Zimmer and Frey: Quite a Team on Quite a Team

Jim Frey walked unannounced into the office of boyhood chum Don Zimmer and unceremoniously handed him a single sheet of white paper with three typewritten lines.

Over the next 30 seconds, Zimmer’s eyes scanned right to left, right to left, right to left. The manager of the defending NL East champions lifted his right hand and made a pass through the graying stubble he still thinks of as a haircut. He reached across the red-and-blue Chicago Cubs insignia covering the left side of his chest and scratched his ribs, just below the armpit. Finally, he looked up and rolled his eyes.

“Thought so,” Frey said, balling up the sheet of paper and zipping it toward the wastebasket to Zimmer’s right. “Everybody wants too much.”

And so the lives of at least two, but likely several more, professional baseball players remained undisturbed, at least for the moment. Frey turned on his heels and headed for the exit. He slowed at the doorway, but did not turn around.

Little more than a minute had elapsed at this point. When Frey spoke, he didn’t appear to be talking to anyone in particular.

“I would have talked to you if I thought there was anything more to talk about,” he said. “I will if there is.”

Zimmer was by then looking down at his desk and the back of his hands. A month earlier, he turned 59 and he has known Frey for almost 50 of those years. He called after his just-departed friend: “You do that.”

That was two weeks ago. In many of the half-dozen spring-training camps no more than a long foul ball away (and many more such facilities in Florida), computers were whirring and clicking, whirring and clicking big-time, as baseball managers and a cadre of assistants plotted the course for 1990 and beyond.

Working on a compressed schedule and a dizzying series of printouts, they assessed the talent they have, the talent they coveted, and the talent they will have to face in the season that is now--finally, mercifully--just five days away.

At Mesa, Ariz., in a spartan office that holds a gun-metal gray desk and locker, a burnt-orange sofa and yellowing kitchen chair and a blackboard, field manager Zimmer and general manager Frey were preparing for the ‘90s as well.

Watching them do it, though, made it seem more like the 1890s. Both are short and a little round, neither looked like a ballplayer when they first teamed up at Western Hills High in Cincinnati, and yet they have a combined eight decades in the game between them.

If they don’t take enough meetings, and a dearth of charts and graphs means baseball is passing them by, neither one knows it. What they do know is what they are looking for -- head and heart and hard work -- and they are confident they will know it when they see it. And both of them will know it at once.

Zimmer made his professional playing debut in the Dodgers’ system in 1949, seeming even then like something of a throwback. And through most of his tries at running a ballclub, he managed like one. It often appeared he called for pitchouts or the hit-and-run only because he felt like it, and he filled out the lineup card depending how it felt when he plopped down on the bench and the seat of his pants.

Equally worrisome, he blew up at players he thought were dogging it, and, in sometimes-fractured English, threatened them with bus trips back to the minors. And he continued to do so long after guaranteed contracts made the threats irrelevant and planes were servicing most Triple-A markets.

Frey, on the other hand, was the polished one. The one who went to college before signing a baseball contract, the one who stayed in chemistry class after his friend transferred into shop class and began making lamps.

And when he took over as general manager of the Chicago Cubs in 1987, and brought Zimmer into the organization the next year, charges of cronyism were rampant. Zimmer hadn’t been entrusted to manage a club since 1982 and at the time, most teams were hiring younger men who knew their way around software.

Even now, Zimmer likely thinks the word has something to do with clothes.

“All of those computer printouts are a great crutch,” Frey told Sports Illustrated in an interview late last season. “Seventy-five percent of them are nonsense. What are you going to do when you go to the mound in the eighth inning and see that your pitcher is quivering when he talks to you? Look at the computer? You need a guy who knows the game at this level; who has seen it.”

Last year, the dynamic duo pushed and pulled a team of two dozen ballplayers generally regarded as too young and too thin in the pitching department to a division title. They did it because Zimmer’s zany gambles came up right more often than Bat Masterson, and because he coaxed career years from both the kids he inherited--Greg Maddux, Jerome Walton and Dwight Smith--as well as the retreads--Mike Bielecki, Lloyd McClendon and Domingo Ramos--that Frey found in other clubs’ scrap heap.

And they mean to do it again.

Never mind that the Cubs are, again, without a proven left-handed starter in a rotation that works half its games in windswept Wrigley Field, or that outfielder Andre Dawson’s knee and catcher Damon Berryhill’s shoulder are recovering way behind schedule.

Even the uncertain future of pitching mainstay Rick Sutcliffe, sent back to Chicago for X-rays after a chronic shoulder problem flared up anew Tuesday, seems not to have shaken either man’s faith.

Replacing Sutcliffe’s 229 innings and 16 wins “is not a small order,’ Frey said, “so I’m concerned about it. We’ll try to do the next best thing.

“The only thing really to do is to give the ball to some young guy,” he added, “and hope the same thing happens that happened last year.”

But just in case it doesn’t, it’s a safe bet some contingency plans are already in place. Indeed, a phone call some 20 minutes after the brief meeting in Zimmer’s office two weeks ago suggested that balled-up piece of paper would not be the only one to find it’s way into the wastebasket.

“Yeah,” Zimmer answered.

“Yeah . . . Yeah . . . Right . . . Right. . . . Look into it.”

The other party never was identified, but it had to be Frey, if only because of the swiftness with which information was being relayed.

“Yeah. . . . Absolutely. . . . Fine with me,” Zimmer concluded, “too.”