Mauch Remembered as Fine Manager and Man

For all the stories about his gruff persona and ability to intimidate friend and foe alike, Gene Mauch also was remembered Sunday afternoon by friends and family as someone who had a soft touch and tender heart.

“A lot of people didn’t understand Gene, thought he was hard and crusty,” said Geoff Zahn, who pitched for Mauch with the then-California Angels and Minnesota Twins. “He was the softest guy I knew on the inside.”

Zahn was among the nearly 200 people who gathered at the Springs Club inside the gated community in Rancho Mirage where Mauch lived to celebrate the achievements of the longtime major league manager, who died Aug. 8 of lung cancer at 79.

Zahn said Mauch once stopped a team bus headed for the Baltimore airport so the manager could comfort Zahn’s screaming baby daughter, Matti.

Matti then showed the gathering that included Reggie Jackson, Sparky Anderson and Mike Witt a stuffed teddy bear that Mauch had given her as a 3-year-old 22 years ago in Toronto.

“When I look at my dad, I see a lot of Gene in him and a lot of his compassion,” Matti said. “He will always, always have a special place in my heart.”

Mauch’s friends also recalled the legendary temper that earned him the nickname “the Little General.” Longtime friend and golfing buddy David Katz said Mauch once hurled a glassful of pencils across the room after several games of bridge had not gone to his liking.

“Later I asked him, ‘Gene, why’d you do it?’ ” Katz said. “He said, ‘Dave, you know me. I can’t help it.’ ”

Those who played for and coached alongside Mauch remembered him as a skilled tactician whose legacy was so much more than that of the manager who won more games than anyone to have never reached a World Series. He managed three teams -- the 1964 Philadelphia Phillies and 1982 and 1986 Angels -- to the brink of the World Series before falling short.

“Gene Mauch could take players and teams that didn’t know how to win and make them smart,” said Marcel Lachemann, a pitching coach under Mauch who eventually managed the Angels. “That’s not something a lot of managers can do.”

Jackson, who forged a strong friendship with Mauch after a shaky beginning in which the manager doubted his ability to hit-and-run with the free-swinging slugger, called Mauch “a man’s man and a pro’s pro.”

“If I had an editorial for Gene Mauch,” Jackson said, “it would just be in one short sentence: You have my respect and I’m proud to know you and proud that when you talked about me that you called me your friend more than a good baseball player.”

Wrote former Angel catcher Bob Boone, in a letter read by Tim Mead, Angel vice president of communications: “He was the innovator of so many aspects of the game -- double switch, bunting strategy, controlling the running game. He was the best.”

Boone, who credited Mauch with resurrecting his career when he joined the Angels in 1982, marveled at how the manager had developed a sequence of pitches that “was absolutely bulletproof” in getting hitters out. Mauch nicknamed the sequence “page 38,” joking that it was in the baseball manual.

Once, when the Angels were playing Minnesota, Boone set up for a “page 38” against Roy Smalley, Mauch’s nephew and the Twins’ shortstop. On the last pitch of the sequence, Smalley hit a home run and Boone returned to the dugout dumbfounded.

“Gene,” Boone wrote, “met me at the top step and said, ‘I forgot to tell you. Roy knows about page 38.’ ”

Mauch also had a knack for outsmarting umpires, Zahn said.

“[Mauch] went up to an umpire and said, ‘If I call you a horse’s

“Gene said, ‘Well, what if I’m just thinking you’re a horse’s ... ?’ The umpire said, ‘Well, I can’t throw you out for what you’re thinking.’ So Gene said, ‘Well, I think you’re a horse’s.... ‘ “

Anderson lamented that his longtime managing peer had not been inducted into the Hall of Fame. Anderson recalled how Mauch had made Anderson’s first day as the manager in Cincinnati memorable by tugging on his pants leg and telling the rookie, “Remember today. It will never come again.”

“Isn’t it a marvelous thing to think that here you are out there, so nervous, so scared and he’s supposed to be the meanest man in your world standing on your left, and he did that?” Anderson said. “I knew then that he was a little teddy bear.”