When Willie Randolph was trying to get a major league managing job back when the best he could do was be a major league coach, he stubbornly resisted advice that he get managerial experience in the minor leagues. Randolph cited white managers who got major league jobs without having had minor league experience so if it was good enough for them it should be good enough for a black guy, he reasoned.
Too many years later, after a dozen unsuccessful interviews, Randolph got his chance, but he has already been fired from his first major league managerial job, and Chris Chambliss, his old teammate and coaching colleague, still waits for the chance to be fired from his first major league managing job.
Why, I asked Chambliss at the recent Yankees’ old-timers game, did he think he had been shunned for 20 years.
“I don’t know if it’s shunned,” he responded. “Maybe nobody thought I could do it so I haven’t had any offers to do it.”
If you expected Chambliss to reply harshly and profanely, spitting expletives and cursing general managers, you’ve got the wrong guy. Not quiet Chris Chambliss. And maybe that’s his problem. In his more than 35 years in baseball, he has been so quiet that people mistake his tranquility for passivity.
“His personality is what it is,” John Schuerholz said, “but if anybody pushed him or tested him on that they’d be making a terrible mistake.”
Schuerholz, now the president of the Atlanta Braves, was their general manager when Chambliss managed in their minor league system in the early 1990s. The 59-year-old Chambliss returned to the Braves organization this season as the hitting coach at AAA Richmond.
Chambliss has extensive experience as a minor league manager and a major league hitting coach. He served 13 years as a hitting coach for the Mets, the Cardinals, the Reds and the Yankees. He was the Yankees’ hitting coach when they won four World Series from 1996 through 2000.
He managed the Tigers’ AA minor league team in 1989 and 90, the Braves’ AA team in 1991 and their AAA team in 92 and the Marlins’ AAA team in 2001. He was named manager of the year in his leagues in 90 and 91. Oh yes, he has also managed in the Puerto Rican winter league.
You want experience? Chambliss has plenty of experience.
Yet no major league team has expressed interest in him as its manager. The Tigers, for example, were the first organization he managed in, but they have had five managers in 13 years, and none has been named Chambliss.
The Tigers sometimes have even violated the commissioner’s rule that when teams interview candidates for managing and general managing jobs they have to include minorities on their interview lists. That’s right. Chambliss is still the same black guy who hit the momentous playoff home run in 1976 that beat Kansas City and catapulted the Yankees into their first World Series in a dozen years.
The Yankees didn’t interview Chambliss either last fall when they sought a successor to Joe Torre. Tony Pena, their first base coach, was their minority candidate, but he never had a chance in competition with Joe Girardi and Don Mattingly. At least he got an interview.
“I don’t know what anyone’s answer would be,” Schuerholz said, discussing the lack of interest in Chambliss as a managerial candidate. “That hasn’t been a search we’ve been on.”
The Braves haven’t needed a manager seemingly since Schuerholz was a boy. Bobby Cox has been their manager as long as anyone can remember (actually since Russ Nixon was fired during the 1990 season).
“All of the things you know about Chris I know about him,” Schuerholz said. “He’s the absolute top of the line, one classy man, bright articulate, energetic. He knows the game, has been a success in the game as a player and has a lot of attributes that ought to be attractive to anybody on that kind of search. He is by his personal demeanor a mild and very pleasant person. The countenance that Chris has reminds me of Stan Musial.
Musial, the great Cardinals hitter, never managed in the majors either, but he didn’t want to.
“Chris is one of the kindest, most gentlemanly people I know,” Schuerholz added. “That shouldn’t be a negative; that should be a positive. But perhaps in a search for today’s managers, people are looking for something other than that.”
Teams most likely look for managers who look the part as well as act it. Girardi, for example, would never be mistaken as a soft and easy guy for players to challenge or ignore.
But Chambliss has demonstrated a different side, and it cost him. The Reds’ hitting coach, he was ejected from a game late in the 2006 season for questioning an umpire’s strike zone. Not only that. He was suspended for a game and fined because he violated what was then a relatively new rule barring coaches from leaving the dugout.
Chambliss’ uncharacteristic outburst did not result in any interviews for manager’s jobs, but it didn’t deter the Braves from bringing him back to their organization this year.
“We were delighted when we had a chance to bring him back in the system,” Schuerholz said. “I know in the last couple years he’s been looking for an opportunity to advance in his career. It hasn’t happened.”
Chambliss did not have a baseball job of any kind last year. “When we knew he was out there and available, even though it wasn’t at the major league level,” Schuerholz said, “we wanted to bring him back because it would be a positive development in the development of our young players. We think the guys who are exposed to Chris Chambliss come away better as baseball players and persons.”
Despite the lack of interest in him as a major league manager, Chambliss continues to aim for that elusive goal.
“I’ll keep working and keep learning, and maybe an opportunity will come,” he said. “I still want to manage. I can’t give up on that dream. It’s something I want to do.” But, he added realistically, “After a while I’ll be too old.”