True Grit Duke : Wathan Played 10 Major League Seasons on Marginal Talent and Perseveres as Caretaker of an Angel Team Sinking in the West

He has 60 or more videotapes of John Wayne movies, including his favorite, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”

He has innumerable Wayne photographs, plus an autograph that reads, “from one Duke to another.”

John Wathan was first called Duke while playing at San Jose in 1971.

“The guys knew how much I liked John Wayne, and it was a typical team,” Wathan said. “There were a lot of guys named John on it.”

So John Wathan, then a 21-year-old catcher-first baseman, became Duke Wathan, and it stuck. So did some of the perseverance that the other Duke, his idol, always displayed on the screen.

Wathan rose above opinions that he didn’t have enough ability to spend 10 years in the major leagues. He disproved the view that he didn’t have enough experience to manage in the majors by leading the Kansas City Royals to a 287-270 record, a 3 1/2-year percentage of .515, third best in Royal history.

Now, though, his perseverance is being tested as never before, and Duke Wathan can only wish that the Angels boasted the same punch that Duke Wayne frequently delivered.

Thrust into the role of acting manager when the bus accident May 22 sidelined Manager Buck Rodgers with serious elbow and knee injuries, there is little Wathan can do but persevere as thepunchless Angels sink slowly in the West.

It’s not ideal resume material for anyone hoping to get another full-time managing opportunity, but Wathan said he isn’t worried about how this will affect his credentials.

His goal is to meld Rodgers’ approach with some ideas of his own, to try keeping the Angels afloat until Rodgers returns. That, however, is not expected before August and may not be, some close to the situation now fear, until next spring.

In many ways, Wathan isn’t so much an interim manager as a caretaker.

“My job as a (third base) coach was to do everything I could to make Buck the best possible manager,” Wathan said. “I think that’s still my role.

“I obviously need his input because he’s still in charge, but during a game I can’t have a walkie-talkie.

“My personality has to come out. I can’t do everything Buck would do. I’m not (a mind reader).

“I also think people in baseball realize there’s not much a manager can do when you’re not scoring runs. I mean, I can only try and do the best job I can with the players I have. I can only try and put them in the best possible position to succeed.

“I think people in baseball realize that the record doesn’t tell the total story, although the way we’ve been playing, I have to wonder if an interim manager has ever been fired.”

He said that with the trace of a smile, having had few reasons to smile in a 3-9 span, through Thursday, since the accident.

Whitey Herzog, the Angels’ senior vice president, said Wathan probably has “the toughest job in baseball” for several reasons:

He is trying to do what’s best for Rodgers while reacting with his own instincts; he is dealing with a basically patchwork and under-manned team that “will have to be torn down even more before it is put together again;” he carries a burden inherent to all interim managers.

“I’m not worried about John’s managing,” Herzog said. “He’ll get another (full-time) opportunity at some point, but when you’re an interim manager the players know it and often react differently.”

There is no evidence, however, of the Angels taking advantage of Wathan or failing to give 100%, although Jim Abbott greeted the interim manager on the mound the other day and persuaded him not to make a pitching change.

Said Abbott: “I appreciated the fact that he gave me a chance to win.”

It is unlikely that Rodgers would have been open to discussion once his decision had been made, but Wathan may figure he has different parameters as he tries to rebuild the Angels’ psyche in the aftermath of the bus trauma and during the current struggle.

Are the two linked? Herzog said some of the fun seems to have gone out of it for the Angels since the accident, but others contend that the Angels had lost nine of their last 11 before the accident and are simply skidding toward anticipated depths.

To his credit, Wathan does not pin his 3-9 record on lingering trauma. He said that professional athletes are paid to be focused, and that the Angels’ focus was disrupted only during the series in Baltimore right after the accident. Besides, he said, not all of the players were on the bus that crashed.

Wathan was, sitting a few seats behind Rodgers and a pile of pizza boxes, but he escaped with only bruises, and he has remained positive, upbeat, publicly confident that the Angels will shake their offensive doldrums.

He has been in almost daily phone contact with Rodgers and has tried to sustain the

Rodgers-Herzog philosophy of manufacturing runs with the hit-and-run, the steal, the little things.

The Angels do not have the speed to do it consistently, but they also do not have the power to do it any other way, and Wathan believes in it as much as Rodgers.

“It’s not like I played and managed in Boston and Baltimore, where the philosophy was to rely on the three-run homer,” he said. “I played and managed in a Kansas City organization that stressed speed. The dimensions and artificial surface of the stadium there made it mandatory.”

In an era of transient labor, Wathan spent 21 years with that one organization as player and manager, signing out of the University of San Diego in 1970. He was 27 when he joined the Royals in 1976.

“I was lucky,” Wathan said. “My timing was perfect.”

The Royals were ready to begin their domination of the American League West under a manager named Whitey Herzog, and Wathan played a key role in spot situations, although he never appeared in more than 128 games in any season.

He had a .262 batting average in a 10-year career, during which he played five positions; set an American League record for catchers with 36 stolen bases in 1982, when he missed six weeks with a broken ankle; and played on teams that won six division titles and reached the World Series twice.

Wathan likes to say that as a catcher, he never threw hard enough to develop a sore arm. But he is also proud to have set that stolen base record, to have contributed to so many title teams and to have made the most of his ability.

“A lot of people said I didn’t have enough, but I spent 10 years in the big leagues, though I probably only played four or five,” he said.

Said Herzog: “I always called him my cornfield player because he came from Iowa, spent so long in the minors and played the game the way it should be played. He was one of the finest catchers I ever had when it came to pitch selection, and he could do a lot of the little things that managers love. I remember saying early in his career that he would eventually manage in the majors.”

Wathan managed at triple-A Omaha in 1987 and became the Royals’ manager in August of that year. The events leading up to his appointment included the illness that eventually claimed the life of manager Dick Howser, the firing of successors Mike Ferraro and Billy Gardner, and the refusal of Hal McRae to leave a coaching position in Montreal and accept the job that was then offered Wathan.

The Royals won 84 games in ’88 and 92 in ‘89, when they finished second in the American League West with their third-highest victory total. But the bottom fell out in ’90 when Mark Davis and Storm Davis basically flopped as high-priced free agents and injuries forced Wathan to use 24 pitchers, including 16 starters.

The Royals were 15-22 last year when he was fired by a new general manager, Herk Robinson, on May 22--exactly one year before the Angels’ bus crashed in New Jersey--and replaced by the previously reluctant McRae.

Three other managers--Nick Leyva, Frank Robinson and Don Zimmer--were also fired that week. Misery may love company, but it didn’t ease Wathan’s bitterness.

“We had played only 37 games and my second-, third- and fourth-place hitters were out of the lineup,” Wathan said.

“I mean, Kevin Seitzer and George Brett were on the disabled list, and Bo Jackson was out for the season. All of a sudden I was stupid. All of a sudden I couldn’t manage.”

Wathan said he also found it ironic that:

--McRae was permitted to keep his job during the Royals’ 1-16 start this year.

--His own firing was followed by the departures of Kirk Gibson, Seitzer, Bret Saberhagen, Danny Tartabull and Kurt Stillwell, among others.

“On the one hand, they said I couldn’t do the job, then they make wholesale changes as soon as I’m fired,” Wathan said. “What does that tell you, other than they’re admitting that the club wasn’t good enough?”

The Royals admit only that Wathan would have been best served by another year or two at Omaha--or with another organization--if only to have cleared the Kansas City clubhouse of some of the players who had been his teammates and soulmates. As their manager, Wathan had major confrontations with Willie Wilson and Frank White when their playing time had to be reduced.

“Maybe I was too young and maybe it wasn’t the right situation. It was definitely more difficult managing guys who had been teammates, but on the other hand I didn’t want to spend three more years managing Omaha.

“I guess the thing that hurt more than the firing was that after 21 years I wasn’t offered another opportunity in the organization.”

Actually, Wathan didn’t stop managing. He spent an enjoyable summer coaching the American Legion team that son Dusty played on, the Little League team that son Derek played on and the Pony League team that featured Dina, his daughter, as the second baseman and only girl in the league.

He also weighed some overtures from ESPN but decided he wasn’t ready to leave the game, and when Herzog joined the Angels, Wathan made the contact that eventually led to the invitation from Rodgers to be his third base coach.

Wathan is now more than that, which has left John Cunningham to wonder if Wathan is still as relaxed and tension-free as he sounded when he called a few days before the bus accident.

Cunningham, who was Wathan’s college coach and is still at the University of San Diego helm, has been a “father figure” to Wathan, whose parents were divorced when he was a toddler.

“John was disappointed and hurt by what happened in Kansas City because he thought he’d have a lifetime job with the Royals,” Cunningham said. “But when he called to line up a golf game a few days before the accident, I’d never heard him sound more relaxed.

“He said he loved the freedom he had under Buck and the opportunity to work in a teaching capacity with the young players. I hope it hasn’t changed for him.”

Wathan said it hadn’t, that for some time he has had the ability to leave losses at the park.

“I know it sounds crazy, but I have more trouble sleeping after wins because I’m so high,” he said.

He also said that the opportunity to coach and manage--if only on an interim basis--in a new organization has opened him to ideas and practices that could prove beneficial if he is offered another full-time managing job.

“It’s not an obsession, but I think everybody who has received a disappointment as a manager wants another crack, a chance to prove he can finish the job,” Wathan said, adding that the relaxed demeanor his friends had been noticing has changed only in that he has less time now to watch those Duke Wayne tapes.

Wathan smiled and listed some of the similarities to his movie idol.

“We both came out of small towns in Iowa, both moved to Southern California when we were young and we have the same initials,” Duke Wathan said.

He forgot to mention perseverance.