The biggest bench coach in baseball is leaning against the dugout railing at Petco Park, bat in hand, sunglasses in place, talking about his great new gig and his managerial debut. It came here last week against the Pittsburgh Pirates, in the third inning of the 14th game of the San Diego Padres season, after the man who hired him, rookie manager Andy Green, got tossed for arguing a botched balk call.
Faster than you can say, “You’re gone,” Mark McGwire, 52, a man who was gone himself not so long ago, was in charge of a big-league team for the first time. And wouldn’t you know it, the Padres knocked three home runs in the next two innings to get out of a 3-0 hole. Soon after that McGwire was on his way to the mound, his familiar No. 25 on a back that seems as big as an outfield wall, bathed in ballpark light as he prepared to make the first pitching change of his life.
He climbed the little round hill and turned to Derek Norris, the Padres catcher.
“It took me 15 years to get back here on the field, man,” McGwire said. “It’s such a great feeling.”
McGwire smiled and rubbed his graying beard as he recounted the moment.
“I felt like I was back in the batter’s box,” he said. “It was like, ‘Wow, this is what it’s like.’ I felt the speed of the game. I felt everything. You had to be on top of it, with all the signs, defenses, everything. It was like I was playing again.
“I (just kept thinking), ‘This is pretty damn cool.’”
McGwire's journey to his spot alongside Green has been meandering and emotional. He hit the first of his 583 home runs off the Detroit Tigers' Walt Terrell 30years ago and the last of them 23 days after the Sept.11 terrorist attacks, a three-run shot off the Milwaukee Brewers' Rocky Coppinger. He seemed as much a lock for the Hall of Fame as any man who ever gripped a bat, until he went from homer-hitting hero to performance-enhanced pariah, and his most enduring video clip went from mighty home run
No. 70 in St. Louis to his timid testimony on Capitol Hill.
Many wondered if McGwire would be in permanent, if unofficial, baseball exile, before Tony La Russa, his manager with the Oakland Athletics and St. Louis Cardinals and a man he regards as a second father, asked him to be St. Louis' hitting coach. McGwire accepted, tearfully owned up to a decade of steroid use and went to work in 2010, spending three successful seasons with
St. Louis and three as the Los Angeles Dodgers hitting coach, before Green reached out to him about being his bench coach in December.
It was another step in McGwire’s gradual passage beyond the so-called steroid era, his image morphing from muscle-bound villain to valued staff member.
“He’s as good a baseball man as I’ve ever been around,” Green said. “Having him next to me, I couldn’t ask for anything better. He’s got great presence about him and a true humility to him. I don’t think people really grasp how well he understands the intricacies of the game.”
For all the fixation on McGwire’s blacksmith forearms and massive physique and the illicit boosters that helped along the way, Green said McGwire’s mental strength overpowers everything else about him. Think about what it took to tune out all the mania and clamor in the summer of 1998 especially and keep performing.
“People who accomplish what he accomplished have such mental focus and tenacity to block out all the noise, and that’s what separates them,” Green said.
“That’s why he’s good in the dugout, too, because the noise doesn’t bother him.”
Padres outfielder Matt Kemp, who was one of McGwire’s star pupils in Los Angeles and continues the cage work with him here, agreed.
“He’s one of the toughest guys I’ve ever been around,” Kemp said.
In 2014, coming off an ankle surgery, Kemp said McGwire’s steadfast work played a major role in helping him regain his power stroke, and he hit 25 home runs.
“Mark’s not a real, real mechanical guy,” Kemp said. “He’s a thinking man: ‘What’s your plan at the plate? You have to have a plan and stick with the plan.’ His (attitude was), ‘We’re going to stay in (the batting cage) until we figure this thing out.’ He’s passionate about the game and loves teaching people about the game.”
David Freese, who signed with the Pirates as a free agent this spring, became an All-Star third baseman who had career highs in home runs (20) and RBI (79) in 2012 working under McGwire in St. Louis. Freese was on the losing side of McGwire’s first victory last week and sent him a congratulatory text.
“He had a huge impact on me from Day 1,” Freese said. “He was so great at keeping you relaxed, keeping things simple, getting us to continually believe we were good hitters. Just the way he went about being one of the guys and the way he cared for us is what I remember most about him.”
A Missouri kid who grew up idolizing McGwire, Freese was a rookie when McGwire returned to the game and had an up-close view of McGwire’s decision to make a full, if belated, disclosure of his steroid use. You can argue that McGwire came clean for the sake of expediency and to pave a way back into baseball, but his confession is probably as complete and poignant as any made by an athlete implicated in a drug scandal.
“Going through stuff like that, being a man about it, it shows how much he loves the game,” Freese said. “He doesn’t have to do this. He’s got plenty of money. He loves being in the game and he loves the aspect of helping people, and that’s what this is all about.”
Said McGwire, “You have obstacles throughout your life. It doesn’t matter who you are. It’s how you bust through them and how your overcome them. All I know is I love teaching. I love being around this game.”
For his part, La Russa has seen the transformation of McGwire from a rookie slugger whose approach was wholly unscientific — “See it and hit it” — to “a very smart hitter who got into the intelligence of how to attack a pitcher” and has become a serious student of the game as a coach.
La Russa, now the Arizona Diamondbacks chief baseball officer, thinks Green is a managerial star in the making, and he’s not much less sanguine about McGwire’s future.
“There’s no doubt in mind he’d be an outstanding leader,” La Russa said. “Managing is about establishing relationships with people, connecting with people, and he’s such a hard worker and so unselfish that (he does that). People will want to follow him.
“I’m a huge fan of Mark in every way — in the goodness of his heart, in his work ethic and his integrity. People may think of the steroid thing (and disagree), but he is a man with as much integrity as anybody I’ve ever met.”
McGwire said Green reminded him of a young La Russa, with his deep intelligence and absorption of the myriad details that go into managing. As bench coach, McGwire spends virtually every pitch next to Green, thinking right along with him, embracing the ebb and flow. It reminds him of the game within a game he played against the pitcher each time he stepped in the batter’s box.
‘This game is so much about detail, so much about execution,” McGwire said. “Let’s just say things speed up in a hurry in this game. Just when you think things are really going good, it can change. ... You have to be on top of how many pitches your pitcher has thrown, where you are in the lineup, when do we get the bullpen ready, do we make a double-switch here? All of it.”
Are his aspirations to be a big-league manager?
“I’ve never ruled it out,” McGwire said. “But let’s just say I have a lot to learn. I’m really, really happy in the position I am in right here. There’s no timetable for (managing). I’m constantly learning. I love the challenge. How do you not want to challenge yourself in life; how do you not want to challenge yourself in your profession? It doesn’t matter whether you are a ballplayer or not. It’s just the way I’ve always been built.”
As the Padres batting practice ramped up one night last week, McGwire had to get to work. Six years after his return from unofficial exile, he was asked about where he is, compared to where he was.
“I am in a great place,” McGwire said. “How can you not say you are in a great place being a major league coach? When you were a former major league player for 16-plus years? I love this game so much. The amount of work I put in as a player and the amount of work I put in as a coach, I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t love it.”
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