Maybe .300 Hitters Make Good Managers After All

You can tell right away Lou Piniella couldn’t be a good manager. Never mind the X’s and O’s, the hit-and-run plays, the bunts, the pitcher changes. It’s just that Lou couldn’t have a real good grasp of the game.

Just look at his record. Not his managing record, his hitting record. Lou Piniella batted over .300 seven times in his career. He was a natural-born .300 hitter. He averaged .305 in five playoff series and .319 in four World Series. He hit .330 one season.

He has the 11th-best batting average in New York Yankee history, trailing only the likes of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Don Mattingly, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle in that category.

If you think all this doesn’t disqualify Lou as managerial material, you don’t know baseball.

If you were to work up the typical profile of the successful major league manager, you would immediately throw out the silhouette of anyone who ever had any success playing it.

I guess the most successful manager in Dodger history was Walter Alston--seven pennants, four World Series championships in 23 years.

Walter went to bat once in the big leagues. He struck out.

Perhaps you consider Tommy Lasorda more representative--four pennants, two World Series titles in 15 seasons. Well, Lasorda was a pitcher. He never won a big league game. He lost four.

You like Sparky Anderson? Seven playoffs, five World Series, three championships? Sparky batted .218 as a player. With zero home runs.

Apart from Casey Stengel, Joe McCarthy was the most successful New York Yankee manager--eight pennants, four in a row once, three in a row another time, seven World Series wins, three of them in four straight games. McCarthy never got to the big leagues as a player.

Maybe you like Miller Huggins as the prototype Yankee manager? Six pennants in 12 years, three World Series. Huggins, the leader of the most fearsome slugging team of all time, Murderers’ Row, had a .265 average himself. He hit nine home runs in 13 years.

Well, John McGraw was great, the old-timers used to tell you. Managed 33 years, won 10 pennants--and hit .333. But there are curious gaps in Muggsy’s dossier. He never seems to have played a full season and, by 1903, when he was only 30, he was down to playing only 12 games a season.

Connie Mack, the Grand Old Man of the grand old game, managed 53 years. He got in eight World Series, won five of them. How did he satisfy the owner with this meager record? He was the owner.

His playing record, too, is spotty. He seems to have been playing in only 14 games a year in 1905 when he was only 32. He batted .187 one year, .201 another, and .217 his last year. No wonder he bought the team.

Look at the superstars who have dabbled in managing with catastrophic results. Ted Williams lost 100 games in his last year of managing and 364 in four years. The great Ty Cobb, even with himself in his prime in the lineup, was a disaster. Rogers Hornsby won a pennant his first full year as a playing manager but never could get the hang of it again in 14 years. Mostly, he finished seventh.

Leo Durocher was a great manager (lifetime batting average, .247), Yogi Berra wasn’t (lifetime homers, 358). Tom Kelly, current manager of Minnesota, had a lifetime average of .181. Tom Trebelhorn of Milwaukee never played an inning in the major leagues. Neither did the man he replaced, George Bamberger.

The new Yankee manager, Stump Merrill, never played in the big leagues. Neither did Pittsburgh’s Jim Leyland nor Philadelphia’s Nick Levya.

The moral of the story is, you can’t have a manager whose idea of strategy is to pull the kid aside before he goes up to bat with the bases loaded and growls “Now, hit a home run, kid, that’s what I would have done.”

You can’t have a manager who gets furious with his pitcher and says, “Why didn’t you strike him out--it was only Willie Mays up there!” You have to get a guy who knows how tough this game is for an ordinary mortal.

So, is Lou Piniella betting into a stacked deck, a rigged wheel? What’s the 11th-best Yankee hitter of all time doing leading the National League as a manager? Who does he think he is--Casey Stengel?

Lou Piniella is a manager who’s already been through the first ordeal that fits a man for managing. He’s been fired. By George Steinbrenner.

Now, if firing by George Steinbrenner made you a Hall of Fame manager, the hall would be overflowing. Steinbrenner would have fired the Duke of Wellington in the middle of the battle of Waterloo.

But the first test of a manager, in addition to a low batting average, is how he stands up to a firing. One is usually enough for the superstars. They leave with a who-needs-this? shrug and go to selling insurance.

Lou Piniella’s record with the Yankees, on the face of it, should have earned him a raise, not a pink slip. The team that is now bottoming out the major leagues, Lou Piniella finished second with in 1988, winning 90 games. The next year, he won 89.

Steinbrenner took this to be evidence of total collapse and he kicked Piniella up to the front office and brought Billy Martin back to run the club--or rather to seem to run the club. The Yankee managership is really a kind of complicated ventriloquism act and, when Lou got called back to the dugout in mid-season, he decided he didn’t want to be the wooden dummy anymore. He left to sign with the Reds.

So, why is Lou Piniella trying to beat the odds? Doesn’t he know .300 hitters can’t manage? Why doesn’t he just resign himself to being the batting coach or making token appearances at spring training like the rest of the stars do? It’s well established that .300 hitters and 20-game winners make .400 managers or 100-game losers. Why should he be different?

Well, probably because of Steinbrenner. The normal reaction for a refugee from George Steinbrenner’s knee is bitterness, resentment. Piniella is different.

“In a way, I’m indebted to him,” he says. “Mr. Steinbrnner taught me some things I needed to know. It was a learning process. With Mr. Steinbrenner, it was never good enough. I felt like I was a forest ranger, putting out fires all the time.

“But it kind of fits you for the game. You learn what not to do. You learn that impatience and impetuousity doesn’t work in baseball. When I got over here to Cincinnati, I knew what it would take.

“I’m not a Marine drill sergeant but I’m in charge and the players know it. I don’t have to jump every time the phone rings. I learned you can get listened to when the players know you’re not going to be gone in a month, the difference between a team and a turmoil. You learn how not to beat yourselves.”

You listen to Lou Piniella today and it’s hard to imagine he wasn’t a pesky .230 hitter who worked you for a walk or an inside pitch he could let hit him, bunted a lot, hollered a lot. Thanks to George Steinbrenner, he thinks like a banjo hitter. Perfect for a manager.