Anderson’s Fall From Grace Just Won’t End

It was the not-too-perfect end to a not-too-perfect year.

About this time in 1984, Sparky Anderson was shaking more hands than a department store Santa Claus.

Understandably so. He had brought the holiday cheer to Detroit early by leading the Tigers to 104 regular-season victories, a sweep in the first round of the playoffs and an easy, five-game triumph in the World Series.

There were parades, banquets and awards all over the country. Anderson, a Thousand Oaks resident for 19 years, didn’t get to see too much of home.

And he truly regretted that. Sparky Anderson would much prefer to be plain old George Anderson in the off-season, the guy who pulls his weeds, paints his house and then goes over to the nearby homes of his three kids, pulls up his sleeves and starts all over again.

That seemed to be the one consolation for 1985. It wasn’t easy for the man who has won world championships in both leagues to watch his team tumble from the top into third place in the American League East--15 games out, 20 wins poorer than in 1984.

But, at least, Anderson figured he would have a peaceful winter with his family.

What he didn’t figure on, however, was the biggest tumble of all.

Each year, Anderson sponsors a local golf tournament to raise funds for the baseball program at Cal Lutheran College. Last week, while trying to store some bats to be used as tournament prizes in his garage, he fell seven feet off a ladder, breaking two bones in his upper left forearm.

“That ladder disappeared real quick,” says Anderson, seated amid two decades of awards in the den of his home. “Wham! When I hit that concrete, I thought I had broken every bone in my body. It happened real quick, but when I was flying through the air, I knew I was in trouble. I knew something here is going to happen.”

Ironically, the 51-year-old Anderson, who played 12 years of pro ball, had never before broken a bone, not even in high school.

He insists he didn’t stage his accident to get out of a winter of house painting. “I really look forward to doing that kind of stuff,” he says.

Instead, he’ll be spending the next three to six weeks in a cast, giving him plenty of time to analyze what went wrong.

Not in the garage. In the dugout.

Anderson has spent enough time at the top--both with Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine for nine years in the ‘70s and now for nearly seven years with Detroit--to know that achieving such heights can be just as precarious on the diamond as it was on his ladder.

But while the first charge leveled at every club that fails to repeat is complacency, Anderson refuses to point his finger in that direction.

“I’ll never believe that about any club,” he says. “I’ll tell you something. No guy likes to leave that field a loser. Ever. They have so much pride. They always want to do well. You know, when you’re going good, you are all loved by the fans. But when things are not going good, people can be cruel.”

So if not complacency, then what?

“It’s hard to explain,” he says. “Going into the season, I thought we had an outstanding defense. But we played poorly. We were like 13th in the league defensively, 10th in hitting and in the middle of the pack in runs scored. I have never seen a team execute any poorer than we did.

“You know, if you execute and do all of the little things right, all of a sudden, big things happen. But if you do the little things wrong, you never even see the big things.

“But let me say right now that Toronto was a better club. They were clearly the best club in our division. No doubt in my mind. We might have made it closer, but they were going to win it.”

One nightmarish period late in the season continues to haunt Anderson these cold, winter days.

“A year ago,” he says, “we didn’t lose a game that we led going into the ninth inning. There was one stretch of 15 games this year, though, where we lost two games in the ninth inning where we had a two-run lead, two where we had three-run leads, and one, right here in Anaheim against the Angels, where we had a four-run lead in the ninth, with two out and a man on. Instead of being 13-2 in that stretch, we were 8-7.

“That’s the difference, one season to the next. The difference between winning and losing is such a fine line. Winning becomes contagious. Well, losing becomes contagious, too.

“But you know, people expect me to win. They don’t treat me like others. I’m supposed to win. Well, I’m not a miracle worker. I’m not some Wizard of Oz. The game is still the players.”

Anderson is quick, however, to emphasize that he isn’t shrugging off his responsibilities.

“There’s an answer out there somewhere,” he says, “and I’ve got to find it. If you don’t blame yourself, who do you blame? I don’t pitch. I don’t field. I don’t hit. So, I better shoulder the blame for something. The manager is supposed to find answers somewhere.

“The door’s got to be locked sometime. It’s up to me to find somebody to do it. Obviously, I made some bad choices someplace.”

He rubs his broken forearm as he talks. Outside his Thousand Oaks home, the wind whistles and the rain continues to fall.

Spring seems a long way off.