Former Phils skipper dies

PHILADELPHIA — As a big league pitcher, Dallas Green was pretty mediocre.

“I was a 20-game winner,” he would joke, “it just took me five years to do it.”

Instead, it was in another role where the imposing, 6-foot-5 Green really made noise.

“When you think of big, with that deep voice, that booming voice, he could hold a team meeting, boy, he could scare you right out of your seat,” Cleveland manager Terry Francona recalled.

Green, the tough-talking, no-nonsense skipper who in 1980 guided the Philadelphia Phillies to their first World Series championship, died Wednesday. He was 82.

The Phillies said Green died at Hahnemann University Hospital in Philadelphia. He had been in poor health for a while.

Green spent 62 years in baseball as a player, manager, general manager, team president and other roles.

“He was a big man with a big heart and a bigger-than-life personality,” Phillies chairman David Montgomery said in a released statement.

As a pitcher, Green went just 20-22 in the 1960s. His most notable distinction on the mound might have been giving up the only grand slam launched by all-time hits leader Pete Rose.

In 1980, with Rose playing first base on a team that included future Hall of Famers Mike Schmidt and Steve Carlton, Green guided the Phillies to a very elusive crown, ending a drought that stretched back nearly a century.

“Baseball world lost a giant,” Rose tweeted. “Dallas was a hell of a guy and a real leader.”

He sure got his team’s attention midway through that championship season. After a loss in Pittsburgh left the Phils around .500, his clubhouse tirade was so loud that writers outside the locker room at Three Rivers Stadium swore they could hear every word.