The Mouth That Roared (9 page)

Gene didn’t care if he made you look like an ass, either. In a game against the Cubs, rather than coming to the mound to take me out, he stayed on the bench and signaled his displeasure with my outing by putting two fingers in his mouth and letting out a piercing whistle. I left the ball on the mound and walked off the field. Yep, Gene was a lousy people person, all right. That act was as unprofessional as it gets.

Gene hated to lose, which must have made the 1960 and 1961 seasons agonizing for him. Then again, he might have realized the futility of getting worked up about a lost cause. Once we started winning more often, he seemed to take every defeat personally.

And he threw some legendary fits.

After a tough loss at Houston in September 1963, a game that ended on a hit by rookie Joe Morgan, Gene raced into the clubhouse and with a couple of violent sweeps of his arm cleared a buffet table loaded with ribs, chickens, and salads. By the time the team came off the field, he had retreated to the shower. We looked around at the mess and wondered if a Houston fan had sabotaged our postgame meal. Some of the food was still dripping off lockers, indicating that whoever committed the crime was still in the area. A teammate with a future in detective work put two and two together.

“I think Gene did this,” he said.

A few minutes later, we heard the click-clack of Gene’s plastic shower shoes on the hard clubhouse floor. We all stood in silence as he entered the dressing area. All of us had our street clothes on, except for Wes Covington and Tony Gonzalez, whose wardrobe had taken the brunt of the flying food.

Gene looked at their stained clothes and growled, “Buy yourselves a couple of suits and give me the bill.”

After Gene walked back to the shower area, Gonzalez picked a rib up out of Covington’s shoe. “Hey, roomie,” he asked Covington. “Do you think this is still good?”

*

Back in those days, a college boy like me was assumed to have the intelligence and communication skills necessary to advocate for his teammates’ needs. That’s how I, by default, became the Phillies’ player representative. The Major League Baseball Players Association formed in 1954, but until Marvin Miller came on the scene 12 years later, it didn’t really have much clout.

Player rep was a thankless job in the early 1960s. The most frequent complaint I fielded dealt with the facilities at Connie Mack Stadium. Our clubhouse had a radio, but no TV. We had stools, but no chairs. And perhaps worst of all, our training room was located in a room above the clubhouse, meaning an injured player had to walk up a flight of stairs to get treatment. Quinn brushed aside all of these gripes.

On the road, there was a rule stating we had to wait for our beat writers to finish their game stories before returning to the team hotel. Gene also took his sweet time getting on the bus after games. That meant sitting around for two hours before leaving the stadium.

My teammates felt this was unacceptable. They agreed the bus should depart for the hotel exactly one hour after the end of the game. I mentioned this demand to Quinn, but all I got back was a grunt.

Back in Houston for another game, we decided to unilaterally put the policy in effect. The entire team sat on the bus, but several writers, our traveling secretary, and Gene were nowhere in sight.

“Hey, Big D, we got two minutes,” someone yelled from the back of the bus.

A few more minutes passed. Some writers scurried onto the bus, but still no Gene.

Figuring there was safety in numbers and surely a cab somewhere on the premises of the ballpark, I gave the bus driver the green light to leave.

The bus started rolling away, but the driver missed the entrance to the freeway and had to circle around to where we started. And there were Gene and our traveling secretary. The doors swung open, and they got on.

I think I saw steam coming out of Gene’s ears.

“This goddamn bus doesn’t leave until I tell it to leave!” he fumed.

It got real quiet. Then a couple of teammates finally broke the silence.

“But Dallas said to go.”

Ah, the life of a player rep in the early 1960s.

When Jim Bunning came to the Phillies from the Tigers after the 1963 season, our complaints got taken more seriously. As a veteran who had established himself as one of the better pitchers in the game, Jim wasn’t a guy Quinn could send down to the minors or trade. In other words, he wasn’t like the rest of us. Even Robin Roberts had fallen out of favor with the Phillies, who sold him to the Yankees after the 1961 season.

Quinn and Phillies ownership established another rule that forbade us from leaving tickets for friends or family when we played the Dodgers or Giants. Both teams still had large East Coast fan bases and Quinn hoped games against Los Angeles and San Francisco would sell out. A sign on a mirror in the clubhouse spelled out the rule: “No tickets/No passes for Dodgers/Giants.”

My teammates already were unhappy about their families being given nose-bleed seats. But no seats at all? That crossed the line. When Bunning heard about the rule, he went upstairs to Quinn’s office and had a word with him. After a few minutes, Jim came back down, walked over to the mirror, and ripped up the sign.

A few years later, Bunning and Roberts were instrumental in bringing Miller over to the players association. With that, a new era of baseball began.

*

John Quinn was one of the toughest general managers you’d ever run across. He was old-school and hard on everyone, from his players to his subordinates. At home, he was probably hard on his family. He came to work every single day dressed to the nines in a coat and tie, and he stayed that way the entire day. The son of a baseball owner and general manager, he felt you couldn’t run a team professionally if you didn’t dress professionally.

Mr. Quinn, as players addressed him, was also a heavy drinker. And when he drank, he became erratic. He was sharp as a tack earlier in his career, but as the years went by, he developed an off-putting demeanor.

I experienced that side of him after the 1963 season, which turned out to be my best season in the big leagues. When Quinn sent me my contract for the following year, I was surprised to see I hadn’t earned a raise. I wrote him a note explaining why I felt my performance warranted an extra $500.

At 29, I wasn’t getting any younger, and I felt I needed to stick up for myself. A few days passed before his secretary called me at home and said he wanted to meet with me.

On the appointed day, I went up to Philadelphia to make my case for a raise. Quinn greeted me with, “Hey, Dallas, how are you? How’s the family? Good, good, good!” It was classic Quinn small talk. He loved to ask and answer his own questions. The players joked that someone could say, “Well, Mr. Quinn, my wife’s dying of cancer, and my kids got eaten by a bear,” and he would still respond, “Good, good, good!”

I knew he didn’t like to waste time, so I got right to the point. “I had a nice season, Mr. Quinn, and I think I’ve earned a raise,” I said.

I waited for an answer but got none. He didn’t say anything. He just sat at his huge desk staring out the window. I didn’t say anything, either. It remained silent for a long while. Occasionally, he would refocus his attention on something other than what was going on outside his window. But he never looked at me.

“Well, it was nice meeting with you, Mr. Quinn,” I finally said, fleeing his office.

Without a contract, I couldn’t participate in spring training activities. There was a picture of me in one of the Philadelphia papers peering through a chain-link fence at my teammates taking batting practice. In the photo, you can see Quinn standing a few feet away from me.

A few days into camp, Phillies owner Bob Carpenter called me and said, “Sign the damn thing, Dallas. You don’t want this to go on any longer.”

We ended up working out a deal that allowed everyone to save their pride. Per its terms, I would get an extra $500 at the end of the season if we drew a certain number of fans to Connie Mack Stadium in 1964. It was an unrealistic figure that we had no way of reaching. We drew a record-setting number of fans in 1964, but not enough for me to collect the bonus.

That meeting remains my most vivid memory of Quinn. I guess I was lucky. Some of my teammates saw his uglier side. Ruben Amaro Sr. still talks about Quinn’s habit of calling him late at night and berating him.

Quinn wasn’t all bad. The Jack Tar Hotel in Clearwater, our spring training home, refused to rent rooms to our African American players, forcing them to stay in apartments and eat their meals in a segregated part of town. As the team’s player representative, I went to Quinn in 1963 and asked if we could switch hotels to protest the Jack Tar’s discriminatory policy. To his credit, he agreed to my request and made arrangements to move to a motel over the causeway, near Tampa.

The story didn’t have a happy ending, however. We moved the whole team to the other motel, which was owned by George Steinbrenner. On our first goddamn day there, Ruben went down to eat at the motel restaurant—and they wouldn’t serve him. We said, “Screw this,” and went back to the Jack Tar.

*

The mouth that roared wasn’t doing so much roaring in those days, at least not in the newspapers. Behind the scenes, however, I enjoyed frank conversations with teammates about Gene, our team, and the game in general. The Philadelphia teams of the early 1960s had genuine camaraderie. Our common bond was that Gene had managed to put the fear of God in all of us. Even Johnny Callison, who made three All-Star appearances with the Phillies, was scared to death about getting sent back to the minors.

“Christ, Johnny, you’re playing every day,” I told him. “I haven’t been on the mound in eight days. If I screw up, I might not get back out there for another month.”

I can only remember one time that a conversation with a teammate turned into an argument. It happened when a bunch of us were yakking and Art Mahaffey, who pitched for the Phillies from 1960 to 1965, confessed to me he didn’t necessarily want other pitchers on the staff to do well.

“If you’re pitching, I don’t root for you, because you never know who might end up taking your job,” he said.

Art was four years younger than I was and enjoying considerable success the majors. In a game against the Cubs in 1961, he struck out 17 batters, a Phillies team record that still stood at the end of the 2012 season.

I had a hard time understanding his way of thinking. Then again, he was the same guy who demanded to know why Quinn had promoted me instead of him from the minors in 1960.

“Jesus Christ, Art,” I said. “We’re a team. You have to root for your team. When you go out there, I’m rooting like hell for you. I hope you strike everyone out. If you look good, we all look good.”

Art didn’t buy it. He firmly believed that the success of others, even if they were teammates, could only hurt him.

In all honesty, he didn’t have anything to worry about from me. I was the 24
^th
or 25
^th
man on the roster every season.

I’d like to be able to say that my major league career was marked by sheer enjoyment. But I don’t think I ever really stopped to reflect on how lucky I was to have made it to the game’s highest level. Instead I was locked in a constant battle with myself.

As my teammate Bobby Wine says, “We were at the mercy of the manager and general manager. Nobody dared buck the system. If you did, your butt was off to Triple-A.”

In a way, my experience toughened me in the long run. I trusted my baseball abilities and instincts, even if my body wouldn’t allow me to perform at an elite level. The adversity I faced as a player helped prepare me well for the future. At the time, I didn’t view it that way, however.

My 1963 Topps baseball card featured this bit of information about me: “Once plagued by wildness, Dallas can now consistently get the ball where he wants it.”

Unfortunately, just as often I put the ball exactly where hitters wanted it. And after a couple of subpar outings in 1964, I was back in the minors.

I badly wanted to be in Philadelphia that August helping the Phillies sew up a pennant, but instead I was a member of the Triple-A Arkansas Travelers.

This wasn’t supposed to be how the 1964 season played out. I had grinded out a major league existence long enough to experience one of those magical years where everything falls into place for a team. But a few lousy games did me in. And all I could do upon my return to the Phillies in September was watch as the team blew a chance to go to the World Series.

That season, coupled with the death of my father, sapped my drive to stay in the game. I was angry that my damaged right arm couldn’t make the pitches it used to. And I was furious at the Phillies for considering me minor league talent and dumping me just when it looked like we were going to win a pennant.

*

During the off-season, I returned home to Delaware and contemplated a life after baseball. I met with a businessman in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, whose company serviced all the big farms in that area. As a local kid made good, I had helped him drum up business by joining him on sales presentations. We got to know each other pretty well, but Sylvia was suspicious of the guy. She thought he was more interested in me helping him improve his social life than his business. “Of course he likes having you with him at bars,” she said. “It helps him meet girls.” I ultimately turned down his offer to come work for him full-time. It was a wise choice. About a year later, he lost his business.