season. I had nowhere near the baseball ability of Richie, Curt Simmons, Chris Short, Johnny Callison, and some of the other Phillies who took part in the games. But on the basketball court, where I had many proud moments in high school and college, I could claim a certain degree of superiority. Only Robin Roberts, who captained the Michigan State basketball team for two seasons, had bragging rights over me.

Robbie was the self-appointed team leader. Before every game, he’d say, “Alright, big boy, get the ball, throw it to me, and I’ll put it in the basket.”

The strategy usually worked. We took on all comers and usually came away with a win.

One time, Bobby Wine arranged for us to scrimmage against Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a church parish in North Philadelphia. Father Larkin, the parish priest, planned to raise funds by selling tickets to the exhibition.

It sounded like a worthy cause, so we accepted the invitation without even asking who exactly we’d be playing. We figured it’d be a high school team or a group of priests, but it turned out to be teachers who worked with troubled kids at a school affiliated with the church. These weren’t kindly old schoolteachers. I noticed in warm-ups that quite a few of them could dunk the ball.

A pretty large crowd filed into the gymnasium to watch the parish team take on a squad that included a couple of future baseball Hall of Famers. Father Larkin had a front-row seat for the action.

From the opening tip, we took it to our opponents—at least on the scoreboard. But the teachers didn’t seem to care about the score. They were too busy knocking us around.

I was getting banged around pretty hard in the lane. After a particularly flagrant foul, Richie looked over at Father Larkin and yelled, “Goddamn, your guys are the dirtiest sons of bitches I’ve ever played against!”

At halftime, we regrouped. Dating back to high school, I could play the game as rough as anybody. I got a little physical with the teachers in the second half.

I don’t remember the final score, but I know that if someone had pledged a dollar for every foul committed that night, the parish would have made out very well.

It was exactly the type of situation Quinn wanted to avoid when he tried to ban us from playing these games out of fear one of us would get hurt. Maje McDonnell, a member of the Phillies coaching staff who also liked to shoot hoops, helped convince Quinn to let us keep playing.

*

In 1963, Gene got closer to his lofty goal of being the best manager in the business by guiding the Phillies to a record of 87–75.

My future with the team hinged largely on Gene’s opinion of me. I was never going to be the ace of his pitching staff, so I went out and did the little things Gene admired. In 1963, I bunted when asked and didn’t commit an error. I also put together my best year on the mound, going 7–5 with a 3.23 ERA in 14 starts and 26 relief appearances. Above all, I worked hard and learned every facet of the game.

It was hard to know, however, if any of this impressed a manager who had a reputation for loathing pitchers and younger players. I was a pitcher, and at least for a while longer, still a younger player.

Ruben Amaro Sr., my Phillies teammate from 1960 to 1964, describes Gene this way: “Gene Mauch wasn’t an easy manager. He was a very ornery man who was angry at the world. He was even angrier that the teams he managed in the early 1960s were too young to compete with the rest of the league. But he also had trouble handling a team once it started winning.” In the words of
Philadelphia Daily News
columnist Stan Hochman, Gene was “a woeful people person.”

Gene considered himself a manager and a strategist, but not a teacher. He demanded that players be fully formed major leaguers the day they joined his team. This attitude was difficult to understand considering he was 34 years old when the Phillies hired him and not that far removed from his own days as a rookie.

His in-game strategy reflected his disdain for young players. For a while, Gene platooned Ruben and Bobby Wine at shortstop. He’d fill out a lineup card with one or the other’s name on it, but if he changed his mind once the game started, he’d have no qualms about pinch-hitting for the starter
in the first inning
. If you’re going to bench a guy, then bench him. But that way of handling players left us all walking on eggshells.