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Saturday, July 1, 2006
Mazzone like a buddha in orange
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Leo Mazzone was back in town and you wouldn’t have believed the scene. Cameras, mikes, tape recorders, flashes, pads and pens for those less advanced, like a swarm around the departed Braves pitching coach, poised in the visitors dugout like a buddha in orange. Nothing like it since the Beatles press conference in the old stadium in 1965.
Well, maybe not that much of a stretch. But strong.
And yeah, in the visitors dugout. “I had to come in through the visitors parking lot. I never knew where it was before. I didn’t know which entrance to take to get to the visitors clubhouse. You think I don’t feel awkward sitting here?”
Awkward, maybe, but it wasn’t coming through. Mazzone is a showman. He may have felt awkward as a Baltimore Oriole, but he’s a resident of Atlanta. This will be home out of season. “Georgia is my home now. This is where I should be living and we’re building here,” he said, though he didn’t say where, or clarify “we.” It’s OK, we welcome all taxpayers.
Nobody gets more credit when things are going well and the earned run average is low, and nobody takes more guff than a pitching coach. Here is Mazzone, who never threw a pitch above the minor leagues as a player and becomes the pitching coach rage for the Braves, elevated to such a commodity that the Orioles are willing to pay him $500,000, twice his salary here, to coach their pitchers.
There was another consideration. The Orioles manager is a quite gentlemanly man named Sam Perlozzo, who played in exactly a dozen major league games. Sam and Leo grew up together in western Maryland, played kids’ ball with and against each other, each coached by his own father. May be “closest friends,” as advertised, but that’s sometimes exaggerated by circumstances. Now, here’s Mazzone, who never made more than $900 a month in the minor leagues elevated to star status coaching pitchers during those 14 seasons of Braves championships. Rocking in the dugout, on camera.
He was caught in a mild rocking motion Friday night, but there wasn’t much to rock about. He was caught later ripping off his cap and rubbing his baldness in disgust. Marcus Giles had just struck a two-base hit that won the game for the Braves, 5-3.
In his first full season as Braves pitching coach, the team ERA was 3.49. Of course, he was dealing with a hot hand of Smoltz, Glavine, Avery, et al. This season in Baltimore, the Orioles’ ERA stands at 5.15, but of course, he’s dealing with Kris Benson, (not to be sneezed at), then drops off. For awhile there, another starter was Chen, Bruce Chen, and that brings up an interesting coincidence.
Chen was one of the Braves’ promising prospects when Mazzone was here, sure to have a hot hand in the season of ‘99. It never worked out, he was traded, and is now with his eighth team. But last season Chen won 13 games as a starter. This season he is 0-6, and has been exiled to the bullpen.
Mazzone now gets a reprieve with a second former Brave, Russ Ortiz, cut loose by Arizona, obligated to him for a king’s ransom in salary. He was a study in curiosity as he went to the mound for the Orioles Saturday night against a team for which he once won 21 games. Leo’s mission: re-charge Ortiz’s battery and help him find his way back.
A pitching coach can sometimes be a combination of snake oil salesman, coddler, tough guy, instructor, taunter and cheerleader. Mazzone is all of those, sometimes harsh, crusty, foul-mouthed and on occasion, patient. It’s his decision only on which of his moods to address to which pitcher. If that suggests psychologist, he would hardly fit that category.
He is quite honest, when asked to define his success as a coach of pitchers when he was with the Braves.
“Well, I’d say Maddux, Smoltz, Glavine and all those Cy Young winners we had,” he said, in one of his rare moments of self-effacement.
Surrounded by a cadre of news pursuers, he looked around Turner Field and spoke cheerfully. “I never realized what a beautiful place this is,” and as he said it, his eyes were scanning that string of division championship flags above the left field bleachers. “But, there’s a right time for everything,” and this was his time to go. I can’t say that Oriole orange does much for him as a color.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Furman Bisher
Hoping Cremins finds old spark
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
I hope this works out. I really do. Contrary to popular belief, I’ve never held a personal animus against Bobby Cremins, and I took no glee in seeing him exit Georgia Tech on such a somber note. But I believed then that Cremins’ best days as a coach were behind him, and I wonder if, six years later, anything has changed.
The College of Charleston is a mid-major school with big-time aspirations for its basketball program. It just fired Tom Herrion, who won 68 percent of his games and who didn’t have a losing season. It is planning to build a new 5,000-seat arena, and it still believes the advances made under John Kresse, who reached the NCAA tournament four times in the ’90s before retiring in 2002, were no aberration.
Lest we forget, one of Kresse’s signature victories came in 1993 against Cremins and Tech. Only six days earlier, those same Jackets had upset No. 1 Duke. That, sad to say, was the story in miniature of Cremins’ last decade at Tech: He’d win big games, yes, but he’d lose too many little ones. (Remember Southern in the NCAA tournament? Remember Mount St. Mary’s on a layup off an inbounds pass? Remember Hofstra in Madison Square Garden?)
Cremins did one of the greatest building jobs in the history of college basketball, lifting Tech from the bottom of the ACC — the Jackets were 1-27 in conference games the two seasons before he arrived — to the penthouse of the nation’s most prestigious league. He turned a dead program into a national force by dint of personality. He made everybody like him, and he made a slew of big-name recruits — Price, Dalrymple, Ferrell, Hammonds, Scott, Anderson — want to play for him. Those first giddy years he had workaholic assistants Perry Clark and George Felton alongside, and Cremins managed to outwork both.
That’s the part that worries me. Cremins, who hasn’t coached since 2000, turns 59 on the Fourth of July. Will a man of that age put in the 18-hour days a younger Cremins did? Will he spend half his time on airplanes, chasing down talent? Will he be able to lure enough gifted players to a Southern Conference outpost? And if he can’t, will he be able to win with ordinary resources?
That was always my gripe with Cremins — great recruiter, substandard tactician. I saw too many games where the Jackets lost not because they were outmanned but because they were outflanked. Cremins was the best thing ever to happen to Tech basketball, but at the end of his run — the Jackets missed the NCAA tournament in six of his final seven seasons after making it every year from 1985 through 1993 — he was clearly out of ideas. It was time to go, and he knew it. Being a nice guy, he did Dave Braine the favor of not making the AD fire him.
Charleston offers a new start, but its circumstances are unusually unsettled. After firing Herrion, the Cougars hired Gregg Marshall, a former Kresse assistant who has done well at Winthrop, but Marshall changed his mind — pulled a Cremins, South Carolina fans would say — one day after being introduced. Then Buzz Peterson, whose name has been linked to every position except secretary of the treasury, interviewed for the C of C job but withdrew his name almost immediately.
Finally the Cougars turned to Cremins, and on the surface he seems a nice enough fit. He has lived in Hilton Head since leaving Tech, and he’s the biggest name Charleston could possibly have landed. But will the name carry the weight it did two decades ago, when every school in the land — Kentucky included — had Cremins No. 1 on its wish list? Can he do as Lefty Driesell did at Georgia State and call back the years with one last feel-good run?
I hope so. Those last years at Tech were no fun for anybody, and no coach of such charm and eminence deserved to depart with the barest of whimpers. I hope Bobby Cremins makes C of C basketball the talk of Charleston, same as he did in this city way back when.
Permalink | Comments (14) | Categories: Mark Bradley, Tech / ACC
