Sorry to interject a sports theme into the diaries, but one of my favorite baseball figures, Gene Mauch, has passed away at the age of seventy-nine.
Mauch was the manager of my beloved (and formerly hapless) Angels in ’82 and ’86, when they came soooo close to winning the pennant, I could almost taste it.
He is most remembered, however, for being at the helm of the ’64 Phillies when they went through one of the worst end of season collapses in the history of baseball. This tendency to lose, at the cusp of victory, became known, pejoratively, as the “Gene Mauch Jinx.”
He was a truly gifted manager, however, with a mind like a steel trap: He knew what to do in every situation, without looking at notes or scouting reports.
Mauch was probably the best manager to never win a World Series.
There will never be another manager like him.
John Kruk just noted that Phillies fans still booed Mauch more than forty years after the collapse — one of the reasons I’ve never liked Phillies fans (sorry Boo, Atrios, et al) — but he’ll always be a winner in my book.
Go with God, big guy.
That’s sad news. I always thought Mauch was a good guy.
I have to say, though, after reading your post, my immediate reaction was: Jiminy, he was seventy-nine now? He seemed that age twenty years ago! (I guess that’s what being a career manager will do to you.)
More seriously, though, I’ve never understood the “Mauch mystique.” Everybody always said what a great manager he was, and the usual take was that he’s a great manager who is unfortunately stuck with losing teams. But as you remind us, he sometimes had some pretty good teams.
I realize that being a fan for a team, following every game, can give you special insight into the manager’s (and the players’) skills and limitations. (Lord, back when I was really able to follow the A’s seriously — no, I’m not trying to be provocative now by bringing up the A’s! — I laughed whenever I heard what the national commentators said. Hell, I think I was the only person outside of Cincinatti who thought the Reds would blow out the A’s in 1990! I knew that team and its strengths and weaknesses; I was even tempted to put down what money I had on the Reds, because I was so certain, but, well, it’s bad business to bet against your own team…) So can you tell me, more specifically — maybe using examples — what did his greatness as a manager consist in?
I really want to know. Do it for Gene’s sake!
Mauch was one of the first “small ball” managers; he always put pressure on the other team’s defense, employing the sacrifice, the hit-and-run and the stolen base to great effect.
He also had a .483 career winning percentage with the Phillies (1960-68), the Expos (1969-75), the Twins (1976-80), and the Angels (1981-87). He wasn’t just a manager of bad teams, he was like the major leagues’ janitor, doing jobs at which lesser men would have balked.
He had winning seasons on thirteen occasions, exactly half of the twenty-six he managed. He even coaxed near-winning seasons out of the ’73 and ’74 Expos. The Expos. Think about that for a minute.
Here’s a chart of his career from Baseball-reference.com, one of my favorite sites. You’ll notice that all four teams he managed got better under his leadership.
Despite having winning teams, and turning around franchises that were perennially awful, Mauch had a reputation as being a loser because he could never win the big one. He never managed a team in the World Series.
My memories of Mauch will always include the fact that he let Donnie Moore pitch to Dave Henderson in game three of the ’86 NLCS when it was pretty clear Moore didn’t have his usual stuff. Still, Moore was the team’s closer. In looking back, I don’t know what I would have done differently, myself.
Mauch always got the short end of the stick. I guess that’s why I have a soft spot for the guy.
That’s helpful.
Oh, poor Donnie Moore. Haven’t thought about him in a while. What a sad story.
Still, Mauch is certainly not alone in having lost a hugely important game through relying on a closer who didn’t have his usual stuff. I’m having a hard time thinking of a manager who didn’t, in a similar situation, do what Mauch did.
One of the reasons I was so sure the A’s would get badly beaten in 1990 was that it was painfully obvious to anyone watching the team that Eckersley had completely run out of gas around early September. You — and I’m sure the opposing hitters! — could see it on his face when he came into games. LaRussa knew it, for sure. But again, what was he to do? Just hope that when they hit the ball, they hit it at somebody, I guess.
Yeah, Moore was a tough one. That and the tragic death of Lyman Bostck, Jr. (my favorite player, at the time), were part of the reason the Angels were considered a cursed team.
Mauch never had a chance.
My dad and I landscaped Mauchs house back in the late sixties, a few years after his debacle in Philadelphia.
He was just as quiet, cold-seeming in real life as he appeared to be on the bench. Clearly an introverted man, no doubt haunted beyond measure by his historic failure.
And yet, he was a great manager of a certain type I like to call the “overmanager.”
Tony LaRusso is a natural progression of Mauch. And he has a few Mauchian failures of his own, except with better teams.