The Little General : He Has Won Many Battles and Lost Some Wars, Notably in ’64 and ‘82, but Gene Mauch Is Back in Uniform

It is 8 a.m. on a cold, misting morning at Mesa, Ariz. Reggie Jackson is planning his day as he drives toward the Angels’ training base. He is thinking of the coffee and pancakes he will soon be having. He is thinking of the workout that will soon be canceled because of the weather.

He arrives two hours before the workout is scheduled to begin, parks his car, turns off the ignition and hears the voice of Manager Gene Mauch thundering across the complex.

“Stay on the base. Stay on the base.”

Jackson peers through the mist toward Diamond 1. He sees the tarpaulin has been cleared from the first-base area. He sees Mauch in uniform, dismissing the cold and rain as he works with outfielder Juan Beniquez on the nuances of first-base play. Jackson’s head drops to the steering wheel.

He knows now there will be a workout.

He knows now there is validity to what he previously suspected, which is that the Little General has returned to a team of suspect chemistry and intensity with all of his renowned zeal. Jackson smiles, feeling good at the thought, believing, as he says later: “Gene Mauch brings something we need . . . some drive, some push, some demands.”

There is irony in this, for there was a time when Gene Mauch--the thinking man’s manager, the manager Sparky Anderson called the smartest who ever lived--doubted that he would ever again experience those familiar drives and demands.

Stunned by the second-guessing he received after the Angels lost the 1982 American League playoff with Milwaukee and flattened emotionally by the ensuing death of his wife, Nina Lee, Mauch has survived a battle with indifference. He is returning for his 24th season as a major league manager with characteristic combinations of caring and cunning, confidence and complexity.

He has turned that difficult period between October, 1982, when he rejected a delayed offer to return as Angel manager, and October, 1984, when he agreed to succeed John McNamara, into a private preserve, basically off limits to probing media.

It is left for Don Drysdale, a Rancho Mirage neighbor and friend, to reveal that Mauch responded to the criticism of his managing in the ’82 playoffs in the same principled manner that he responded in Minnesota when he quit as the Twins manager because he believed that then-owner Calvin Griffith didn’t have a commitment to winning.

The Angels offered Mauch a 1983 contract but only after questioning a number of his pivotal decisions in the wake of a best-of-five series that the Brewers won after losing the first two games. It was as if a club-record 93 wins during the regular season and an American League attendance record of 2.8 million didn’t count for anything.

“The major factor (for quitting) was that he felt he had done the best possible job with a team that wasn’t expected to win,” Drysdale said.

“The criticism was totally unjust and unfair. You win as a team and lose as a team.

“Gene decided, ‘To hell with it. . . . I don’t have to put up with it.’ ”

Likewise, it is left for brother-in-law Roy Smalley Sr., a former major league infielder, to confirm that the devastated Mauch made a painfully slow adjustment to the ensuing illness and death of his wife in June, 1983, only three months after the discovery of her cancer.

The Mauchs had been married for 35 years. They had gone to the same junior high school in Los Angeles and been friends and sweethearts ever since.

“Gene still feels it, but I’m happy to see him back on the field,” Smalley said. “His enthusiasm and optimism is just as real and vital as ever.”

The fires began to burn again during the final weeks of the ’84 race. Mauch had returned to the club a year earlier in the phantom capacity of personnel director. He watched games from the executive level, made an occasional scouting trip, offered a player or two to help at times--with McNamara’s approval.

Basically, however, it was still a period of intense grieving.

“I was deep into indifference,” he said. “I was even indifferent about being indifferent. I mean, I didn’t give a damn or a darn. I went two years dead certain I’d never manage again.

“Then, when the pennant race began to heat up last year, I felt those little things in my belly again and liked it. I went to look at our kids in the (Arizona) Instructional League when the season was over and said to myself, ‘Hey, this is fun again.’ ”

At 59, he has been a baseball professional for 42 years, a scarred man in a boys’ game, haunted forever by the memory of 1964, when his Phillies blew a lead that couldn’t be blown, and haunted now, too, by the memory of the ’82 playoff, when he juggled his rotation in the same way he juggled his ’64 rotation, trying to win it too soon.

“Some people think that was the only year I ever managed,” Mauch once said of the ’64 season.

In reality, he has managed 3,457 major league games, putting him ninth on the all-time list. He has also directed a series of basically bad teams to 1,646 wins, which also ranks him ninth.

If the accomplishments are forgotten amid a media and fan emphasis on what he has not won, Mauch deals with the demons of his destiny by believing he has never cheated an employer, never backed up to a pay window, never actually had an opposing manager beat him between the white lines.

“Nobody has and nobody will,” he once said.

Put another way on the eve of this current spring: “I may not be the smartest manager and I may not know everything, but if I don’t, no one else does either.”

The cool candidness is as close as Mauch gets to self-analysis. He has said that he doesn’t spend time on it and won’t climb on the couch for any writer who doesn’t have psychiatric training.

Such an attitude reflects the combativeness of the gritty infielder who learned early that he had to give something extra, that he had to play with his mind as well as his body, that he couldn’t survive without 100% intensity.

Even now, with all his experience, intelligence and confidence, Gene Mauch knows he wouldn’t be back managing if not for those little things in his belly.

“I don’t know what all the ingredients are to managing in the majors, but I do know you can’t do it without enthusiasm, without excitement,” he said. “I have that again, and I’m not just happy about it, I’m grateful.”

How will that enthusiasm, that intensity, play on a team accused of lacking it at times?

This, too, is a subject Mauch refuses to discuss in depth, apparently fearful that the wrong word or interpretation can destroy what he calls the delicate and fragile nature of team chemistry.

“If obviously caring, as I do, rubs off, that’s great, but I don’t even think about what I contribute in that area,” Mauch said.

“I don’t handle people, I level with people.”

The man has aged and the game has changed. No longer is he likely to angrily upend a clubhouse food table after a loss, exchange punches with an opposing pitcher or verbally ride an opponent from the bench.

The concern is there, however, and it is obvious that Mauch does think about it.

It is obvious that he has begun an effort to help reestablish the Angels’ drive, the feeling that he knows was there in ’82.

Mauch initiated the process in Mesa on March 1, only hours after the full squad reported. He asked veterans Bob Boone, Rod Carew, Doug DeCinces, Brian Downing, Bobby Grich, Reggie Jackson and Rob Wilfong to join him in a distant corner of the complex.

Mauch will not talk about what was said. It may be that he believes his remarks will be viewed as criticism of his quiet predecessor, McNamara. However, the players seemed to view the remarks as a positive goal, a commitment to teamwork.

Said Jackson: “Gene stressed that we need each other. He said that the attitude and atmosphere weren’t good last year and that we could all do a hell of a lot better. He got us thinking positive, got us thinking about this year, before we contributed to a lot of articles dealing with the negatives of last year and the players we’ve since lost.”

It was in September of 1984 that a serious questioning of the Angels’ work ethic began. Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post watched the Angels play a showdown series with Kansas City and wrote a commentary to the effect that the Angels were only going through the motions, that they appeared to run hard only to the bank.

Owner Gene Autry, frustrated by another summer of Angel futility, seemed to respond to what he read. He clipped the article from The Times and sent it to publicist Tom Seeberg with instructions to display it in the clubhouse in Texas, where the team ended the season.

The players got the message but didn’t like it. Jackson stood up and said it was a cheap shot. He said the next time Autry has something to say he should say it directly, visiting the clubhouse as New York Yankee owner George Steinbrenner would.

Then and now, however, there is agreement among the players that the club lacked a degree of spiritual chemistry, that an environment in which a laid back manager was devoid of a Don Baylor, a clubhouse enforcer, failed to generate consistent motivation.

Why would a team with an average salary second only to the Yankees require motivation? There is no real answer to that. There are different perceptions from different people, all of whom seem to believe that Mauch will help produce an improved atmosphere and dedication.

Catcher Boone, for example said that intensity is automatic with Mauch, that you never have to wonder if it will be there. He also said that a Mauch team is never unprepared, which is all you can ask of a manager.

“He simply knows more aspects of the game than anybody I’ve been around,” Boone said.

Said DeCinces: “We have a quiet club. A lot has been said about that. I think Gene’s outward intensity will change that. I also anticipate our younger players will be more mentally prepared to play now because Gene talks baseball from the time he arrives until he leaves. He’s had great success with young players.”

Said Geoff Zahn: “I wouldn’t say that Mac wasn’t a great manager or that he wasn’t intense.

“It’s just that it was manifested in a different way. Mac kept it in and Gene lets it out.

“A veteran club shouldn’t need a manager to motivate it, but occasionally you’ll have an older club that’s been pieced together and doesn’t know where the leadership is supposed to come from.

“On an older club that’s been together for a long time and won consistently, guys know when to kick each other and which guys to kick.

“On a club where the faces change a lot and which hasn’t won that often, the tendency is to look at each other without knowing who’s supposed to step forward.”

In addition, the spirited Grich said, there was a problem last year getting the bench vocally and animatedly involved. Grich implied that the players who were not in the lineup seemed to emulate McNamara’s impassive personality, whereas Mauch actively encourages a lively bench.

Grich said that with Baylor and Fred Lynn gone and the nucleus a year older, the Angels have to rely now on a team offense and that Mauch is a master at producing it, be it Mauch Ball, Little Ball or Team Ball.

He added that Mauch himself seems more relaxed now, after having been around the Angels for almost five years. “He has a better understanding of our personality and we have better understanding of his,” Grich said. “He’s smiling more, laughing more. There’s improved communications. We’re getting our work in but having more fun.”

Jackson agreed. He said “the Gene Mauch work ethic” is mandatory in an environment that tends to dilute intensity and motivation.

“Baseball in California is entertainment,” Jackson said. “I don’t even look on it as a job. There’s not the life and death atmosphere to it that you find in the East. It’s harder to develop a killer instinct. It’s pretty rather than gritty.

“You’ve got fans who have to decide between the ballpark or going sailing. You’ve got girls walking around the stadium in bikinis.

“We’d come in with the Yankees and think, ‘Hey, it’s the Angels. They don’t slide hard, they don’t play hard.’ I mean, it’s tougher for a manager to develop that type work ethic that will carry a team through a 162-game schedule, but I have respect for the business (and like) the way Mauch goes about it.

“He projects an uneasy air, and that’s good. You need to feel that you have to play to a certain level for approval. I stretched a double into a triple the other day, and he didn’t say good hustle, he didn’t say anything.

“He looked at me as if to say he expected to me to be on third, as if to say, ‘What next, old man?’

“I mean, it isn’t always comfortable being around Gene Mauch, but the bottom line is that his theory is productive.

“He’s like Al Davis. He recognizes that winning is a long, plodding effort and he’s always looking for the little ways to beat you. I have the feeling he stays up all night thinking about how to get a bunt down.

“I told someone that if Gene Mauch lost his wallet on the desert and you watched him walk back on the desert to find it, you’d believe he knew exactly where he was going, where he had lost it.

“You believe what he says because the image he projects doesn’t give you reason to doubt it.”

General Manager Mike Port began to believe, especially the more he and Mauch talked about finding a new manager.

Intensity. Knowledge. Experience. Compassion with young players.

“I finally turned to Gene and asked him, ‘aren’t we talking about you?’ ” Port said.

“He kind of laughed and said, ‘Well, the fire is burning again.’ ”

Port paused, reflecting on the subject of intensity.

“I thought we had it last year but that it wasn’t collective enough,” Port said. “Guys were traveling different roads, trying to do it themselves. The question in my mind was how do we make it more unified? How do we bottle it?”

Port believes he has found the answer in his new manager, whose bid to spread a competitive fire has been helped by the best group of farm prospects in Angel history.

No veteran is safe now. No veteran can afford the time to look over his shoulder.

Said Grich: “That’s what this team has needed at every position. I think you’ll see a change in spirit on that basis alone. I think the older players can’t afford to get lazy now, can’t afford to ride on their laurels.

“I welcome it. I like having competition. I think it’s healthy for everyone concerned. Nothing is worse than to have it made and to try and push yourself.”

Gene Mauch’s customized golf cart sits empty by the ninth green at Sunrise Country Club.

He could step out the back door and ride the plush fairways of an easy life, but he is back pursuing a star-crossed pennant dream, back pushing himself and his team, innovatively doing it his way.

He has returned Reggie Jackson to right field. He is prepared to go with rookie pitchers. He has outlined a new attack to Gary Pettis and Dick Schofield, who can be expected to join Bob Boone in playing a considerable amount of Little Ball.

He has set down a verbal challenge.

“The expectancy of winning can only come from winning,” Mauch said. “I feel like this club expects to do well, and I damn well expect it to.

“I’m assuming, in fact, that everyone will play as good as they can play. If they do, no one will beat us.”

And Mauch will know he made the right choice in responding to the feelings in his stomach.

“Part of that (the decision to return) was knowing the caliber of the people I would be working with,” Mauch said.

“Part of it is that bumming around is all right until you start feeling like a bum. I had a plan for 40 years--all baseball and a little golf.

“I tried it the other way (the last two years) and I didn’t like it at all.”