Padres Fire Bowa, Give McKeon Job

The ending, at 8:25 a.m. Saturday here in the Grand Hyatt hotel, was much like Larry Bowa’s tenure as the San Diego Padres 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 club President Chub Feeney. Bowa later described the conversation like this:

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 a record of 81-127 (.389). In typical Bowa fashion, it was a hit-and-run, spikes-high firing, filled with charges of incompetence made by just about everyone.

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

Perhaps thinking they might not be able to hire somebody outside the club to mend all this, the Padres instead asked General Manager Jack McKeon to do both jobs.

McKeon, who will retain Bowa’s entire staff, has managed for parts 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 Padre general manager since 1980, building a team that won the pennant in 1984.

The last person to attempt both 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,” McKeon said. “I take no days off.”

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

Said Feeney on Saturday morning: “Our team is better than it showed. I felt it was time for a change.”

McKeon, 57, will direct the team at least through the end of this season as the Padres’ 12th manager in 20 years.

“I’m no Houdini,” he said. “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.”

Bowa, feeling that he had suffered with this team through a management-directed youth movement, and now was being fired for it, suddenly fired back Saturday morning, an hour after his firing.

“I hung up on Feeney because I was so disgusted,” said Bowa, whose injured and outmanned team lost 30 of 46 games. “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, nevertheless 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.

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 Padres’ players, a restless and divided group, agreed there had been a mistake. They just couldn’t agree on who made it.

“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,” veteran pitcher Andy Hawkins said, adding that he has told Bowa these things. “The way Larry has gone out is typical of the lack of class he showed through his tenure.”

The team’s best player, last year’s major 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.

“Personally, I think he was fired because he didn’t get along with somebody in the front office,” Gwynn said. “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.”

John 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.”

Talk of Bowa’s job being in jeopardy surfaced after an 0-5 start and made headlines 37 games later, last Thursday, when team sources told The Times Bowa had this current nine-game trip to turn the team around, or he would be fired.

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.”