He Discovers a Way to Teach Without Being in Classroom

Bobby Meacham did not spend 457 major league games and 10 years bouncing around professional baseball plotting a managerial career.

“No, never,” he said, “I said I’d never do it.”

Meacham, who played at Mater Dei High School and San Diego State and was the eighth pick overall in the 1981 draft, thought he would become a teacher. But when his playing career ended after the 1990 season, he didn’t yet have a teaching credential.

And thus, a coaching career was born.

“I didn’t have a job, so I took the coaching job here last year,” he said.

After one year as a coach with Eugene, the Kansas City Royals’ short-season Class-A team, Meacham, 31, was promoted to manager this season.

“Last year changed my mind,” he said. “I’m going to continue to do this until it looks like it’s not going anywhere. After three or four years, when I’m close to my degree, I’ll step back and evaluate.”

Meacham, an infielder who spent parts of six seasons with the Yankees, was turned off from coaching by what seemed to him to be a pattern of dishonesty. Too often, what he heard wasn’t what he saw, in the minors and from certain Yankee coaches he doesn’t want to name.

“People would say things like, ‘Well, you’re gonna play every day,’ and ‘You’re this and that.’ You hear later what they said behind your back,” Meacham said. “If I stink, let me know. Don’t talk behind my back. Don’t assume, ‘This guy is this way,’ when you don’t know me.”

He vows he’ll be a different kind of manager.

“I want to judge guys by what happens on the field. That’s the way I wanted to be judged,” Meacham said. “I’m not one to compromise to please a boss, whether it’s the farm director or the GM or whatever.”

Meacham got his opportunity with the Royals because he impressed the staff at triple-A Omaha, where he spent his final season as a player. Sal Rende, who then was manager at Omaha and is now a roving instructor with the Florida Marlin organization, recommended Meacham for the Eugene coaching job. Meacham has taken it from there, and this year he is making the adjustment from coach to manager.

“When I was coaching, I used to take care of the infielders and the hitters and it would be more one-on-one,” Meacham said. “Now I step back and try to see the whole picture and make sure everything goes right from the time we get on the bus to when we try to hit-and-run or give the steal sign.”

His team is fair to middling--”Very inconsistent, as you would imagine young guys being,” he said. “We’ll have a really good team if we can get our pitchers to throw strikes.”

Through Saturday, the Eugene Emeralds were 8-10 and in third place in the Northwest League’s Southern Division.

Meacham says he is going to manage his way.

“I’m going to try to keep the same principles,” Meacham said. “If they get me fired, they get me fired. I’ll never lie or skirt an issue. If the organization doesn’t like it, they can find someone else. I know I’m not going to change my principles.”

Meacham didn’t have the career some might have predicted for a first-round draft choice, but he doesn’t look back with regret.

“I feel good,” he said. “I made it to the big leagues and that was a lifelong dream. I would rather have been there seven or eight years. I still think I did OK. It was the best job I’ll ever have.”

Meacham had a .236 career average, with 58 doubles, eight triples, eight home runs and 114 runs batted in over six seasons. He also stole 58 bases.

Meacham used to make regular donations to the Mater Dei baseball program when he was a player.

“The last couple of years have been dry for me, so it’s been dry for them, too,” he said.

But even though Meacham and his family have lived in New Jersey the past six years and plan to move to Denver during the off-season, there is still a tie to Mater Dei.

In fact, it’s his first baseman, Larry Sutton, an All-Angelus League outfielder in 1988 who went on to play at Illinois and was drafted by the Royals this spring.

Sutton is batting .286 after 18 games with Eugene, with two home runs, six doubles and 11 RBIs.

“He kind of makes me feel old,” Meacham said.

Danny Lane, the former Laguna Beach High standout who sustained mild injuries in a June 19 car accident near Jamestown, N.Y., returned to the field Tuesday.

Lane, a 24th-round pick by the Expos last month, was one of four players who were passengers in a car driven by Jamestown Expo trainer Lee Slagle. Slagle was charged with driving while intoxicated after the car skidded and rolled as he attempted to pass a tractor-trailer on Route 17 in rainy conditions shortly after midnight.

One player, Jim Henderson of Agoura Hills, remained at Erie County Medical Center as of Thursday, and a team spokeswoman said he is partially paralyzed.

“We’re hoping he’ll walk again; he won’t play ball again,” said Julia Van Etten of the Jamestown Expos.

Henderson, 23, is a catcher who played at Arizona State and Westlake Village Westlake.

The other players, pitcher Rod Henderson, 21, of Glasgow, Ky., and first baseman Tom Doyle, 21, of Burnsville, Minn., suffered less serious injuries but are out for the season. Van Etten expects them to be able to participate in the fall instructional league, however.

Slagle is still employed by the team and has not faced disciplinary action.

Lane, who was also a standout quarterback at Laguna Beach, was a first-team All-Big West Conference shortstop at UC Santa Barbara last season. He had played in all four of the Class-A Expos’ games in the late-starting New York-Penn League before the accident.

He was one for nine with one RBI before the accident, in which he sustained bumps and bruises and soreness. He was traveling and working out with the team before he made his return Tuesday in a pinch-hit appearance, going zero for 1.

After eight games through Saturday, he had yet to get a hit, and was batting .053 with one hit in 19 at-bats.

Recent El Dorado graduate Shawn Holcomb allowed seven runs in three innings in his first professional start with the Angels’ rookie league team in Mesa, Ariz. Holcomb, the Angels’ fourth-round draft pick, struck out five and walked two.