The Diary of a Madcap Manager

In 1949, when the Yankees signed Casey Stengel as manager, the New York writers were apoplectic. “That clown!” they wrote. “How dare they? There goes the neighborhood!”

The statue of Babe Ruth would crack. Yankee Stadium would become a ghost town. A dynasty was destroyed.

The popular belief was, Casey was just a baggy-pants comedian who would turn Yankee Stadium from the Old Vic into Minsky’s, turn the Yankees from Hamlet into the Ziegfeld Follies.

After all, he was a guy most famous for wearing a bird in his hat or dropping a grapefruit from the cockpit of a low-flying plane to his catcher below. Thumbing his nose at Babe Ruth as he ran out his inside-the-park home run in the 1923 World Series.

You couldn’t take Casey seriously. He had stepped right out of the pages of a Grimm’s fairy tale. He wasn’t real. He was a figment of his own imagination.

Baseball has always been a game that liked its managers tight-lipped and humorless, somber martinets who would fine a smile, suspend a laugh and treat each loss like the fall of Paris. Remember the time Yogi Berra, no less, fined and benched Phil Linz for having the lightheartedness to play a harmonica on the team bus during a losing streak?

Casey, they thought, was just a guy who would play it for laughs. “Why don’t they just get Emmett Kelly if they want a clown?” they asked.

So, this putative Bozo became the most successful manager in the history of baseball--10 pennants in 12 years, seven World Series championships. He perfected the art of platooning, refined the role of relief pitching. Casey didn’t change. He just won.

When the California Angels signed up Doug Rader to manage this year, a lot of people reacted the way New York had in 1949. This guy had a reputation that made Casey Stengel look staid.

The best guess was, there would be a lot of cayenne pepper in the sugar bowls, game shoes nailed to the floor, uniforms knotted together and ice cubes in the whirlpool bath. But not many pennants. Doug Rader had more of a reputation as a cut-up than a careerist.

The last thing the Angels needed, it was generally felt, was some guy coming into the clubhouse with a nose that lights up, a box of exploding cigars or a set of rubber ducks and frames with no glasses in them. These guys were lighthearted enough and had the record to prove it--29 games behind Oakland last year. These guys could get all the laughs they needed.

What the Angels needed was somebody with a spiked-helmet mentality, someone who would march them into a swamp. The Angels do their best playing with somebody glaring at them, it was felt.

Well, Doug Rader has been there almost a season now, and if you put a celluloid collar and striped tie on him and parted his hair in the middle, you’d think you had Connie Mack. Like Stengel, he proved to be a very serious man when it came to winning or losing. His team still trails Oakland. But they’re 28 1/2 games closer and, in fact, even take over the division lead from time to time.

And a guy whose humor ran heavily to scatology and rabbit punches when he was a player, was revealed in a national magazine recently to be, of all things, a guy who keeps a diary.

Now, Samuel Pepys and the girls in Louisa May Alcott novels keep diaries--guys in granny glasses and girls in crinoline. But not big (6-foot-3), tough (he bites off bottle caps) ex-third-basemen. I mean, would John McGraw keep a diary?

Doug Rader does. “It’s personal. But it’s to keep tabs on myself.”

Rader sees it as a tool for self-improvement. “I like to look back (in the journal) and see how I handled a certain situation, whether it turned out positive or negative.”

It’s not whether he bunted, or hit for the pitcher, it’s what he did for morale.

Such introspection might be found surprising by old teammates who remember Rader more as a guy who might leave elephant droppings in your game shoes than a guy who would go pouring his heart out in a locked book, but Doug Rader would probably wear a powdered wig if it would help win. Gene Mauch used to chart every ball everyone hit in colored pencil, but Rader clocks attitudes.

Rader is not a man who likes to see a player who has just popped up with the bases loaded or a pitcher who has just given up a game-winning walk sitting in his locker staring at the floor or sobbing.

“Victory, you can exult over all winter,” Rader says. “Failure, you should take off with your uniform.

“Brooding on failure, keeping it inside, only worsens the problem, perpetuates it.”

He would just as soon they get out the harmonica. It is no time for yelling. “Nobody needs to be reminded of his inadequacies,” he insists. “Everyone knows too well what they are. Most people are very harsh on themselves already. They don’t need you to add to it. They need you to emphasize the potential.”

Baseball deals in failure. The best team in the game loses one out of three. The best hitter in the game makes out two times out of three. And, people are, at bottom, insecure, Rader believes. “The trick is to instill confidence, not reinforce doubts,” he reminds. “It’s not the guy going three for 10 you have to work with, it’s the guy going three for 30. Slumps are in the head.”

Winning is often a state of mind, too, Rader believes. The 1927 Yankees were great. But they were great because they thought they were.

The 1989 Angels are not the ’27 Yankees. But if they get in the World Series, look for baseball to comb the dugouts for guys with propellers on their caps, or a lapel flower that squirts water, guys who sat on candled cakes in the clubhouse or carried live birds around in their hats.

These are serious people. It may be those boring glum types who sit there looking as if their feet hurt or they just got the news that the Titanic went down who may be the real clowns.