To McNamara, 1986 Is a Lifetime Ago

Players stop by, stick their head in and talk. They are greeted with a handshake, a piece of advice, even a smile. The door remains open, and the man in the office continues the quiet quest of achieving vindication by degrees.

Nothing preceding today matters much to John McNamara. History has not been especially kind to him, and he has never been completely comfortable in its presence. It has become a relationship of mutual disdain. He feels that history has a bad habit of omitting salient details, of translating gray issues in black and white.

The manager of the Cleveland Indians is back in his element now. He has control of a team that few give more than a passing thought, and he is herding it toward respectability.

“This is where I belong,” he said. “This is what I’m best suited to do.”

He has given most of his life to baseball, and the game occupies a place in him that may lie deeper than marrow. He has spent parts of four decades working in a position where his worth is measured by the actions of others. He has been fired five times. He has endured criticism, even humiliation. Each time, he has come back.

“Baseball’s given me a way of life,” he said. “That’s getting into something I’ve never talked about. But the bottom line is I’ve walked through life enjoying what I’ve done, and I’ve been paid for it.

“The nice thing is that I’m competent at what I do. I’m quiet; I mind my own business. I don’t talk like a lot of the other managers. I don’t feel that need to blow my own horn. But hell, I’ve done a few things in this game for a dumb kid from Sacramento.”

Rudy Seanez, a 21-year-old pitcher, walks in without knocking and asks a question. McNamara smiles and answers, then sends Seanez out with a pat on the back.

“That’s what’s it’s all about,” McNamara says. “We’re all friends here. That’s what makes it great.”

McNamara goes one way, his reputation another.

McNamara, 58, has managed more than 2,000 games for six different teams in the major leagues. He has won two division titles and helped bad teams get better. The Indians have exceeded expectations this year, entering Saturday night’s game with the Seattle Mariners in third place, 4 1/2 games back in the American League East.

Still, McNamara has come to be defined by one bouncing ball.

In the ninth inning of the sixth game of the 1986 World Series, a wobbly Bill Buckner failed to get his glove down on an equally wobbly two-hopper off the bat of the New York Mets’ Mookie Wilson. McNamara’s Red Sox were one out away from presenting Boston with a championship the city had coveted ravenously.

The Red Sox lost. McNamara lost. A whole city lost.

Some Bostonians blamed Buckner. More blamed McNamara.

They said he should have replaced the gimpy Buckner with somebody who could move. McNamara says there is nothing to regret. But remembering is something different.

“I relate that like a death in the family,” McNamara said. “Being Irish-Catholic, you don’t forget those things, but with time, you learn to live with them. I can always go back to that, from wherever I am. That was the low point.”

One out from being canonized, McNamara became vilified. The Red Sox finished in fifth place in 1987, and some members of the Boston media began a bilious campaign to oust him. They even gave it a name: “Knife the Mac.”

“It all started with the error,” McNamara said. “And that’s been misconstrued. Anybody can make an error. We won the second game of that series when (Tim) Teufel made an error. We lost because of a culmination of things, not one play. But that’s all they looked at.

“There were things written in Boston that weren’t factual. We took that franchise and turned it around. Boston hadn’t won for how long? A long time.”

McNamara was labeled surly and unapproachable. He was fired at the All-Star break in 1988, his managerial career having seemingly run its course.

“I really didn’t care if I got back in it or not,” he said. “Just to take a managing job to have a title and the money -- I wouldn’t have done it.”

He spent the 16 months between Boston and Cleveland as an advance scout for the Mariners. He traveled through the American League watching games from the stands behind home plate, a place that amounted to foreign land. His decisions weren’t dissected under a microscope; his attitude wasn’t grist for the public’s mill.

“It was a very good sabbatical for me,” he said.

Still, nothing would have seemed complete without another chance. Boston, to be sure, was not a good one to end on.

Indians president Hank Peters gave McNamara his first managing job, with Lewiston of the Northwest League in 1959. Thirty years later, on Nov. 3, 1989, Peters gave McNamara what will probably be his last.

“You’re taught never to say never,” McNamara said. “But I don’t see myself as being in any better situation. I feel I’m right where I want to be.”

As McNamara watched and scouted in 1989, Peters saw his team perform a late-season belly flop in the American League East. The Indians were 1 1/2 games out of first place on Aug. 4. They finished 16 out.

“When we got to within 1 1/2 games, I said, ‘Now we’ll find out what kind of players we have and what kind of manager we have,’ ” Peters said. “We found out two things: We had the wrong players and the wrong manager.”

Peters, the Orioles’ chief engineer in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, fired manager Doc Edwards and then tidied up the clubhouse, sending discontented Joe Carter to San Diego and bringing in 10 new players.

When it came to picking a manager, Peters had one simple criterion. “I was looking for someone who knew what it was all about,” he said.

Peters and McNamara are good friends, and McNamara’s hiring was seen as a further promotion of baseball’s pal-ochracy, a system that allows managers with full membership in the good-old-boy club to get chance after chance at the expense of younger men and minorities.

Jim Frey hires Don Zimmer in Chicago. Hank Peters hires John McNamara in Cleveland. Baseball’s business as usual.

“I knew what I was looking for,” Peters said. “You can’t make decisions based on media acceptance. You look around now, and all those people who criticized it are saying it wasn’t such a bad move after all.”

Said McNamara: “The quickest way to get somebody fired is to hire your friends. Friends don’t get you hired; they get you fired. I didn’t solicit this job. If I wasn’t competent, I wouldn’t be here. This is a very tough, competitive occupation. You better be good at what you do in order to survive. If you can’t do it, they’ll find somebody else who can.”

Winning has not exactly been an institutional standard with the Indians. It has been 36 years since they played in a World Series, 42 since they won one. Success hasn’t gone to anybody’s head.

McNamara says he refuses to accept tradition as an excuse.

“I said for me to come back to managing, it had to be a team with a chance to win,” he said. “It had to be the right place, the right time and the right people.”

The intensity goes way back, to the days when, growing up on 25th and F streets in Sacramento, McNamara used to take a bat, a ball and his catcher’s mitt to the park on 27th and C streets and hit himself pop-ups. For hours.

Indians outfielder Mitch Webster calls McNamara “a quiet intense.” McNamara calls it “presence” and says, “I could walk out there right now and get everyone’s attention. No problem.”

One of the traditional raps against McNamara has been that he is impatient with young players, that he doesn’t take the time to nurture budding talents and tender egos. He refutes the theory by first pointing to his days as the manager of the Oakland A’s (1969-70), when he guided a team of young superstars through its embryonic stages. Then he points a finger at the Indians’ clubhouse as further proof.

“Look at the rookies here,” he said. “Ask them.”

Included among those rookies is catcher Sandy Alomar Jr., an uncommon talent at a premium position. Alomar is hitting over .300 and started in Tuesday’s All-Star Game.

“He’s done everything good for me,” Alomar said. “He’s always helping me out. He’s everything I could ask for. He gives me good rest when I need it.”

One by one, McNamara sets out to topple the criticisms like so many dominoes. He is an easy target. There have been the six teams -- tying a major-league mark set by Jimmie Dykes -- and the five firings. There is a career record under .500.

“That’s where I always get knocked,” he said. “But you look at some of those teams. Look at the San Diego ballclub my first year there (1974). We lost 102 games with basically an expansion team. Erase that one year and what have you got? Over .500.

“I’ve never taken an easy job. Everything’s been a challenge. Two people -- Dick Wagner in Cincinnati and Ray Kroc in San Diego -- said the worst decision they ever made was firing me.”

This is really all you need to know to understand John McNamara:

The phone rings in his office about three hours before game time Friday night. It is Jim Lefebvre, the manager of the Mariners. They joke about Thursday night’s game, a 5-4 Indians win, and make plans to meet after batting practice.

“Jimmy and I have become good friends,” McNamara says. “When I was working for them last year, I used to come down and talk to him a lot. You know, help him out when things weren’t going well and he needed somebody. I mean, who’s there to put an arm around the manager? ... Nobody, that’s who.”