The Spark Returns : Tigers Manager Quits Local Golf Links for Florida Diamond

Time, something Sparky Anderson has had in abundance this spring, had all but evaporated for the Thousand Oaks resident and Detroit Tigers manager by Monday afternoon.

But the gravel-voiced 60-year-old clearly didn’t mind.

“I’m extremely happy,” said the veteran of 42 professional baseball seasons, preparing to leave today for the Tigers baseball camp in Lakeland, Fla., for the belated but welcomed start of spring training.

When major league owners on Sunday accepted the players’ offer to return to work, life returned to its normal, hectic pace for Anderson after months of relative tranquillity in Thousand Oaks.

With the end of baseball’s eight-month strike, Anderson no longer will be able to spend long mornings on the lush, green fairways of the Sunset Hills Country Club in his hometown.

Nor will he be able to jump in the car and head up to Sacramento to visit his 10 grandchildren--at least not for a while.

He will miss those things, but the return of baseball, a true love for him, will help ease the loss.

Anderson is the dean of major league managers, but he fell into the disfavor of some when he defied his bosses and refused to coach a squad of replacement players this spring. Some have speculated that his stance will cost him his career after this season, once his contract with the Tigers expires.

But Anderson said he did only what he believed to be right, although he understands why the less experienced members of the managing fraternity did not join his boycott.

“A lot of people say that now it looks like you were the one who was right,” Anderson said. “There’s not such a thing. I don’t want to be known as being right.”

For now, he is just happy to be returning to the ball field, where he will be lifting the fungo bat and hitting steaming one-hoppers to the likes of all-star first baseman Cecil Felder. And he’s happy that in just 19 days his name will ring through the loudspeakers of the Seattle Kingdome when the Tigers start their 16th season under his management.

Surely, the strike has been painful for Anderson in ways other than simply not being able to coach grown men in a child’s game. Until the call came from Tigers President John McHale on Sunday, Anderson had been on an unpaid leave of absence because he refused to oversee the team of replacement players fielded by the Tigers.

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It has cost him part of his salary, scheduled to hit the $1-million mark for the first time this year. In addition, there is the speculation that his actions may have also cost him a contract extension at season’s end.

Whatever will happen will happen, said Anderson, who refuses to gloat about his prediction earlier this year that replacement baseball would never take root.

“I never felt I was right, and it proved out to be that I wasn’t right,” the oft-quoted manager said.

“That’s so easy, after it’s over, for people to tell you that it was right. Where were they when it was going on?” he asked. “I don’t think ‘right’ proves anything. I’ve never been one who thought that ‘right’ was the answer. It was right for me.”

And, presumably, wrong for others in his profession who are not as experienced and secure.

His refusal to manage the replacements, he said, had little to do with the men who crossed the picket lines for their one, and perhaps only, shot to play major league baseball.

“It had nothing to do with them. It had to do with baseball,” he explained.

He watched in recent weeks as the evening news showed replacements booting ground balls, misjudging pop-ups and throwing to the wrong bases. But that is not why he did not want to coach them, said Anderson, who has seen real major leaguers make those same gaffes.

“Any time you want to single out a play, you can single out a play,” he said.

He expects that his own players, some of the best that money can buy, will have a lot of kinks to work out in the two weeks and five days they have to prepare for the grueling marathon of a season.

As he leads them, Anderson will think back fondly on the first spring he spent at home in more than four decades.

A member of the Sunset Hills Country Club, he was part of a regular foursome that teed off almost daily.

“He doesn’t have the aura of being someone famous,” said the assistant golf pro at the country club, Chris Zambri. “He doesn’t drive in in a Mercedes and act as if he owns the course. He acts like everybody else.

Other club members treat Anderson as they do everyone else, calling him George, his given name.

“If they need us to know specifically who they are speaking of they will say ‘Sparky,’ ” Zambri said. “Other than that, they will come in and say, ‘We’re playing with George’s group.’ ”

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For his part, Anderson said he enjoys living in Thousand Oaks because people respect him for his straightforward take on life and not on his fame.

“This is my home,” he said proudly. “People know me here. Not because of what I do. I’ve been here 30 years. They know me as a member of the community.

“It’s not that I’m anything special around here.”