Sparky Is Managing Nicely With Life in Angels’ Booth

“Baseball is a very simple game,” Sparky Anderson says. “There’s no need to make it hard.”

This basic tenet helped guide the 62-year-old Anderson during a storied 26-year big league managing career. Now it’s the credo that directs him in his new job as the color commentator for Prime Sports’ cable telecasts of the California Angels.

Unlike many TV sports analysts, you won’t find this esteemed baseball man laden with notes, statistics and scouting reports as he settles in to work an Angel game with play-by-play announcer Steve Physioc. That type of information overload just doesn’t suit Anderson’s informal style.

“I don’t have a note in front of me and I never will have a note in front of me,” he says unapologetically while finishing up a hearty breakfast at a restaurant near his Thousand Oaks home. “If you’ve got notes in front of you, then you’re not talking from you. . . . The stuff I see in the dugout, all these books and [scouting reports], I ask myself, ‘Don’t you remember anything?’ Why do I need to look at a book? I already know these players.”

It’s hard to argue against Anderson’s baseball acumen. In the 1970s he won two World Series titles as the skipper of the powerhouse Cincinnati Reds. In 1984 he landed another championship while piloting the Detroit Tigers, thus making him the only manager ever to win World Series in both the National and American leagues.

What Anderson brings to Angel cable telecasts is a manager’s perspective on baseball strategy and a bevy of anecdotes and remembrances from his own baseball past. As a commentator, he feels he’s at his most potent during closely contested games when both managers are vying to outmaneuver each other. When the game is a blowout, which has sometimes been the case during this disappointing Angel season, he tends to be more of a raconteur.

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Anderson is only a season removed from his role as baseball manager. After the 1995 campaign he resigned from his post as Tiger manager, a position he had held since joining the team during the 1979 season. So the Southern California native (he attended Dorsey High in Los Angeles) is still very aware of the skills and tendencies of most of the players in the American League. When it comes to sizing up the rookies, he solicits the advice of various scouts.

The four-time winner of baseball’s manager of the year award laughs at the notion of being a professional broadcaster.

“I’m more like the village clown!” he says with a chuckle. “Now Steve [Physioc] really works. He’s so prepared it’s unbelievable. He’s got [his notes] underlined and his press books [marked] in different colors. The sidekick is just that--the sidekick. He’s riding the mule and the [play-by-play announcer] is riding the stallion. [The latter] is the star of the show.”

When Prime Sports hired Anderson, he possessed limited broadcasting experience. He worked four World Series on CBS radio with Vin Scully and three with Jack Buck. In 1979 he was a color analyst during NBC’s telecast of the Angels-Orioles American League championship series.

A slick, silver-tongued commentator he is not. But part of Anderson’s appeal lies in his earthiness, which is reflected in a raw oratorical style that’s capable of sending shivers of horror up a persnickety English teacher’s back.

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Anderson bows his head and smiles sheepishly when the issue of his sometimes poor grammar is raised. “That’s just the way I speak,” he says. “I can’t change the way I speak. But I could never understand why it matters so long as they can understand what you’re saying.”

In many eyes, major league baseball has lost much of its luster in recent years because of labor-management problems and controversy over such characters as suspended Reds’ owner Marge Schott and Cleveland’s belligerent star, Albert Belle. Cast against this backdrop, the grandfatherly Anderson comes across as a welcome throwback to a seemingly more honorable age in baseball.

Fittingly, the unpretentious Anderson sees his role in broadcasting partly as a promoter of the sport, which he believes is in serious need of a public-relations face lift.

“I try to talk about the positive things in our game,” Anderson says. “The more positive you are in our game, the more you publicize it. But you can still be positive and tell it like it is. The greatest thing in the world is to be able to lie truthfully. Like when [the Angels’] Tim Salmon wasn’t hitting at the start of the season. I said, ‘If you’re going to worry about Salmon, you might as well shut down the season.’ How the hell do I know if he’s going to start hitting? But I do know that he’s a quality player.”

He also believes it wouldn’t hurt baseball to be more open to innovation. The former minor league player and skipper believes managers could probably do a better job directing their teams from an elevated, broadcast booth level, which offers a panoramic view of the field.

Anderson says he left the Tigers partly because he had grown tired of running a team that had little chance of winning. (Indeed, this season Detroit is baseball’s worst club.) There were also some rumblings in the Motor City last year that perhaps the game had passed him by. Anderson admits that he might have been fired had he not left the team voluntarily. He certainly did not please Tiger ownership when he refused to manage replacement players during last year’s players strike.

Though he loved managing and could return to it “tomorrow and still love it,” Anderson claims he doesn’t need to be in that position to be happy. He attributes his color work with helping him make the adjustment to a life away from the dugout. He particularly likes the fact that the Angel telecasts on Prime Sports are all home games. Anderson says he’s had enough of grinding road trips. He’d much rather be at home playing golf or spending time with his wife, Carol, and their 14 grandchildren.

“It’s fun,” he says of his color commentary job. “It’s what’s saved me. I’m not too sure I wouldn’t [otherwise] have really missed [managing]. By doing this I have enough baseball that it solves all my problems. You sit up there and you say, ‘Oh my God, the guy just made an error that allowed two runs.’ Do I want to go down there and go through that? No, this is nice up here. Let me describe this and let [the manager] do the worrying.”

* The California Angels will be seen on Prime Sports tonight and Friday at 7 p.m.