‘99 Bottled-Up Tears in the Fall

It would be a stretch to describe that 1999 season with the Albuquerque Dukes as living hell, even though Mickey Hatcher comes close to doing just that.

Realistically, it was more like living handcuffed.

It was as if every managerial move by Mike Scioscia was second-guessed or dictated by Rick Sofield or Jim Benedict, the drill sergeants who were Kevin Malone’s minor league field supervisors, even to the point of Scioscia summoning one pitcher and Benedict sending in another, even to the point of requiring Sofield’s permission to conduct infield practice, even to the point of Scioscia canceling an off-day workout because of blazing heat and being overruled by the cadre.

“Brutal,” said Hatcher, Scioscia’s hitting coach then and now.

“You can’t believe how bad it was.”

Hard to believe, indeed.

One minute you’re on the inside track to becoming Tom Lasorda’s successor as Dodger manager--”no question about that,” said Fred Claire, the former Dodger general manager--and the next you’re a whipping boy, almost every decision questioned by a new administration seemingly intent on wiping out every link to what could be considered Dodger continuity and tradition--23 years in Scioscia’s case.

Now, of course, no one has to be told how it played out.

It is three years later, three years since Sheriff Malone and posse basically forced Scioscia to leave Dodge and the Dodgers, three years since he was basically plucked out of the unemployment line by Bill Stoneman in what many thought was strictly an inexpensive hire, and Scioscia is leading his red-clad, blue-collar Angels into Yankee Stadium tonight for the opening game of the division series with the New York Yankees.

The man in the other dugout is Joe Torre, whose Yankees have won four of the last six World Series, but it is Scioscia who is drawing the playoff buzz, who is being touted as the American League’s manager of the year.

Vindication?

Scioscia laughs.

Why would he need vindication? What does he have to prove, and to whom?

Malone is gone, fired as Dodger general manager and unable to get a professional baseball job, and Scioscia has only rewarding memories of those other years as catcher, bench coach and minor league catching coordinator with the Dodgers.

No bitterness, he says, no time for it.

After all, he adds, how many qualified baseball men never get the opportunity he received from the Angels?

Well, OK, if what he has done in restoring stability and continuity in Anaheim, in winning the respect of his players and providing a foundation that was the springboard to 99 wins and the club’s first playoff appearance in 16 years (a period in which the Angels made 13 managerial changes), if all of that doesn’t represent vindication in the context of that infuriating Albuquerque season, maybe the word is satisfaction.

Maybe, but that’s not Scioscia either.

The credit here, he says, belongs to the players and to Stoneman and Bill Bavasi, the general managers who put the Angels together.

What happened in ’99 is forgotten history, he says, and the Angels have simply taken the first step toward the goal of being a perennial contender.

“That’s where this organization needs to be, that would be satisfaction,” Scioscia said.

Hatcher doesn’t disagree. He suggests, however, that his boss may be hiding his true feelings regarding ‘99, absorbing the hit as he did when catching and unwilling to open old wounds, burn any bridges or disrupt his current focus.

“Our hands were tied that year,” Hatcher said. “It was very frustrating for Mike and for me. I mean, it was as if the years of loyalty to the Dodger organization meant nothing, as if everything we felt in our hearts about the Dodger organization had been ripped out, and how sad is that to say?

“I’ll always have praise for [former Dodger owner] Peter O’Malley, and it’s great to see how Jim Tracy and Dan Evans have brought the Dodgers back, but it was pretty clear after ‘99, with the people that were running it then, that neither Mike nor myself had the future with the organization we once thought we did or hoped we did.”

And now?

“Well,” said Hatcher, “for Mike to turn around and get this opportunity, to put a plan in place as he did, to accomplish what he has, there’s terrific satisfaction.

“I know Mike feels that because I certainly do.”

Scioscia left the Dodgers after that ’99 season. It almost happened at the end of the ’98 season when Davey Johnson was hired as manager and brought in his own coaches. Scioscia, who had spent two years as bench coach under Lasorda and Bill Russell, was saved from a guillotine that claimed such longtime Dodgers as Reggie Smith, Mark Cresse and Greg “Goose” Goosen, among others, by the organization’s fear of a fan backlash.

He agreed to manage triple-A Albuquerque because he felt it was a missing piece in his resume. He had no choice but to leave after the exasperation of ’99.

“There were definitely clashes and differences of opinion that year,” Scioscia said, “but that’s going to happen when a new regime comes in and some of it’s healthy.

“I didn’t leave because of that. I left because I wanted to be at the big league level and that wasn’t going to happen with the Dodgers.

“I came out early that winter to give myself the best shot at a big league job.”

A call to Malone, now vice president of development at the Master’s College, was not returned.

Said Claire, who had been fired during the ’98 season: “I heard all the stories about what Mike went through in ’99 and it was absolutely brutal. When [Stoneman] called for a referral, I said, ‘Hire him, you’ll never regret it.’ I mean, all of us knew Mike was someone with the gift and makeup to be a major league manager. Every time I talked to him he would say, ‘Don’t rush me, Fred.’ He wanted to be as prepared as he could be.”

Practice. Preparation. Performance.

Scioscia said there is nothing special about his philosophy but that there is no excuse for failing to go hard at every aspect of it.

He has been persistently positive, dogmatically insistent--even when the Angels were 6-14--that this was a championship-

caliber team (“This is no fluke,” he would reiterate Monday) and so here they are, ready to follow the Scioscia dictate of one game at a time against the Yankees.

For Torre, no surprise.

The Yankee manager said he saw the aggressive, hard-nosed transformation of the Angels under Scioscia begin last year, sensed the respect the players had for him because of his credibility as a player and saw the “fire in his eyes” when he served as an All-Star coach this year.

“I think the players take a hint from that,” Torre said.

Among those players, said Darin Erstad, are no egos or big-name superstars, “only guys who love to play and grind it out and I think that’s how Scioscia played, from what I’ve heard, and it’s certainly what he demands.”

Maybe that will serve the Angels well again, enabling them to overcome their lack of postseason experience and this business of Yankee Stadium mystique.

In another borough and time, Scioscia hit a series-turning home run off Dwight Gooden in Game 4 of the 1988 National League championship series, helping a similarly underdog and grind-it-out Dodger team eliminate the Mets before upsetting the heavily favored Oakland A’s in the World Series.

“This team,” he said of the Angels, “has the same heart and focus but more talent than that team.”

It also has Scioscia to tell them what the postseason is like, but “there’s no such thing as an injection of playoff experience. You’ve got to go through it for yourself.”

And that’s where the Angels are, about to discover October for the first time in 16 years. And the manager who provided the road map, who restored stability where so many others had failed, said: “I don’t think we’ve found a magic button or anything like that. All we’ve tried to do is establish an environment conducive to success, but the accomplishment is that of the players.”

In that Albuquerque environment of ‘99, Scioscia would have been happy if the pitcher he had called for was the one who showed up.