A PURE BASEBALL MAN : Where He Works, Parking’s No Problem and Players Are Broke

It’s an August afternoon, 3 o’clock, 90 degrees and hot enough to take all the salt from an old man, which is what Tony Torchia, who is 43 years old, feels like sometimes.

He leaves Ashley Oaks apartment B-24, a three bedroom that goes for $350 a month, and drives past the run-down houses and grated windows and police on horseback. He pulls up to a nearly deserted baseball park. Most of the members of the Padres’ Class-A baseball affiliate, the Charleston Rainbows, won’t be arriving for at least an hour. Tony will spend that time walking through a nearby park with his wife of 26 years, Nancy. This is his time.

“Every day, this is how I can think,” said the man with the round face and soft New England accent.

After his walk, he arrives back at the College Park field wearing a gray T-shirt that is darkened and wet.

He grabs a belly that stretches the cotton. “I’ve gained 15 pounds lately. Don’t know where it came from. Or maybe I do. I don’t know.”

Tony Torchia’s waste line is one of the rare variables in his life. He has learned to expect that his baseball players will be under 21, and every year they are going to run out of money, eat pregame meals of Snickers bars and want to quit and go home where they can be near their girlfriends. Every spring the season will begin in a Motel 6 and a tiny, lousy clubhouse on the business end of some winter resort, where the more glamorous players and managers from the parent major league teams are in the same town, but on a different planet.

He is part of a major league organization whose owner, stadium and fans he never sees. His only vital contact with the parent club is a tape recorder, which sits on somebody’s oak desk and patiently listens every night to his phoned-in reports.

Each fall his season ends early, in August, just as baseball is getting good. During September and October, when all the fans wish they were managers or players, Tony Torchia is just one of those fans. Year after year.

Tony Torchia is a minor league manager.

And if it sounds like a difficult job . . . “Don Zimmer once said it was baseball’s most difficult job,” said Torchia. “I think now, maybe I believe him.”

Beginning next week when major league teams start dipping into their minor league pools to get a look at promising young players, Padre fans will likely see several of their club’s top prospects.

But they will not hear of, or from, Tony Torchia.

In a way, many minor league players have it easy. After a couple of years they either advance to the major leagues or are released into real life.

Guys like Torchia just stay in the minor leagues. And stay.

Come September, Torchia will have managed in the minors for 11 years. Three years in Class-A. Six years in Double-A. Two years in Triple-A.

In the past 10 seasons, he has had seven winning years and four championships. But when your main job is only to develop players, everyone forgets.

Just once he has been called to the big leagues. It was in 1985, with the Boston Red Sox, an organization he had served as a minor league second baseman and a minor league manager for 24 years.

After all those seasons, they finally gave him a look at the big leagues. He was named bullpen coach.

“I thought, my career had been like depositing money in the bank, and finally I was getting a return,” Torchia said. He spent the first half of that summer reveling as if it were Christmas. He phoned his wife from every next city, every new park. He felt both humbled and proud when players whom he’d coached in the minors would meet him before the games to offer congratulations and belated thanks.

But then in the second half of the year, something else happened he didn’t realize.

“I was a big league coach, but I wasn’t coaching,” he said. “I was being paid to carry six balls down to the bullpen.”

His wife watched from Fenway Park, for one of the first times watching her husband with a more than a couple hundred other people, and she couldn’t understand either.

“This was all we had dreamed about and then we got here it was like, ‘Is somebody fooling me?’ ” Nancy recalled. “This was the same game I had watched for 25 years, maybe a little more hoopla, but the same game. All this dreaming, and it turned out to be the same game.”

Torchia wanted to do more. He thought the big leagues had to be more.

But that winter the Red Sox eliminated the position of bullpen coach. They asked Torchia to go back to what he did best. Back to the minor leagues. Just in time for the Red Sox to win the American League pennant without him.

“They said I was too valuable to be up here in the bullpen,” said Torchia wryly. “Said they had another club for me.”

It turned out to be New Britain (Conn.) of the Double-A Eastern League.

“I was devastated,” said Torchia. “I told them it was my last year with them. But I went.”

After 1986 he started looking around for another job. He ended up with a guy who used to umpire his games, Padre minor league director Tom Romenesko.

The Padres had an opening in Charleston, the lower of their two Class-A teams. Reno is the other. Torchia would be the new manager of the Charleston team.

For most of the players on the Charleston club, it would be their first full pro season. For many, it would their first summer alone. It would be a far drop even from Torchia’s days with the Red Sox Triple-A Pawtucket team when he managed guys like Wade Boggs and Oil Can Boyd.

It would be the minors of the minors and Torchia only needed to ask Romenesko one question. How do I get to Yuma?

“I can’t tell you how impressed I am that, after all he had been through, he was willing to go back to the deep minors,” said Romenesko. “That showed what kind of quality person we would be exposing our youngsters to.”

And so Torchia has survived another summer, older, with gray hair in his sideburns and at least an hour a day will be needed to lose those 15 pounds.

And his wife Nancy has just one request.

“I would love for baseball to change the name ‘minor leagues’ ” said Nancy. “How about ‘necessary leagues?’ Or ‘pre-major leagues?’

“After all we’ve been through, I just don’t like the sound of the word minor .”

The phone rings in the walk-in closet where Tony Torchia has his desk.

“Home locker room,” answers Tony Torchia.

Pause.

“Yes ma’am, tonight’s game is at 7:30 p.m. Greensboro. Yes ma’am.”

Torchia hangs up and sighs:

“I have the only manager’s office where the phone number is listed in the book.”

Outside is Charleston’s College Park, a refurbished old stadium of 6,000 seats, most of which still creak when you sit. Led by a team president, Ray Passailaigue, who used to dress up as the team’s mascot rooster, the franchise is thriving with the usual bikini contests and postgame dances on the infield and a beer vendor who entertains during a rain delay by sliding around in the mud.

The franchise has had other major league affiliates before the Padres came along in 1985. And if the Padres should decide to bail out in 1988 at the end of their contract, other teams will be clamoring to replace them.

The franchise is drawing 1,200 a game this year, and will probably do that much next year, with or without a guy like Tony Torchia. But he’s used to all that.

“One season, one summer at a time,” he says, pulling a fresh white Rainbow jersey over his bare chest, still wet from the daily walk.

“I take everything as it comes. I’ve learned.” On his wall is a cardboard clock. Any air conditioning comes through an open hole in the ceiling. There are grates on the outside of the windows. The indoor carpet is turned upside down; the rubber part sticks up so the floor won’t damage the cleats. That’s OK, it is an ugly plaid anyway.

Pitcher Matt Maysey, 20, sticks his head in and looks at Torchia.

“Can I have a ball to warm up with?” he asks.

“What kind of ball do you want?” says Torchia, rummaging around.

“How about a white one,” says Maysey.

This was no joke.

Last summer former Red Sox second baseman Jerry Remy apprenticed under Torchia at New Britain in hopes of starting a new career.

“He took one look at the life,” recalled Torchia, “and he quit.”

Such is the life:

“Sometimes I’m a father confessor, sometimes I’m a baby sitter, usually I’m either lending the kids money or trying to direct them on their future,” Torchia said. “Do you know this is the first year I’ve actually had my own third-base coach, and could manage from the dugout? Tell the Padres I thank them.”

Back when he managed Bruce Hurst, the Red Sox pitcher would quit baseball every year, on schedule, for four years. It is as much Torchia’s understanding as Hurst’s arm that got the pitcher to the big leagues

“I guess I’ve always had a lot of compassion for the players,” said Torchia. “I realize what a tough road this is for them. I try to understand them.”

He understands that the average player’s take-home pay is $310 every two weeks. On the road, they are given $11 a day meal money. Money is their first and most enduring problem, with every other dilemma lining up close behind.

He must tell players when their careers are finished.

Torchia is the one who finally talked Mark Fidrych into quitting when he pitched for Pawtucket in 1983.

“He obviously didn’t have it anymore, he was a one-year wonder, so I called him in and said, ‘Mark, great players don’t get released, they retire. He knew what I meant. He set he would retire. We set up the press conference. That was it.”

Most of the time, however, Torchia must do all the tough stuff himself.

Such as:

--Rake the field before the game. “In Bristol (Conn.), it used to be me. There wasn’t anybody else, and it had to get done.”

--Hold the hands of the new batboys. “I’ve got to sit next to our new batboys in the dugouts, tell them when to go out and get the bats. Sometimes they’ll go out so soon, they’ll almost get hit on a backswing. I once saw a batboy get hit by a throw from right field. Got to break in the batboys right.”

--Wash the towels and uniforms and clean the spikes. “In Winston-Salem for one month, it was my wife and I. She got to the park early so the kids wouldn’t be there.”

--Give special help to the Latin American kids, who are not only adjusting to a new career, but a new world.

Torchia has driven his young Spanish-speaking players to their driver’s license tests. Once he even checked the want-ads, and then drove a player around until the kid had purchased a used car.

“I still can’t speak much Spanish, maybe, ‘Freeze on a line drive’, but these guys can’t understand anything from us,” Torchia said. “Not the umpire calling them out, not a teammate calling for a fly ball. It takes understanding.”

--Picking the team’s bus driver. Forget the staring lineup or pitching rotation. For a minor league manager, this may be his most important decision of all.

Earlier this season a man named Fred Cox, who had driven a bus for Torchia 10 years ago in Winston Salem, surprised him with a pregame visit. In the life of the minor league manager, it is the bus drivers, not the players, who return to shake hands. “The bussie in my business means everything,” said Torchia, who once offered his bus driver his championship ring when a team owner didn’t want to buy an extra. “Understand that on the road, our kids have no way of leaving the motel. Bus drivers are the guys who, if you are good to them, might take the guys to the shopping mall and theaters and to buy fruit.”

Torchia, in fact, uses up most of his road trip conversation on bus drivers. “I’m the one who has to keep him awake,” he said.

--Laying down all the silly rules. Torchia’s laws are like the man himself, soft-spoken, understanding, but not ones to be pushed.

Fighting will cost you $200. Once Torchia saw two players brawling over a Bob Feller autographed baseball and decided, this is so dumb, nothing should be more expensive.

Wearing no socks on a trip will cost $5. “Teaching them how to dress is all part of it,” he said.

A girl in a motel room is $50. Being late for a meeting is $15.

Missing a cutoff man or missing a steal sign? “I fine them nothing,” said Torchia. “Every player can’t hit the cutoff man, some of these guys just aren’t capable. But every player can show up on time.”

Good thing Tony Torchia can’t fine himself. He makes about $25,000 a year. Well, for that one major league season he made $35,000, but that was just once.

And now for the obvious, why?

For Torchia, who is a substitute teacher in the off-season in Cape Coral, Fla., it’s got something to do with watching people grow up.

“Only 5% of my kids--of any minor leaguers--are ever going to make the big leagues,” said Torchia. “Of course, I don’t tell them that, but it’s true.

“Because of those odds, I think they should have a positive experience while they are here. I think they should learn something. These are important years in their lives; I hope I can have some influence on them. It’s easy to say you can’t change the spots on a leopard. But you can try.”

Sometimes it puzzles him to wonder why he isn’t coaching in the big leagues, or, for that matter, why he isn’t managing there.

Goodness, his 1978 Bristol team won the Double-A Eastern League over a team managed by Lee Elia, now manager of the Phillies. His 1984 Pawtucket team won the Triple-A International League over a team bossed by Doc Edwards, now manager of the Cleveland Indians.

Run your finger down the 1986 Red Sox World Series roster. At one time or another 16 of those players had been managed by Torchia.

“Anybody would be fortunate to have a person of his caliber in their organization,” said the Padres’ Romenesko. “For whatever reason, he’s not made the big leagues, and we’re just lucky he’s with us.”

Lucky, he feels that sometimes, too.

Torchia remembers the Eastern League championship of 1981, with Bristol, when his team came back from a 2-games-to-1 deficit against a great Glens Falls (N.Y.) team featuring future major league stars Greg Walker and Ron Kittle. Torchia’s team won two straight to take the best-of-five series. And after the game, the fans rushed the field and Torchia poured champagne on his 11-year-old son, Troy, and then put his arms around his players and cried.

It wasn’t the big leagues but then sometimes, as Torchia can tell you, the big leagues aren’t the big leagues.

“When the Red Sox sent me back to the minors last season,” he said, “they told me to look at baseball only as a way to make a living. They said, ‘Look at it like a business.’ ”

“I told them, ‘I’m sorry. But to me, baseball will never be a business.”