Nice-Guy Boros Gets Padre Job

The San Diego Padres signed Steve Boros to replace Dick Williams as manager on Tuesday and completed an about-face.

Williams might have been too mean, but Boros might be too nice.

Boros lost his managerial job with the Oakland A’s in 1984 because the front-office people there thought he was a softy. They wanted him to run out and kick dirt on umpires, and Boros wouldn’t. They wanted him to yell at outfielder Rickey Henderson, who wasn’t getting to the ballpark on time, and Boros wouldn’t.

They fired him.

“We wanted him to be tougher,” said an A’s executive, who requested anonymity. “The idea that players were adults and should be treated as adults is a little bit simplistic. We all need pats on the behinds, but we also need to be scolded. That was the message we tried to get across (to Boros), and we didn’t, maybe because Steve didn’t think it was his style.”

But it’s this soft style that the Padres apparently prefer. General Manager Jack McKeon had Boros as a player in the 1960s and coached with him in the 1970s. They’re buddies. And last year, McKeon hired him as his minor league coordinator.

When Williams resigned Monday, mainly because of his stormy relationship with his players, McKeon nominated Boros. Both Boros and McKeon drove back to San Diego Monday, and they visited with owner Joan Kroc and President Ballard Smith Tuesday morning.

The hire was made.

In addition, first-base coach Jack Krol has been made third-base coach, and Sandy Alomar, a Padre minor league coach last year, will be first-base coach. Also, Harry Dunlop, who was bullpen coach last season before Williams asked management this winter that he not be retained, becomes Boros’ new bench coach.

“This is Steve’s first time managing in the National League,” Dunlop said. “He just wants to make sure he doesn’t leave anything uncovered.”

Boros, who signed a one-year contract, was the logical choice because he came from within the Padre organization, because he has so many friends here (Dunlop and pitching coach Galen Cisco have worked with him in other cities) and because he has major league managing experience.

As a manager, Boros is known to be an advocate of the running game and also of computerized statistics. As a first-base coach in Montreal, he kept a stopwatch out there with him. He would clock runners from first to second. And he would clock each opposing pitchers’ delivery time to the plate and would add that to the catchers’ throwing time to second base. In theory, then, he could calculate whether a base-stealer would be safe or not before the fact.

And when he was a minor league manager in San Jose, his team stole a modern-day record 372 bases.

But what about the “nice guy” label?

“When I was a player coming up in the minor leagues,” Boros told the Oakland writers after being fired in 1984, “I used to think of ways to hate the pitcher, his appearance, his delivery. I’d come up with something to hate him. I’d get angry, too. I’d throw my helmet, kick water coolers.

“But when I finished my college education as an English major, I had been exposed to philosophy. I found that my old attitude disgusted me. I saw baseball as an art, a beautiful game. It was just me and my emotions. And I started to take pride in controlling myself.