Mauch Gets New Chance to Look Adversity in Eye

Sweet are the uses of adversity! --SHAKESPEARE, in “As You Like It”

Adversity’s sweet milk, philosophy. Hang your philosophy! Unless philosophy can make another Juliet. --SHAKESPEARE, in “Romeo and Juliet”

The proposition is this: Gene Mauch is (choose one): (a) the best manager in baseball who never got in a World Series, or (b) a bad manager, as proof of which is the fact he never got in a World Series.

Gene Mauch is a complicated man. He’s as intense as a light bulb, as explosive as six sticks of dynamite in a bouncing truck. He smolders a lot, seethes. He often appears to be gritting his teeth to avoid doing something he knows he will regret.

He’s a handsome man who has little time for women, a gambler who nevertheless plays the percentages. He sulks, hollers, rages, breaks things. Yet, he excels at games that require excessive patience, like bridge and golf.

He is calculating while appearing to be impulsive.

He is a driven man who does not mind feuds.

He has a nice smile because he doesn’t use it much, and when it comes it’s like the sun breaking through heavy clouds.

He was a frustrated player, a minor league star (he hit .348 in the Triple-A Coast League one year with 20 home runs and 84 RBIs), but he could never get a full chance in the big leagues.

He was a cerebral player who seldom made a mistake with the glove or the ball, and he couldn’t abide people who did.

He stands expressionless in a dugout through the most calamitous of on-field happenings, but his brow is as black as a storm front.

He once threw a whole table full of barbecued ribs across a room in Texas (he was furious because a rookie beat him in the ninth inning with his first-ever hit--but he was to laugh later that the rookie was Joe Morgan).

The bottom line with Gene Mauch is, he cares. He’s never been an “Aw, let’s forget it and go have a beer” manager. Gene doesn’t forget it.

One of the things he doesn’t forget is 1964. That was an OK year for a lot of people--Johnson was President, gas was 40 cents a gallon, movies ran to “Mary Poppins” and “Sound of Music” instead of soft porn.

But to Gene Mauch, it was the Johnstown flood, the sinking of the Titanic and the 1929 Crash all rolled into one.

Mauch was managing a Philadelphia Phillies team that had been so bad it lost 23 straight games only two seasons before.

It wasn’t exactly Murderers’ Row, but Gene had it comfortably in the lead (by 6 1/2 games) with 12 to go.

The magic number was, like, three. The Phils had to lose, like, 11 of 13 to blow it.

They did better than that. They lost 10 in a row.

They were 2 1/2 back and in third place by the time the season ended.

It was one of the great blowups of baseball history.

And Gene Mauch was standing there with his face blackened, his eyebrows singed and his hair burning when it was over.

Recriminations were not long in coming.

Mauch had blown it, the press charged. He had over-managed (a charge that was fastened on him like a scarlet letter). He had used his ace pitchers (Jim Bunning and Chris Short) on two days’ rest. He had panicked.

A team that was printing World Series tickets on Sept. 24 was in third place a week-and-a-half later.

It took Gene Mauch the rest of his life crawling out of that rubble. A lesser man would have gone into the insurance business. But Mauch figured baseball owed him one. He set about in grim pursuit of vindication. He was as single-minded as Captain Ahab, as implacable as a Lenin.

They gave him the Montreal expansion franchise to manage next, a happy hunting-ground of Coco Laboys, Adolfo Phillipses, guys who were over the hill and guys who never even got to the hill. Mauch took them to respectability.

They gave him Minnesota to manage next.

This was a franchise that wouldn’t have bought Babe Ruth at the waiver price at the time, and it was throwing great players to the wind like a drunk throwing his money off dance hall balconies, not to beef up its own franchise but to get rid of salaries.

Mauch was playing .500 ball with a lineup that wouldn’t have made the American Assn. in his day.

When they gave Gene Mauch the California Angels in 1981, he couldn’t believe his good luck.

Real, live big-leaguers. Rod Carew, Reggie Jackson, Fred Lynn, Bob Boone.

Mauch was like a guy who has been asked to win Indy for years with a stock Edsel and suddenly gets a March-Cosworth. It was duck soup for him to win a pennant easily.

When he lost the 1982 league championship series, 3-2, after winning the first two games, the old bugbears surfaced. People began remembering this was the guy who had lost the pennant in the last week in 1964.

Mauch had pitched Tommy John with only three days’ rest. Shades of Jim Bunning and Chris Short. Reruns of the old “over-managing” stories.

Mauch resigned. The team that had won 93 games under him won 70 the next year.

They brought Gene back in 1985. The team promptly won 90 games again. It missed the (division) title by one game.

This year, he has won the title again. Two titles (’82 and ‘86) in three seasons--and a one-game miss in the other--argues that Gene Mauch is an over-achiever, not an over-manager.

Even Shakespeare couldn’t agree whether adversity fits a man, or destroys him, whether it’s good for him or ruinous.

It depends on the man.

Gene Mauch will get another chance to find out. Gene will be the man in the corner of the dugout in the coming playoffs against Boston, glaring at the world as if it owes him money and he means to collect. In a sense, it does and he just may.

Sam Snead was the best golfer never to win a U.S. Open.

Ernie Banks was the best player never to play on a pennant-winner.

O.J. Simpson was the best player never to make a Super Bowl.

And Gene Mauch is the best manager never to get in a World Series.

If I were the Red Sox, I’d rather see almost any other manager in that other dugout. Gene has had enough. As Shakespeare said, adversity, my eye!