Sparky Anderson always looked older than he was and he has died much younger than he should have.
Sparky is at or near the top of my list of people who, when they die, I wish that I could have had one last conversation with.
I don’t recall the last time I spoke with him; it was since he retired. But too many years had passed. Unfortunately I think that happens with most of us. Especially today, when people live longer than they used to, we put off calling someone until he can no longer answer the phone.
Dan Ewald was a close friend and confidant of George Anderson. He even called him George at times.
“He died of complications from dementia,” said Ewald, the former public relations man for Anderson’s second team, the Detroit Tigers. “It developed over the last couple years. He would occasionally forget something or where something was, and he would say there’s that Alzheimer’s again.”
Ewald said last Thursday that Anderson’s illness was not specifically identified as Alzheimer’s, but it took a similar toll nonetheless.
“You could see slippage in the last year,” said Ewald, who lives in the Detroit area and made periodic visits to the Anderson home in Thousand Oaks, Calif. “I was at his house three weeks ago and hadn’t see him since August. I called his wife the day before I got there and asked ‘am I going to be surprised?’ She said yes.
“He had really regressed. He didn’t want to eat. A day or two later Carol called and said ‘I put him in the hospital.’ He was discharged yesterday and put in hospice care at home. She called me this morning and said ‘he’s gone.’”
The news release announcing Anderson’s death summed him up in one sentence: “At the request of Mr. Anderson, there will be no funeral nor memorial service.”
That was Sparky. Don’t make a fuss over me; I’m not special. One of the best managers in baseball history – he won the World Series with teams in both leagues – he never took or wanted credit for his teams’ success – he attributed it all to his players.
I vividly recall a scene in which Sparky had just learned of a trade the Tigers had made. I don’t remember the player the Tigers acquired, but he was pretty good. “I just got smarter,” he remarked.
In a similar vein, Anderson played down his role in the Tigers romp through the majors in 1984, a season they began by winning 35 of the first 40 games and ended by winning the World Series. The Tigers that year had a closer, Willie Hernandez, who won both the most valuable player and Cy Young awards.
“Managing the ‘84 team was really tough,” he said. “All I did was call the bullpen and say ‘get Willie ready.’”
As sharp and as perceptive as Anderson was, at times he let his assessment of young players get away from him. That’s when hyperbole would creep into his outlook.
Kirk Gibson, then barely a young outfielder with Detroit, for example, was going to be the next Mickey Mantle, Anderson declared. Gibson at least became a top-flight player. Chris Pittaro wasn’t so fortunate.
Pittaro was a minor league second baseman, whom the manager watched one spring and pronounced to all as the next Lou Whitaker, the Tigers’ second baseman for 18 years, who played in All-Star games and won Gold Glove and Silver Slugger awards.
Pittaro played in 28 games for Detroit one year and 25 games for Minnesota in two other years, and his career was over.
No one ever challenged Anderson on those comments. We figured they were harmless hyperbole unless they affected the kids he was touting. There was one time, however, that Anderson planted his foot firmly in his mouth.
His Cincinnati Reds had just completed a sweep of the Yankees in the 1976 World Series and he was asked to compare the Series’ two catchers, the Reds’ Johnny Bench, who hit .533, and the Yankees’ Thurman Munson, who hit .529.
After initially lauding Munson, Anderson said, “But don’t ever compare anybody to Johnny Bench; don’t never embarrass nobody by comparing them to Johnny Bench.”
Anderson made the comment in the post-game interview room, where the managers, win or lose, routinely appear. In this instance, however, Billy Martin, the Yankees’ manager, refused to appear, and Munson agreed to represent the Yankees.
Munson arrived in the room, unknown to Anderson, in time to hear his remark. When he learned later that Munson had heard him, Anderson wrote a letter of apology. Munson said he never received it, but the Reds released the letter publicly.
If there was another negative aspect of Anderson’s career it occurred many years ago when he threw one of his sons out of the house because he refused to cut his long hair. Ewald said that family episode was ancient history.
“They made peace 25, 30 years ago,” he said.
Anderson was the first manager to win the World Series in both leagues, but it’s a distinction he never should have had the chance to attain. He did because the Reds foolishly fired him after the 1978 season.
The Reds had developed a bad habit of making foolish moves. In December 1965 they traded Frank Robinson to Baltimore, declaring him “an old 30,” and the next season he became the first winner of the American League triple crown in 10 years.
Dick Wagner, the Reds’ general manager who fired Anderson, didn’t give a reason for his foolish act, but the Reds had finished in second place two years in a row after winning two consecutive World Series.
Anderson was not out of work long. The Tigers named him their manager midway through the 1979 season, and he remained in Detroit for 16 ½ seasons, resigning after the 1995 season.
Had he not resigned, he would very likely have been fired because in the spring of that year he staged a one-manager work stoppage, refusing to manage a team of replacement players during a strike of the real players. The only manager to take such a position, Anderson didn’t do it in support of the players but in support of the integrity of the game, which he said would suffer irreparable damage if the owners went forward with replacement players.
Ewald said that Anderson later said that act was one of the proudest times in his career. If it cost him his job, Anderson never complained or found fault with anyone. Meanwhile, Ewald said, the large labor force in the very industrial city of Detroit adopted Anderson as their hero.
Baseball writers considered Sparky a good friend, if not a hero, though there were times that I thought of him as a hero.
In the days when newspapers were newspapers and not fodder for the Internet, baseball writers for big-city papers who covered baseball teams had to write stories for early editions. Sometimes we had ideas for those stories and tried to write them before we got to the ball park; other times, no ideas, no stories.
But fear not when the Yankees were in Detroit. If I walked into Sparky’s office and he sensed that I needed a story, I never left without one. He talked and talked (he was very good at talking, maybe better than he was at managing) until my notebook was full, and when it was I said thank you, left his office and went to the press box to turn his comments into an early story.
There was no other manager like him. At times, I think he knew our job better than we did. The important thing was he knew we had a job to do, and not only did he help us do it but he also never tried to prevent us from doing it.
CLYDE WAS A MAN OF MANY TALENTS
I would have liked to have had another conversation with Clyde King, too. During the years that I covered the Yankees for The New York Times, Clyde did just about everything for them but clean out the clubhouse: scout, coach, manager, general manager, troubleshooter, adviser to and confidant of the owner. There are probably a few other jobs I have missed.
But in all of them, King was fun to talk to. He had been a major league pitcher, and he told how he had worn his cap slightly cockeyed to make hitters think he was looking at them when he wasn’t. It was the kind of trick he recalled playing in his basketball-playing days when he said he wore two same-foot shoes to trick opposing players about which way he could or could not go.
King died last Tuesday at the age of 86 at a hospital near his home in Goldsboro, N.C.
“He fell and broke some ribs,” Norma King, his wife of 64 years, said by telephone from her home. “He went to rehab and came home but kept falling. He even fell off a chair. Then his heart gave out. No one knew he had a heart problem.”
But King, who worked in baseball for nearly 70 years, was a baseball man to the end. “He watched every World Series game,” Mrs. King said. The team that King managed in 1969 and ’70 won.
My favorite King story happened during another World Series, when he was general manager of the Yankees. It was the day of the last game of the 1985 World Series, and the Yankees usurped the hours before the game by scheduling a conference call to announce their new manager.
On the call with reporters, King said that he and Woody Woodward, the vice president for baseball operations, had spoken with George Steinbrenner, who had told them two weeks earlier to decide the replacement for Billy Martin.
”We called George and told him we made our decision,” King said, then related this conversation:
Steinbrenner: Who is it?
King: Lou Piniella. Boss, are you happy?
Steinbrenner: I sure am.
The idea that Steinbrenner was going to let someone else select his manager was ludicrous, of course, but Clyde told the tale in such a way that the amusement was even greater than it otherwise would have been.
HOW DO YOU SPELL BURRELL? KKKKKKKKKKK
Bruce Bochy has been acclaimed for his World Series managing, but his best moves were the easy ones – writing the names of Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain and Madison Bumgarner on his lineup cards and calling on Brian Wilson to get the last few outs.
But what about Bochy’s decision to stay with Pat Burrell for all but one post-season game? The best that can be said is the Giants won in spite of Bochy’s decision.
In 14 post-season games Burrell batted .143 with 6 hits. 1 home run, 4 runs batted in and 22 strikeouts in 43 at-bats. He saved his worst for last.
If strikeouts were calculated like batting averages, Burrell would have had an .846 average. Playing four of the five World Series Games – he sat out Game 4 against the right-handed Tommy Hunter but returned for Game 5 against left-hander Cliff Lee – Burrell had no hits and struck out 11 times in 13 a-bats.
In the two times he made contact he grounded to third base in the sixth inning of Game 2 and lined out to left field in the second inning of Game 5. He was 3 for 3 in strikeouts in Game 1 and 4 for 4 in Game 3.
I wanted to put Burrell’s performance – or non-performance – in perspective so I asked Bob Waterman of Elias Sports Bureau to do that. What he found is mind-boggling.
Using players who have had a minimum of 10 at-bats in a World Series, Waterman found that only three have struck out in at least 70 percent of their at-bats, meaning there were only two before Burrell: David Justice, who with the Yankees in 2001 struck out 9 times in 12 at-bats (.750), and Lefty Grove, a pitcher of all things, who with the Philadelphia Athletics in 1931 struck out 7 times in 10 at-bats (.700).
Now Burrell tops them all. He has gained a World Series ring and a dual World Series distinction – most strikeouts without any hits and highest strikeout percentage.