He’s the Perfect Guy for the Job, and It’s Perfect for Him, Too

You ask Sparky Anderson, baseball’s sunshine boy, how he copes with the inevitable down days, those times when a guy just doesn’t feel like whistling off to work. You realize as you’re asking that this is a stupid question.

“I never had a day like that,” Sparky says, without having to mull over the question. “I can honestly say I never have.”

Of course, Sparky has only been in this pro baseball business 36 seasons, 19 as a big league manager. He’s still honeymooning.

“I can honestly say I’ve never felt that way,” Anderson continues, like an avalanche set off by careless gunfire. “I love to go to the park. I always feel safe there, it’s my comfort zone. I know everyone that works in the stadium, in the front office, down on the field, I know all the people.

“Coming to the ballpark, that’s my relaxation. I get out of the house as fast as I can, I don’t like to hear the phones ringing.”

George Anderson is 54 years old, with a shock of white hair and a grandfatherly bearing, right down to his folksy philosophizing and his enormous carved pipe. He is slow to rile and he exudes the wisdom of a judge.

Yet even if you didn’t know what George Anderson does for a living, within minutes you’d peg him for a Sparky.

If anybody who plays baseball for the Detroit Tigers has an attitude problem, a difficulty cultivating a deep and abiding love for this game, they can’t blame Sparky. Attach battery cables to Sparky’s earlobes and his warmth and enthusiasm would light up Tiger Stadium.

Dr. Sparky serves the same function for baseball that Dr. Ruth does for sex. He removes the clinical dullness and makes it sound like fun.

People tend to listen because aside from being upbeat, Sparky is successful. He’s the only manager ever to win 800 games in both leagues, and the only manager to win a World Series in both leagues.

“The first is the first,” Sparky says of those achievements, “and nobody will be able to be the first but me.”

The only thing that seems to make him sad is thinking about players who have to leave the game.

“It’s a tremendous life,” Anderson says, tamping a fresh load into his pipe. “I feel bad for players, because when they’re done, it’s gotta be a lonesome feeling. I couldn’t do it (live away from the game).

“I know when they’re done, they’re gonna wish they were back. It never fails. I know guys who make big, big money out of baseball, they’d drop everything to come back. It’s almost like a disease. No way in this world I would be happy without it.

“Money will let you acquire a house and car and clothes, but as you acquire ‘em, they don’t mean nothin’ to you. It’s the war, the battle, that’s what gets you.”

He strives to cut through the bull to distill the essence of life, and baseball, which are one and the same. Like the time he was explaining how a player could use willpower to play despite a nagging injury.

“Pain don’t hurt,” Sparky said.

He is the master of the multiple negative. It is believed the Sparkster is the first man to master the difficult and even dangerous quintuple negative, no mean feat for such a positive guy. He set the record one spring while forecasting success for his star pitcher.

Quoth Sparky: “Ain’t no way no Jack Morris ain’t gonna win no 20 games.”

Anderson refers to everything beyond the ballyard as the outside world, as in: “I like the players, ‘cause they’re good people. It’s not like the outside world, they don’t get into politics and all those other things. They live together and accept each other and don’t try to be judge and jury. There’s nothin’ tighter than baseball people.”

He gets up every morning, reads the box scores, goes for a walk, gets antsy and heads for the ballpark. For a 7:30 game, he’ll arrive at maybe 1:30. This despite the fact that a manager’s only obligatory pregame duty is filling out the lineup card, five minutes’ work if he’s a slow writer.

There are players to talk to, writers (he calls Detroit beat reporters “my people”) to shoot the bull with, groundskeepers to consult on watering techniques, batboys to be given fatherly advice, fans to wave at, pouches of tobacco to be smoked, nuggets of wisdom to be shared.

No need to knock on his office door. The doctor is in.

About the only outside world stuff Sparky does is with a Detroit charity. He helps arrange fund-raising events for crippled children, calls it “the best thing I ever did.” Every morning Anderson picks up a different Tiger player and visits one of the two local children’s hospitals.

“We go and have pizza with the kids,” Sparky says.

So he doesn’t get to the ballpark until maybe 2:30. Hey, ain’t nobody perfect.