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DEL.ICIO.USStar-crossed Mauch was one of a kind
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
In all my baseball days, I had never met a manager who knew more about the game. And I had known managers who had grown gray on the job. Gene Mauch was only 27.
He had just arrived in town to manage the Atlanta Crackers in 1953 , which struck me as strange, since he had hit .324 in the American Association the year before and apparently had a career ahead of him. But John Quinn , who ran the then-Boston Braves, felt he had a budding genius in his hire and wanted to get him plugged in. Quinn was right, but a few years ahead of his time.
Mauch would be a playing manager. “I’ll play third base, so I can be nearer the pitcher,� he said, “if I can make the team, and if I can’t, I’ll play second.� Which he did.
No doubt about who was in charge. Those piercing blue eyes could bore a hole through you. He made you nervous while he carefully thought through his next sentence. He would stand at a bar and argue baseball with you until the lights were turned off. In one season, I came to know and enjoy him more than any manager I crossed swords with. Mauch was, indeed, ahead of himself. He returned to the field for three good seasons in Los Angeles. (One year he hit 20 home runs.) In 1960, Quinn, then moved to Philadelphia, called on him again, and for the next three decades he managed the Phillies, Montreal, Minnesota and California , in the process, suffered three major heart breaks. Three times within a murmur of a pennant.
“Best manager in baseball who never made it to a World Series,� it was said of him, and who’s to debate that?
Oh, no doubt who was in charge. Captain Bligh was a scoutmaster by comparison. He took over the Phillies in 1960, and lost 23 games in a row the following year . They weren’t called “phutile� without license. If there was anything Mauch couldn’t stomach, it was complacency, and one night in Houston, after a dismal performance, he shocked his dawdling hirelings by spraying the clubhouse with spareribs, cutlets, sandwiches and all the postgame food the clubhouse man regularly laid out. It’s a rampage that hasn’t lost its place when baseball tales are being told.
He was the Expos’ first manager, and if there’s any fate worse than managing an expansion team, it’s managing one that can’t rise above .500. Then to the Twins, where he endured Calvin Griffith’s tight-fistedness as long as he could stand it. Then Gene Autry put in a call for him. Mauch later said that the Angels had more talent than any team he ever had, but twice they led him to the brink and stranded him there.
The Phillies had given him an indoctrination in close calls in 1964. Six games ahead, 16 games to play, they were sitting cozy. But he relied too heavily on two pitchers, Jim Bunning, same as the senator from Kentucky now, and Chris Short, and all the Phillies did was come up short. In California, it was even more cruel. The Angels were within one strike of the pennant in 1986, but instead blew a three-run lead and another one got away. You never saw a more bedraggled human being, standing alone in the dugout after it was all over.
Physically, he wasn’t a big fellow, but inwardly, he was as tough as a clenched fist. He had attracted John Quinn’s attention as a rookie with the Braves. The team bus, on the way to a spring game, had become wedged beneath a railroad overpass. Players got out, stood around, cursing the driver, when Mauch stepped up with the solution.
“Let some of the air out of the tires,� the rookie said. They did. The bus squeezed through, players boarded again and Mauch was a hero.
He gave me some of the days of my life I’ll never forget. His Crackers team finished third, and he later told a Philadelphia sportswriter, “Bisher told me, ‘I’m glad for your sake, you didn’t win the pennant. You’re overbearing enough â€â€? with a winner you’d be unbearable.’â€? It was written that he laughed.
Gene passed away last Monday in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He was 79, and not a dull moment among them.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Furman Bisher
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By David Balog
August 16, 2005 04:46 PM | Link to this
As a fan, I’ll always remember Gene Mauch’s toughness and his ‘64 Phillies. He and they were memorable characters. Watching Gene Mauch’s teams, I knew I was watching baseball they way it should be played.