Gene Mauch a Lot Like Captain Ahab

To some, Gene William Mauch was the best manager never to have gotten to a World Series.

To others, Gene Mauch never got to a World Series because he was not a good enough manager.

He over-managed, they said. He kept his players at arm’s length. He was an authoritarian. He couldn’t cope with the modern-day ballplayer. He lacked resiliency. And so on.

Well, he was all of those things. So was John McGraw. So were Connie Mack, Leo Durocher, Casey Stengel. Name me a great manager or coach who wasn’t.

You think Vince Lombardi took a vote before he made a decision? That Knute Rockne went out and had a beer with the boys? You think the Yankee players didn’t know Joe McCarthy was boss?

I think Gene Mauch was the best manager in baseball for a lot of years. I think he did things with mediocre to marginal material very few managers could do.

Look, anybody can win a pennant with the 1927 Yankees. I don’t think it’s too hard to win a World Series when you have the Dean brothers and Ducky Medwick and Frankie Frisch, or when the middle of your lineup is DiMaggio, Gehrig, Dickey, Lazzeri & Co., or Cochrane, Simmons and Foxx, or Robinson, Campanella, Snider and Hodges.

But when they hand you an expansion club in a foreign country and stock it with has-beens and never-weres and never-will-bes; when they give you the 1960 Philadelphia Phillies, a team that lost 23 games in a row, a major league record; when they hand you the 1976 Minnesota Twins, you don’t last 26 years unless you know what you’re doing. You don’t win 1,903 games if you’re not good at it.

One of the first times I saw Gene Mauch was almost a quarter of a century ago. He was the fiery young manager of the Phillies. He took them from hapless--sports page readers thought that was the city they represented because that’s the only way they ever saw them identified, “the hapless Phils”--to magic numbers in three years.

I went down to the locker room when the Phillies, leading the league by 6 1/2 with little more than a week to play in ‘64, were all but printing World Series tickets. Their magic number was, like 2.

“What do you think of ‘magic numbers?’ ” I asked the young skipper--38 at the time.

“I like them fine when they’re in my favor,” Gene said, grinning.

Well, of course, they really weren’t in his favor. The Phillies went into the worst tailspin in league history. They left magic numbers lying all over the place as they went on such a losing streak that they actually fell to third place for a while, and had to rally to tie for second.

I won’t say Gene Mauch changed after that because I didn’t know him that well before that. But I always thought there was a lot of Captain Ahab in Gene Mauch from then on.

Captain Ahab, in fiction, you remember, is the whaler who had his leg bitten off by the great white whale and made it his lifelong obsession to bag the creature and avenge himself. He perishes in the attempt, being taken on his final “Nantucket sleigh ride” to the bottom of the ocean by Moby Dick.

There were elements of this monomania in Gene Mauch. But you can’t go chasing any monsters of the deep with the Montreal Expos or the 1976 Minnesota Twins. You can’t get Moby Dick with a canoe. Even Captain Ahab needed a crew and the Pequod. But when Gene Mauch got the Angels in 1981, he got this gleam in his eye. Vengeance was going to be his.

Well, you all know what happened. Within sight of his prize, harpoon at the ready in 1982 and 1986, Captain Gene went on his own Nantucket sleigh ride, each time with victory in his grasp.

I have seldom in my life in sports seen a more tragic, gloomier, almost Hogarthian picture than the one of Gene Mauch on television in 1986, standing in a corner alone in the dugout just after his team had come within a strike of getting into the World Series, only to see it get away again in a shocking series of all but unbelievable misfortunes.

Mauch was beyond shock. He looked like a man staring into his own coffin. I remember thinking, “This time, he won’t recover.” This was too devastating.

You have to remember, in that celebrated Game 5 of the playoffs, Mauch’s Angels still had the bottom of the ninth to retrieve the game and redeem themselves and they had a man on third with only one out before, as it happens, they popped up the pennant again. Mauch’s demons don’t just frustrate him, they taunt him.

Aristotle called it undeserved misfortune. It happens to the great ones. It happened to Ben Hogan at San Francisco, Arnold Palmer at San Francisco, Jack Dempsey at Chicago--and Mauch at Anaheim.

I don’t think anybody else could have put the Angels of those years in the pennant position in the first place.

In the many long hours I spent talking with Gene Mauch in dugouts over the years, I never heard anyone, manager, player or front-office type, who knew the game of baseball any better than Gene Mauch. He knew what made each player special and what was really going on in the game better than anyone I ever talked to.

When you come that close that often, you have to begin to doubt yourself. And when a pitcher who let you down badly in that playoff in ’86 takes to the public prints to criticize and misidentify you as the real culprit for those losses, you have to start thinking to yourself, “Is that what they really think of me?”

A golf course and being home for dinner every night have to start looking good to you.

But I’m not convinced we’ve seen the last of Gene Mauch in a dugout. Not as long as that great white whale is still swimming around out there.