Bowa Goes Down Swinging; McKeon Steps In

The ending, at 8:25 a.m. Saturday in the Grand Hyatt, was much like Larry Bowa’s tenure as the Padre manager. Short and intense and a little bit nasty.

The phone rang in Room 2231. Bowa rolled over in bed and picked it up. On the other end was the club president, Chub Feeney. Bowa later described the conversation this way:

Feeney: “Can you come up to my room?”

Bowa: “Is this to tell me I’m fired?”

Feeney: “Yes.”

Bowa: “Then I don’t have to see you.”

Click.

Bowa, the 42-year-old former shortstop, hung up on the Padres seconds after they hung up on him. He was fired Saturday after 19 months and 208 games and a record of 81-127 (.389). In typical Bowa fashion, it was a hit-and-run, spikes-high firing, with charges of incompetence made by just about everyone toward everyone else.

Bowa ripped Feeney. Players ripped Bowa. Players ripped the front office in defense of Bowa.

Perhaps thinking that they might not be able to hire somebody to mend all this, the Padres hired nobody, and instead asked a current employee just to move his office. The Padres’ new manager is General Manager Jack McKeon, who will wear both hats, not to mention an extra-large uniform. As one of his first acts as manager, McKeon--who is 5-feet 9-inches tall and weighs 230 pounds--informed first baseman John Kruk that he would be wearing a pair of his pants.

“Right,” Kruk said. “If you sew mine and Tony Gwynn’s together.”

McKeon, who will retain Bowa’s entire staff, has managed for all or part of five big-league seasons but not since 1978 in Oakland. He won 48% of his big-league games (286-310), and has been fired three times. He has been the Padres’ general manager since 1980, and he built a team that won the pennant in 1984.

The last man to attempt the jobs of manager and general manager was Whitey Herzog, with the St. Louis Cardinals from 1980-82.

“Whitey liked fishing more than going to the office; I like the office,” said McKeon, who wore his general manager’s trademark “Trader Jack” T-shirt under his new uniform Saturday. “I take no days off.”

Good thing. The job of turning this team around will require at least that much effort.

“Our team is better than it showed,” Feeney said Saturday morning. “It felt it was time for a change.”

“I’m no Houdini,” said McKeon, 57, who will direct the team at least through the end of this season as the Padres’ 12th manager in 20 years. “I’m just going to try to move upward, with a different way of motivating the guys. We’re going to do classroom work on the mental approach--we’re going to start thinking about winning--and see where we go.”

Sitting in his hotel room Saturday morning, an hour after his firing, Bowa was still in pajamas. He tugged on his messy black hair, as he had this winter while the Padres failed to make any substantial personnel improvements on a team that struggled to a league-worst 65-97 record in his debut 1987 season. He bit on what remained of his ravaged fingernails, just as he had for many nights this year while watching his injured and outmanned team predictably lose 30 of its first 46 games.

Believing that he had suffered with this team through a management-directed youth movement, and now was being fired for it, Bowa suddenly fired back.

“I hung up on Feeney because I was so disgusted,” he said. “This organization always preached professionalism, and then they fire me like this. This is an amateur contest.

“I’d feel worse if I was fired by somebody with dignity, somebody credible, somebody I respect. But you’ve got a guy running the show (Feeney) who doesn’t even know the players when he sees them in a hotel lobby. The game has passed him by. He knows absolutely nothing about what’s going on. Everybody in San Diego knows it. All baseball people know it.”

Bowa shook his head. “Why is Chub even here? That’s the big question in this.”

Feeney, a 66-year-old former National League president who took over the club presidency in the middle of last season as a favor to owner Joan Kroc, said, “I will not respond to that.”

Feeney cringed last season as Bowa berated young players and umpires. He barely held his tongue this season as Bowa, who curbed his temper, nonetheless was quick to bench a struggling player, yank a struggling pitcher or beg for the demotion of any kid who didn’t play the way Bowa did when he was a kid. On Saturday, finally, Feeney just shrugged.

“What has happened is very sad, so I will not go into chapter and verse,” Feeney said. “I just think Larry saying those things is a mistake. All of those things are just Larry’s opinion, and I don’t know what some of those things mean.”

The Padre players, a restless and divided group who often this year have won only in spite of themselves, agreed that there had been a mistake. They just couldn’t agree who made it.

Veteran pitcher Andy Hawkins said: “In my opinion, Larry was not qualified to manage this team, and I give management credit for making the decision before the season was ruined.” Hawkins said he has told Bowa these same things to his face.

“The way Larry has gone out is typical of the lack of class he showed through his tenure,” he added. “The feeling in the clubhouse was oppressive. He tried to encourage us, but there was a lack of sincerity there, and the players felt it.

“The young guys, who are never sure what they are doing in the first place, were intimidated and yelled at when they didn’t play like Larry used to play. Just having him gone is a huge weight off our shoulders. We’re a better team right now for it.”

The team’s best player, last year’s big-league batting champion, Tony Gwynn, didn’t agree. He even met Bowa in his hotel room before the former manager drove home to suburban Philadelphia.

“I told him he did a great job with what he had. I don’t think he got a fair shake,” Gwynn said. “It’s obvious the club is short in a lot of areas and not making any improvements in the personnel. I don’t know what more Larry could have done.

“Personally, I think he was fired because he didn’t get along with somebody in the front office. There was somebody there who tried to tell him who to play, and what order to bat them. I’ve seen him get called upstairs before home games. I’ve seen the changes he was forced to make. The guy deserved a better chance, and I’m very disappointed.”

Kruk put it more succinctly: “It wasn’t Larry, it was us. We aren’t that good of a team. The way we’re playing, even God couldn’t come in and help us.”

Bowa began his Padre career last year--after just one season of triple-A managing--as something of a devil. He broke bats, knocked baseballs around rooms and culminated a 12-42 start with a near-fight in the clubhouse with center fielder Stanley Jefferson. He then calmed a bit and led the team to a 52-45 record from June 5 to Sept. 23. At that point, he was rehired for 1988 with the warning from Feeney to “work on his off-the-field things.”

His players, the earlier outbursts still in their memories, promptly rolled over and lost 10 of their last 11 games. That fade still in Bowa’s memory, he pushed them hard this spring and began the season managing every game as if it were his last.

On the season’s second night in Houston, he benched second-year center fielder Jefferson, saying Jefferson was struggling at the plate, even though he had gone only 0 for 4 for the season. His problems with Jefferson, who was later demoted and who now is lacking in confidence and batting average (.260) at triple-A Las Vegas, became a black mark on his record with management.

That same night, in the first inning against an already struggling Astro pitcher, Bob Knepper, Bowa pulled a hit-and-run with slow Randy Ready on second base. Batter Keith Moreland missed the pitch, Ready was thrown out, and the rally was killed. The Padres lost, 6-1, en route to an 0-5 start, and that kind of desperation was to mark the remainder of Bowa’s season.

“I think a lot of things made Larry extra hyper,” Feeney said.

Talk of Bowa’s job being in jeopardy, which first surfaced after that bad start, finally made headlines 37 games later, on Thursday, when team sources told The Times that Bowa had the current nine-game trip to turn the team around, or he would be fired. When the story was published, the Padres had already experienced two ugly losses in the trip’s first two games in Montreal.

Sources say management decided to push its schedule and fire Bowa then because it feared a week of publicity.

To do so, McKeon was pulled off the road in the middle of scouting for next week’s June free-agent draft. He met with Feeney Thursday morning, then Thursday night. They flew to New York on separate planes Friday, arriving at the start of the first game of a three-game series with the New York Mets, too late to do anything then.

But by then, Bowa knew.

“At batting practice a couple of days ago, he told me he was going to be fired,” Kruk said. “I thought he was joking. I guess not.”

Bowa went so far as to lean across the aisle on Thursday night’s flight from Montreal and hand coach Greg Riddoch the keys to his car and house in San Diego, asking him to take care of things so Bowa could go right to his Philadelphia home if he was fired.

“Sure, I knew I was gone,” Bowa said Saturday morning. “Nobody was hanging around me. Management hadn’t talked to me in a week. It was like I had leprosy.

“It’s funny, because when I was rehired so late last year, Chub said it was because he didn’t want anybody asking about my job status until the end of this year. He didn’t want me worrying all year. Right.”

Said Feeney: “We gave him every opportunity. He made all the field decisions, he had plenty of input. We gave him every chance.”

Concluded pitcher Mark Grant, experiencing his first manager firing: “I think the best way to describe this is it’s like a funeral. Nobody knows what to say to anybody else.”