It wasn't so long ago that four celebrated veteran managers walked off
into the sunset, shaking all cares and business from their age and conferring them on younger strengths, so that they, unburdened... okay, enough with the King Lear.
Joe Torre (70 years old, 13 first place finishes, 4 WS titles), Bobby Cox (69 years old, 15 first place finishes, 1 WS title), Lou Piniella (67 years old, 6 first place finishes, 1 WS title) and Cito Gaston (66 years old, 4 first place finishes, 2 WS titles) all turned their teams over to younger men. Only one of the new boys (Fredi Gonzalez in Atlanta) had ever managed a full season in the majors. Two of them - John Farrell and Don Mattingly - had never managed anywhere before.
The torch, passing. Right? The oldest manager still standing was Charlie Manuel in Philadelphia, and while Charlie certainly looks like an old-timer, he didn't actually get his first chance to manage in the majors until 2000. Jim Leyland and Tony LaRussa were the last men remaining who had managed in the majors back in the 1980s. Just as Cox and Torre were the last we would ever see who had managed way, way back in the 1970s. Until this week's strange tidings.
The season's first managerial move actually came in the AL West, where Bob Melvin took over in Oakland once Bob Geren finished the task of completely losing any remaining support in the clubhouse. Working for Billy Beane is a tough gig. For one thing, Billy can be a little exciteable. He also seems to think that his manager should run the team Beane's way. This is difficult for the manager, who has to be thinking - well, there's Billy's way, or there's my way. I think my way is better, actually. But I guess I have to do it Billy's way. Of course if I do it Billy's way and lose... Billy is going to fire me. There are only 30 of these jobs, right?
But the real excitement has been in the NL East.
Jim Riggleman has just committed career suicide - I assume he knows this, so I hope he had a pretty good reason. There was clearly a severe lack of communication between the field manager and the general manager, which makes the choice of Dave Johnson as Riggleman's replacement especially interesting. Johnson, of course, has a long history of quarreling with his front office. (Granted, his employers have included Marge Schott and Peter Angelos, so this may represent something of a badge of honour.) But Johnson has never been famous for his skills as a communicator, with either his bosses or his players.
On the other hand, Johnson has won everywhere he's gone, and the Nationals have a lot of exciting young players. Johnson's most celebrated successes as a manager came with the Mets teams of the 1980s, which featured some very, very young players. We all think first of Gooden and Strawberry, of course, and mere babes they were. But Sid Fernandez, Ron Darling, Lenny Dykstra, Wally Backman, Howard Johnson, Rick Aguilera, Kevin Mitchell were all between the ages of 21 and 24 when Johnson stuck them into the lineup.
Of course, with the sole exception of a 20 year old Adrian Beltre, Johnson didn't do anything even remotely like that in Cincinnati, Baltimore, or Los Angeles, although he was fairly successful in all three stops. Granted, those teams didn't actually have any interesting young players. Not a one. One also looks at how some of those young Mets developed, and thinks that they might have been better served with someone capable of providing a little more professional (and personal) guidance than it's in Johnson's nature to provide. That's not really his job, of course. But still...
In some ways, the situation in south Florida is even more interesting. And that's without wondering about whether Lebron will ever bother to develop some low-post skills. Through the first two months of the season, things were going just swimmingly for the young Marlins. (Marlins, swimmingly... okay. Sorry about that.)They had a 31-22 record, which put them just two games behind the mighty Phillies, and was good enough to have them a couple of games in front of Atlanta and Milwaukee in the wild card hunt. They'd achieved this with almost no contribution whatsoever from Hanley Ramirez. Hanley is both the face of the franchise (the Marlins' entire marketing campaign, and outreach to Florida's sizeable Latino community, is built around Ramirez.) Hanley is also the man widely regarded as responsible for the demise the previous year of manager Fredi Gonzalez. But he'd had nothing to do with anything in 2011. He was hitting just .210/.306/.309 when he was injured at the end of May. So he missed much of what happened next...
First... the wheels fell off. The Marlins suddenly lost eight games in a row, to Arizona, Milwaukee, and Atlanta before finally beating the D-Backs on June 10 to stop their skid.
Then the engine fell completely to pieces, and fell through the chassis to the ground below. The Marlins lost eleven games in a row, to Arizona, Philadelphia, Tampa Bay, and the Angels. Along the way, manager Rodriguez voluntarily walked the plank (the steering wheel had turned to dust in his hands! Pound that metaphor, until it begs for mercy!) - and the Marlins summoned, as his replacement...
Trader Jack.
And once again - and surely this will be the last time - we'll have a manager who was actually running a team way back in the 1970s. And running one extremely well.
Trader Jack is 80 years old, by the way.
But so what, I say! It means he's almost ten years younger than Red Schoendienst, whom we all saw hitting fungoes this weekend in a Cardinals uniform. As it happens, Schoendienst was managing the Cardinals back in 1973, when McKeon made his mangerial debut. Who were some of the other active managers when McKeon's managerial career began? Billy Martin. Danny Murtaugh. Chuck Tanner. Walter Alston. None of whom are active now, to say the least.
I mean - gosh! Willie Mays was still playing, and Leo Durocher was still managing when Jack McKeon came on the scene. That's just too cool to be true...
McKeon's first season in the dugout, way back in 1973, saw him go 88-74 with the Kansas City Royals - who were but a fifth year expansion club. They weren't really that good, of course, and fell back to 77 wins the following year. They fired him the following season, with the Royals at 50-46, and sitting a rather distant second to the still mighty A's (They replaced McKeon with a slightly younger man - Whitey Herzog.)
McKeon caught on with the post free agency A's for a couple of desultory partial seasons, before moving on to San Diego as the general manager in 1980. It was here that the legend of Trader Jack was built. The Padres had come into existence the same year as the Royals (and Expos and Pilots/Brewers) and had been by far the worst of the four new teams. They'd had exactly one winning season in their history. That was 1978 when the ancient-even-then Gaylord Perry went 21-6, helping the team to an 84-78 mark. Pretty well all the best players on that team - with one exception - were old guys like Perry, brought on board as free agents - Gene Tenace, Rollie Fingers, Oscar Gamble. When McKeon came aboard in mid-1990, Tenace and Fingers will still around, and still effective. But they'd been joined by a whole host of other Older Dudes - Dave Cash, Willie Montanez, Rick Wise, Aurelio Rodriguez. Furthermore, for reasons that still surpass all human understanding, the team was being managed on the field by their longtime broadcaster, the old Yankee second baseman Jerry Coleman. Coleman is a broadcasting legend, if not necessarily for the right reasons, and a total failure as a manager.
And their best young player? That was Dave Winfield, who would file for free agency at the end of the season and soon afterwards sign the biggest contract in the history of the universe. With the Yankees, who else.
Oh, it was a mess!
McKeon's approach, in the beginning was simple. He just got rid of all the old guys. Every one of them. He picked up Terry Kennedy, a promising young catcher trapped behind Ted Simmons in St Louis (part of a big trade that sent Tenace and Fingers the other way.) A deal with the Yankees brought him a centre fielder (Ruppert Jones), a left fielder (Joe Lefebvre) and a starting pitcher (Tim Lollar.) None of the new guys was older than 25. Neither were the three new guys who took over at three of the infield positions - Broderick Perkins, Juan Bonilla, and Luis Salazar - where they teamed up with another young infielder, shortstop Ozzie Smith.
Not all of these guys turned out to be great players. Or good players. They didn't even all turn out to be adequate. But what the hell. It still beats going 74-88 with old, expensive guys. Who you already know will never be good again...
After the 1981 season, McKeon traded his shortstop Ozzie Smith - already regarded as a defensive wizard, but a player who had yet to hit a lick - for an even younger talent. Garry Templeton, far more accomplished with the bat than Smith, but a player with serious attitude problems who had made the mistake of crossing Whitey Herzog. The same trade also brought Sixto Lezcano to San Diego. Lezcano would not age well, but at the time he was still only 28 and was still a terrific two-way player. McKeon put all this young talent in the hands of the one modern manager who has been more willing than almost any other to give a young player a chance - the old grump himself, Dick Williams.
The young pitchers - Lollar, Andy Hawkins, Eric Show, Dave Dravecky - began to develop. They brought an old free agent from a winning organization (Steve Garvey) to play first base. The next year, they brought in another old free agent from a winning organization (Graig Nettles) to play third base. And presto - by 1984, there they were, in the World Series...
It couldn't last. Dick Williams is one of the greatest judges of talent the game has ever seen. He's also a terminal grouch, who alienates everyone around him, sooner rather than later. He will lose his clubhouse. His players will not just tune him out, they will begin to actively resist him. At which point, you have to get rid of him. McKeon gave a couple of well regarded young managerial prospects an opportunity - Steve Boros and Larry Bowa - both of whom proved that managerial prospects are just like playing prospects - they don't always turn out the way you hope they will. In 1988, McKeon righted the ship (the Padres were off to a 16--30 start) by going down into the dugout himself to replace Bowa. They ended up winning 83 games that year, and 89 games the next. But they had a disappointing year in 1990. McKeon turned over the the managing job to Greg Riddoch halfway through the year, and was fired shortly before the season ended.
By now, Trader Jack was in his early 60s. He moved on to Cincinnati, working as a consultant and special assistant to the GM. When Ray Knight, anointed as the Reds' next manager by Marge Schott while the despised (by Schott) Davey Johnson was still actually on the job (and had the team in first place!) flamed out as the manager in July 1997, McKeon stepped in. His Reds won 99 games in 1999, despite a mediocre year from their best player (Barry Larkin). McKeon was the NL Manager of the Year. They won 85 games the following year despite the fact that they had no pitching whatsoever (their top starter, the only guy to win in double figures, was the immortal Steve Parris. And he went 12-17.) The Reds let him go anyway - hey, he was 70 years old and they'd been grooming Bob Boone to take over.
McKeon was in retirement, playing with his grandchildren when the Marlins came calling in May 2003. The team was off to a 16-22 start, and part of the problem was that the pitchers were dropping like flies. A.J. Burnett had been lost for the year to Tommy John surgery, Mark Redman and Josh Beckett had just hit the disbaled list. The manager (Jeff Torborg) and the pitching coach (Brad Arnsberg) both walked the plank. The Marlins lost 7 of their first 10 games under McKeon, but one of those victories was the first major league win for a 21 year southpaw named Dontrelle Willis. Brad Penny and Carl Pavano kept the rotation afloat. Mike Lowell was having a tremendous season through the end of August, when he was hit by a pitch and broke his hand. Luckily, a 20 year old third baseman named Miguel Cabrera had already joined the team in June (McKeon had been playing him regularly in left field). Beckett returned in July, went 7-5 the rest of the way, and had a memorable post-season.
Well, I sure remember it.
And Trader Jack had his championship.
The Marlins, as is their wont, broke up the team, and Jack eased into retirement after a couple of 83-79 seasons. Presumably for the last time.
Except by now, his grandkids must be all grown up. So why not?
Joe Torre (70 years old, 13 first place finishes, 4 WS titles), Bobby Cox (69 years old, 15 first place finishes, 1 WS title), Lou Piniella (67 years old, 6 first place finishes, 1 WS title) and Cito Gaston (66 years old, 4 first place finishes, 2 WS titles) all turned their teams over to younger men. Only one of the new boys (Fredi Gonzalez in Atlanta) had ever managed a full season in the majors. Two of them - John Farrell and Don Mattingly - had never managed anywhere before.
The torch, passing. Right? The oldest manager still standing was Charlie Manuel in Philadelphia, and while Charlie certainly looks like an old-timer, he didn't actually get his first chance to manage in the majors until 2000. Jim Leyland and Tony LaRussa were the last men remaining who had managed in the majors back in the 1980s. Just as Cox and Torre were the last we would ever see who had managed way, way back in the 1970s. Until this week's strange tidings.
The season's first managerial move actually came in the AL West, where Bob Melvin took over in Oakland once Bob Geren finished the task of completely losing any remaining support in the clubhouse. Working for Billy Beane is a tough gig. For one thing, Billy can be a little exciteable. He also seems to think that his manager should run the team Beane's way. This is difficult for the manager, who has to be thinking - well, there's Billy's way, or there's my way. I think my way is better, actually. But I guess I have to do it Billy's way. Of course if I do it Billy's way and lose... Billy is going to fire me. There are only 30 of these jobs, right?
But the real excitement has been in the NL East.
Jim Riggleman has just committed career suicide - I assume he knows this, so I hope he had a pretty good reason. There was clearly a severe lack of communication between the field manager and the general manager, which makes the choice of Dave Johnson as Riggleman's replacement especially interesting. Johnson, of course, has a long history of quarreling with his front office. (Granted, his employers have included Marge Schott and Peter Angelos, so this may represent something of a badge of honour.) But Johnson has never been famous for his skills as a communicator, with either his bosses or his players.
On the other hand, Johnson has won everywhere he's gone, and the Nationals have a lot of exciting young players. Johnson's most celebrated successes as a manager came with the Mets teams of the 1980s, which featured some very, very young players. We all think first of Gooden and Strawberry, of course, and mere babes they were. But Sid Fernandez, Ron Darling, Lenny Dykstra, Wally Backman, Howard Johnson, Rick Aguilera, Kevin Mitchell were all between the ages of 21 and 24 when Johnson stuck them into the lineup.
Of course, with the sole exception of a 20 year old Adrian Beltre, Johnson didn't do anything even remotely like that in Cincinnati, Baltimore, or Los Angeles, although he was fairly successful in all three stops. Granted, those teams didn't actually have any interesting young players. Not a one. One also looks at how some of those young Mets developed, and thinks that they might have been better served with someone capable of providing a little more professional (and personal) guidance than it's in Johnson's nature to provide. That's not really his job, of course. But still...
In some ways, the situation in south Florida is even more interesting. And that's without wondering about whether Lebron will ever bother to develop some low-post skills. Through the first two months of the season, things were going just swimmingly for the young Marlins. (Marlins, swimmingly... okay. Sorry about that.)They had a 31-22 record, which put them just two games behind the mighty Phillies, and was good enough to have them a couple of games in front of Atlanta and Milwaukee in the wild card hunt. They'd achieved this with almost no contribution whatsoever from Hanley Ramirez. Hanley is both the face of the franchise (the Marlins' entire marketing campaign, and outreach to Florida's sizeable Latino community, is built around Ramirez.) Hanley is also the man widely regarded as responsible for the demise the previous year of manager Fredi Gonzalez. But he'd had nothing to do with anything in 2011. He was hitting just .210/.306/.309 when he was injured at the end of May. So he missed much of what happened next...
First... the wheels fell off. The Marlins suddenly lost eight games in a row, to Arizona, Milwaukee, and Atlanta before finally beating the D-Backs on June 10 to stop their skid.
Then the engine fell completely to pieces, and fell through the chassis to the ground below. The Marlins lost eleven games in a row, to Arizona, Philadelphia, Tampa Bay, and the Angels. Along the way, manager Rodriguez voluntarily walked the plank (the steering wheel had turned to dust in his hands! Pound that metaphor, until it begs for mercy!) - and the Marlins summoned, as his replacement...
Trader Jack.
And once again - and surely this will be the last time - we'll have a manager who was actually running a team way back in the 1970s. And running one extremely well.
Trader Jack is 80 years old, by the way.
But so what, I say! It means he's almost ten years younger than Red Schoendienst, whom we all saw hitting fungoes this weekend in a Cardinals uniform. As it happens, Schoendienst was managing the Cardinals back in 1973, when McKeon made his mangerial debut. Who were some of the other active managers when McKeon's managerial career began? Billy Martin. Danny Murtaugh. Chuck Tanner. Walter Alston. None of whom are active now, to say the least.
I mean - gosh! Willie Mays was still playing, and Leo Durocher was still managing when Jack McKeon came on the scene. That's just too cool to be true...
McKeon's first season in the dugout, way back in 1973, saw him go 88-74 with the Kansas City Royals - who were but a fifth year expansion club. They weren't really that good, of course, and fell back to 77 wins the following year. They fired him the following season, with the Royals at 50-46, and sitting a rather distant second to the still mighty A's (They replaced McKeon with a slightly younger man - Whitey Herzog.)
McKeon caught on with the post free agency A's for a couple of desultory partial seasons, before moving on to San Diego as the general manager in 1980. It was here that the legend of Trader Jack was built. The Padres had come into existence the same year as the Royals (and Expos and Pilots/Brewers) and had been by far the worst of the four new teams. They'd had exactly one winning season in their history. That was 1978 when the ancient-even-then Gaylord Perry went 21-6, helping the team to an 84-78 mark. Pretty well all the best players on that team - with one exception - were old guys like Perry, brought on board as free agents - Gene Tenace, Rollie Fingers, Oscar Gamble. When McKeon came aboard in mid-1990, Tenace and Fingers will still around, and still effective. But they'd been joined by a whole host of other Older Dudes - Dave Cash, Willie Montanez, Rick Wise, Aurelio Rodriguez. Furthermore, for reasons that still surpass all human understanding, the team was being managed on the field by their longtime broadcaster, the old Yankee second baseman Jerry Coleman. Coleman is a broadcasting legend, if not necessarily for the right reasons, and a total failure as a manager.
And their best young player? That was Dave Winfield, who would file for free agency at the end of the season and soon afterwards sign the biggest contract in the history of the universe. With the Yankees, who else.
Oh, it was a mess!
McKeon's approach, in the beginning was simple. He just got rid of all the old guys. Every one of them. He picked up Terry Kennedy, a promising young catcher trapped behind Ted Simmons in St Louis (part of a big trade that sent Tenace and Fingers the other way.) A deal with the Yankees brought him a centre fielder (Ruppert Jones), a left fielder (Joe Lefebvre) and a starting pitcher (Tim Lollar.) None of the new guys was older than 25. Neither were the three new guys who took over at three of the infield positions - Broderick Perkins, Juan Bonilla, and Luis Salazar - where they teamed up with another young infielder, shortstop Ozzie Smith.
Not all of these guys turned out to be great players. Or good players. They didn't even all turn out to be adequate. But what the hell. It still beats going 74-88 with old, expensive guys. Who you already know will never be good again...
After the 1981 season, McKeon traded his shortstop Ozzie Smith - already regarded as a defensive wizard, but a player who had yet to hit a lick - for an even younger talent. Garry Templeton, far more accomplished with the bat than Smith, but a player with serious attitude problems who had made the mistake of crossing Whitey Herzog. The same trade also brought Sixto Lezcano to San Diego. Lezcano would not age well, but at the time he was still only 28 and was still a terrific two-way player. McKeon put all this young talent in the hands of the one modern manager who has been more willing than almost any other to give a young player a chance - the old grump himself, Dick Williams.
The young pitchers - Lollar, Andy Hawkins, Eric Show, Dave Dravecky - began to develop. They brought an old free agent from a winning organization (Steve Garvey) to play first base. The next year, they brought in another old free agent from a winning organization (Graig Nettles) to play third base. And presto - by 1984, there they were, in the World Series...
It couldn't last. Dick Williams is one of the greatest judges of talent the game has ever seen. He's also a terminal grouch, who alienates everyone around him, sooner rather than later. He will lose his clubhouse. His players will not just tune him out, they will begin to actively resist him. At which point, you have to get rid of him. McKeon gave a couple of well regarded young managerial prospects an opportunity - Steve Boros and Larry Bowa - both of whom proved that managerial prospects are just like playing prospects - they don't always turn out the way you hope they will. In 1988, McKeon righted the ship (the Padres were off to a 16--30 start) by going down into the dugout himself to replace Bowa. They ended up winning 83 games that year, and 89 games the next. But they had a disappointing year in 1990. McKeon turned over the the managing job to Greg Riddoch halfway through the year, and was fired shortly before the season ended.
By now, Trader Jack was in his early 60s. He moved on to Cincinnati, working as a consultant and special assistant to the GM. When Ray Knight, anointed as the Reds' next manager by Marge Schott while the despised (by Schott) Davey Johnson was still actually on the job (and had the team in first place!) flamed out as the manager in July 1997, McKeon stepped in. His Reds won 99 games in 1999, despite a mediocre year from their best player (Barry Larkin). McKeon was the NL Manager of the Year. They won 85 games the following year despite the fact that they had no pitching whatsoever (their top starter, the only guy to win in double figures, was the immortal Steve Parris. And he went 12-17.) The Reds let him go anyway - hey, he was 70 years old and they'd been grooming Bob Boone to take over.
McKeon was in retirement, playing with his grandchildren when the Marlins came calling in May 2003. The team was off to a 16-22 start, and part of the problem was that the pitchers were dropping like flies. A.J. Burnett had been lost for the year to Tommy John surgery, Mark Redman and Josh Beckett had just hit the disbaled list. The manager (Jeff Torborg) and the pitching coach (Brad Arnsberg) both walked the plank. The Marlins lost 7 of their first 10 games under McKeon, but one of those victories was the first major league win for a 21 year southpaw named Dontrelle Willis. Brad Penny and Carl Pavano kept the rotation afloat. Mike Lowell was having a tremendous season through the end of August, when he was hit by a pitch and broke his hand. Luckily, a 20 year old third baseman named Miguel Cabrera had already joined the team in June (McKeon had been playing him regularly in left field). Beckett returned in July, went 7-5 the rest of the way, and had a memorable post-season.
Well, I sure remember it.
And Trader Jack had his championship.
The Marlins, as is their wont, broke up the team, and Jack eased into retirement after a couple of 83-79 seasons. Presumably for the last time.
Except by now, his grandkids must be all grown up. So why not?
