Those Were the Days : Bill Rigney, Now 66, Can Look Back on Those Years When He Was Angels’ First Manager and Find Lots of Fond Memories

It is February, 1961. Palm Springs. A ballroom at the Desert Inn Hotel.

Gene Autry, awarded the American League’s Los Angeles franchise just two months earlier, is at the podium, introducing the Angels’ first manager to a banquet crowd welcoming the new team to its spring training base.

Obviously as excited as when he first left Tioga, Tex., to join the Fields Brothers Marvelous Medicine Show, Autry is saying how he had wanted and offered the job to Casey Stengel but that he is certain his managerial selection will do a good job.

He then introduces his new manager as Phil Wrigley.

Bill Rigney is now 66.

The home he shares with his wife, Paula, is on the third fairway of the Round Hill Country Club in the San Francisco suburb of Alamo.

He carries a six-handicap on the golf course and the title of “Assistant to the President, Baseball Matters” with the Oakland A’s, an involved consultant to President Roy Eisenhardt and General Manager Sandy Alderson.

It has been 25 years since Rigney rebounded from that inauspicious introduction and left his impact on a team of character and characters.

Many of them are now in Anaheim to play in today’s Silver Anniversary Old-timers Game, a prelude to the game between the Angels’ current crop of old-timers and Chicago White Sox.

There was a reunion dinner Saturday night, and there will be a round of golf Monday.

Joe Adcock, Earl Averill, Bo Belinsky, Bobby Bonds, Ted Bowsfield, Rocky Bridges, Dean Chance, Ryne Duren, Art Fowler, Jim Fregosi, Eli Grba, Ken Hunt, Ted Kluszewski, Bobby Knoop, Joe Koppe, Bob Lemon, Billy Moran, Tom Morgan, Albie Pearson, Rick Reichardt, Frank Robinson, Tom Satriano, Lee Thomas, George Thomas and Clyde Wright are just some of the returning alumni.

Rigney is back, too--a still vibrant link to the expansion years and more.

He is back among men he considers some of his all-time favorites, remembering and reliving years he considers some of his all-time best.

“How about Frick and Frack?” he asked the other day. “Was that a match made in heaven?”

He alluded to the unholy alliance of Belinsky, the street-smart pool hustler from Trenton, N.J., and Chance, the naive farm boy from Ohio. Two talented pitchers whose most consistent performances were illuminated by neon. Rigney tried everything, but ultimately traded both. A time of mourning on Sunset Boulevard.

“People used to ask me why I roomed them together,” Rigney said, “and I told them that it was because I didn’t want to screw up two rooms.

“What a waste. Chance may have had the best right arm I’ve ever seen (he won the Cy Young Award with a 20-9 record and 1.65 ERA in 1964). He could simply overpower a club.

“The other guy, if he ever wanted to put baseball first, could have won 15 to 18 games a year easy (Belinsky pitched a no-hitter en route to a 5-0 start with the Angels in 1962, then won only 23 games the rest of his career). He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hollywood loved him and he loved Hollywood. He was always thinking about what he was going to do after the game rather than what he was doing during it. I’m not putting him down, it was the way he was.

“I can look back now and say I loved both of those guys, but there were times then I wanted to shoot them.”

Rigney seldom hid his emotions, a gregarious, gesticulating disciple of Leo Durocher, The Lion, his manager and mentor with the New York Giants.

Now, nearly 40 years since the halcyon years in New York and a swift 25 since his debut with the Angels, Rigney’s personality and demeanor haven’t changed, though his stomach has found peace in its time. The ulcer that the Angels kept igniting is now dormant.

There was a period, however, even in his first year with the Angels, that a doctor advised Rigney to keep sponge cake and milk near the dugout as a mid-game retardant for his flaming stomach.

The milk and cake began to disappear, however, before Rigney could get to it. He ultimately discovered that catcher Averill had been pilfering it.

“Hell, Rig,” Averill said when apprehended, “I thought it was a treat for the players.”

It was this same Averill who once tapped Rigney on the shoulder during a tense moment in a game at Washington and said, “I wanted you to know, Skip, that I just counted and found there are 80 lights out in this stadium.”

The expansion Mets, born a year later, were no more amazin’ than the early Angels.

“The lunatics,” Rigney observed, during one desperate moment, “have taken over the asylum.”

Consider:

--Shortstop Fritz Brickell fielded a double play grounder in a game at Minnesota and threw it into right field, where Pearson retrieved it and threw it wildly to the middle of the infield, where pitcher Ron Kline retrieved it and threw it wildly to third base. There had been three errors on the same play and now the ball was bouncing toward the dugout, where Rigney fielded it, stared at it, considered, he said, “taking a bite out of it,” then put it in a secure place, his hip pocket.

--The Mets had Marvelous Marv Throneberry. The Angels had his brother, Fabulous Faye. In the late innings of a close game, Rigney called on Faye to pinch-hit. He called, then called again. Faye was asleep in the corner of the dugout.

--The Angels held a slim lead in another game at Minnesota. The Twins had loaded the bases against Chance, who delivered a pitch low and away. Catcher Hank Foiles reached for it, then spun and raced to the backstop screen, where he searched in vain for the ball. All three runners scored before Foiles thought to look in his glove. The ball had been there all the time.

Rigney screamed some and cried some, then laughed about it later.

It was difficult staying angry, he said.

There was that inning in Cleveland, for instance, in which Paul Foytack gave up four consecutive home runs. The Indians, who didn’t draw then or now, stopped exploding fireworks after the third because it was costing too much money.

When Rigney finally went to the mound, Foytack said, “Damn, Skip, what took you so long.” Outfielder Jimmy Piersall greeted Foytack in the clubhouse with earplugs and a stretcher.

Rigney protected his players when he could and was dead honest when he couldn’t. He was glib and accessible, capable of providing stories when there weren’t any, which was frequently the case with an expansion team.

One night in Palm Springs he invited a writer to accompany him to the Howard Manor, a favorite hunting ground for his players. Rigney knew what he would find. He was barely in the door when an evacuation rivaling Dunkirk began.

“My players have more problems with a curfew than with fundamentals,” he said.

There was a spring in which he tried to wear them out before the neons went on, renting bicycles for them to ride from the hotel to the park and back. No cars. It worked fine for a few days, then the bikes were found at the bottom of the hotel pool.

The culprit? Too many possibilities. Too many people with a little zest for fun.

Lee (Mad Dog) Thomas. King Arthur Fowler. Leon Wagner, who opened a clothing store and coined the slogan, “Get Your Rags from Daddy Wags.” Ryne (The Flame) Duren, the fireballing relief pitcher who wore glasses that resembled the bottom of Coke bottles and who was heavy into bottles of another kind.

Duren once:

--Crashed into the Detroit hotel room of writer Dan Hafner and turned over both Hafner and the mattress he was sleeping on.

--Provided a 5:30 a.m. wake-up call for pitching coach Marv Grissom by chipping golf balls off the window of his Palm Springs hotel room, prompting Grissom, accustomed to Duren’s eccentricities, to open the door and say, “Got kind of an early starting time, don’t you Ryne?”

--Celebrated a 1-0 win at Cleveland in a rare starting assignment by wading through the ponds in the hotel’s Polynesian restaurant.

The hotel manager called Rigney and said, “Mr. Rigney, I’ve got one of your players . . . “

“Don’t tell me,” Rigney interrupted. “I know exactly which one.”

Now a recovered alcoholic, Duren assists people with similar problems in Milwaukee.

“We had characters,” Rigney said, reflecting, “but the characters had a lot of character. They may have had fun after the game, but there was never a doubt in my mind but that they gave 100% once the uniform was on.

“They cared, and they wanted to prove to the clubs they had been with that it was a mistake to have made them expendable.”

Rigney and his general manager, the late Fred Haney, selected 30 players in baseball’s first expansion draft. The outlay: $2,150,000, which is only $50,000 more than pitcher Mike Witt, who has a 40-44 career record, is guaranteed over the next three years.

The Angels’ No. 1 selection was New York Yankee pitcher Eli Grba, who would pitch the victory that owner Autry still ranks as his greatest thrill.

It came on opening day in 1961, the first-ever Angels’ game. Kluszewski hit two home runs and Bob Cerv one. The Angels beat Baltimore, 7-2. Publicist Irv Kaze rented a suite and held a champagne party for Grba and the writers that night.

Rigney, in defiance of the critics and experts who predicted the Angels wouldn’t win 50 games, led his team to 70 wins, still the record for a first-year team.

The second year was even more remarkable.

Rigney juggled a marvelous bullpen featuring Duren, Fowler, Morgan, Jack Spring, Dan Osinski and Julio Navarro, drew career years from second baseman Billy Moran and outfielders Wagner and Lee Thomas, introduced a pair of promising rookies named Jim Fregosi, a shortstop, and Bob Rodgers, a catcher, and had the Angels in first place on July 4th.

“Heaven Can Wait, Angels in 1st on 4th” read Mal Florence’s headline in The Times.

The Angels weren’t there long, but were still only 4 1/2 games behind on Labor Day.

They ultimately finished third, but might have done even better except for late-season injuries to Fowler and starting pitcher Ken McBride.

The meteoric rise was to take a toll, however.

“Absolutely,” Rigney said in reflection. “All of a sudden we were in the first division and we lulled ourselves into thinking we could make some magic any time we wanted.”

Instead of an aggressive pursuit of amateur free agents, ownership retrieved its initial investments, sat back, filled in with a minor leaguer here and there and allowed the early euphoria to evaporate.

“We ran decently at the top,” Rigney said, “but the bottom, the foundation, took too long to develop. We were always trying to find a minor leaguer who was just a little better than what we had. We never seemed to sign a key young player. We never had four or five arrive at the same time. We got to be six and seven years old, and we were still fighting an uphill battle.”

Rigney managed the Angels for eight-plus years. He championed and chaperoned the club as it moved from Wrigley Field to Dodger Stadium to the place where Disneyland is . . . that’s it, Anaheim. The farm system never arrived, however, and only twice after the ’63 season was Rigney able to push the Angels over .500.

He was ultimately fired in May of ‘69, replaced by Lefty Phillips, a longtime friend of the new general manager, Dick Walsh.

“I had signed a two-year contract after the ’68 season,” Rigney said, looking back. “I didn’t know at the time that Haney was going to be moved into a consulting position and that they were going to hire Walsh.

“When Gene and Bob (co-owner Reynolds) told me about it, I said to myself, ‘this is going to be hard, it isn’t going to work.’ I knew the connection between Dick and Lefty, and I knew it was inevitable that he’d want to put his own people in.

“I don’t blame him. He had the right. That’s all part of being a (general) manager. My only regret is that the organization didn’t really improve in my eight years there. I also regret a mistake I made at the end of the 1966 season, when I turned down a three-year offer to manage Detroit.

“It was time then for me to move. I couldn’t see a rainbow with the Angels, and Detroit had a solid club. I had never really had the chance to manage a good team, but I guess I felt a certain loyalty to Gene and Bob.”

He would ultimately get the chance to manage a good team, taking Minnesota to a Western Division title in 1970. Age was creeping in on the Twins, however, and Rigney again paid a price, losing his job in 1972.

He has managed only once since, coming back in 1976 as a one-year favor to longtime friend Bob Lurie, then the new owner of the Giants. He had managed the Giants from 1956 to 1960, moving with them from New York to his Bay Area home. Those years represented a dream come true. The year of 1976 was a nightmare.

A man whose passion for the game has spanned 45 years as player, manager, broadcaster and adviser, Rigney was confronted by the reality that many of today’s players seem to have different drives and attitudes.

“I’ll never forget how I was introducing myself to each of the players that spring,” Rigney said. “I got to one guy, stuck out my hand and said, ‘Hi, I’m Bill Rigney.’ The guy never even said ‘hello,’ never even said, ‘how are you?’ The only thing he said was, ‘why don’t we have more charter flights?’ I said to him, ‘Maybe if you got off your ass and helped us win more games we’d have more charter flights.’

“I mean, I never heard as such bitching and moaning as I heard that year. It just wasn’t fun anymore. I wondered if they played because they liked to play and got paid or was it strictly because of the money. I made up my mind that I didn’t need it, that I wouldn’t manage anymore.”

The late innings have been idyllic. He has a good relationship with the A’s and a comfortable life-style. He looked back and said that those early years with the Angels were comparable to his best ever:

--1947: Back from the Navy to hit .267 with 59 RBIs, 17 home runs and 84 runs scored as the New York Giants leadoff man.

--1951: Bobby Thompson’s home run capping the Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff.

--1970: Converting the chance to finally manage a good team by winning a division title with the Twins.

“With the Angels,” Rigney said, “there was the challenge of doing something that had never been done before, of taking 30 players from different teams and molding them into one team, developing a sense of pride for the lettering on the uniform. There was also the challenge of trying to accomplish what the experts said we couldn’t.

“I look back and think I may have had a small impact on how we played. How we went about it. They cared. They never let down. They picked each other up. Guys like Ryne Duren and Lee Thomas were truly heartbroken when they had to leave. I feel good about that. I think, at least at the start, we accomplished what we set out to do.

“I also think I became a good major league manager with the Angels. Whether I had been with the Giants, I don’t know. The fact that I had to do more with less talent than I had in San Francisco made me better. It made me realize that the key to managing is not knowing what your players can do but what they can’t do--and then don’t let them try.

“I managed 18 years and they were all fun expect the one. I’ve had a great life in baseball. I look at Jimmy (Fregosi) and Buck (Rodgers) managing now and think we may have stimulated something there. I only hope they feel like I do . . . with all the downs, as bad as your stomach can feel, nothing compares to when you win it, 3-2, in the ninth.”