Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Appreciating man who reshaped Phillies history
PHILADELPHIA >> From 1883 until a size-15 cowboy boot kicked open the clubhouse door in 1979, no major league baseball team had trafficked in ultimate failure with better than the Phillies.
With good teams and mediocre teams, with lousy teams and in 1976, 1977 and 1978 with great ones, with a couple that had flopped in the World Series and with one that flopped with legendary precision in 1964, the Phillies were always good for one thing: Tolerating disappointment.
That was until one George Dallas Green said it was time for that to end. Better still, he snarled it, then shouted it, then repeated it. Finally, in 1980, he showed it, managing the Phillies to their first world championship and, in many ways, resetting franchise expectations into another millennium.
Green died Wednesday afternoon at age 82. As the Phillies would report in a press release, he passed “peacefully.” He deserved that comfort. He deserved it because the franchise he’d made his for most of his 62 years in professional baseball had long ago been freed of its self-doubts. He deserved it because he was the one who most made that happen.
Rare in baseball, or in any pursuit, will any fable match the reality. But in the case of Green, the Delaware-born former righthanded pitcher who was long on baseball instincts and short on patience, there was never a need to embellish the character.
“He was a big man with a big heart,” Phillies chairman David Montgomery said, “and a bigger-than-life personality.”
Never was any of that — the size of the man, the size of his heart — of more value to a baseball organization than it was to the Phillies in 1979. By then, in many ways because of how Green had peopled the system with gifted players in his role as farm director, the Phillies were loaded with superstars. Steve Carlton and Mike Schmidt already were on their way to Cooperstown. So, too, was Pete Rose, who had joined the 1979 Phillies as a free agent. Larry Bowa was a Hall of Fame can--
didate. Tug McGraw, too. Garry Maddox, Bob Boone and Greg Luzinski were All-Stars and franchise legends. That nucleus helped the Phils finish in first place in 1976, 1977 and 1978, that after having done so just twice before, in 1915 and 1950. Yet for many reasons — from inaccurate weather forecasts to injuries to Danny Ozark forgetting to call for a ninth-inning prevent defense — the Phillies continued to fail. Even Rose, imported as much for his unwillingness to lose as for his ability to hit line drives from both sides of the plate, was unable in 1979 to reverse that trend.
Ozark managed through Aug. 30 that season, but there were the Phils, with that talent, with those expectations, with that payroll, stashed in fifth place in the National League East, 12.5 games out of first, having lost eight of their last nine. That’s when the 6-foot-5, 210-pound Green, boots and attitude easy to see coming, marched down from the front office with one basic announcement: Either the Phillies were going to win a championship soon, or somebody was going to go. And that somebody was not going to be him.
Green would do nothing quietly. Rather, he would spend the next year-plus slamming doors and calling out his players in the papers. With that, the clubhouse would spiral into tumult. The players, aware that they could be blamed for something
at any moment, grew tense and irritable, many nights arriving at the Vet for batting practice and barely acknowledging one another. Others, Bowa in particular, countered with their own criticisms of the manager. But if it was chaos, it was chaos with a purpose: By 1980, Dallas Green was succeeding in shaking a room full of spectacular talent to life.
Still, though, Green’s spread-the-fear initiative was not working exactly as planned, with the Phils five games out of first place in mid-August and the Vet crowds — which Bowa had shouted were made up of the worst fans in baseball — were turning more miserable than usual. That’s when Green made good on his promise to put the franchise’s reputation above that of any of the players. So into late September the Phils rolled, and into the lineup on a more regular basis went rookies Lonnie Smith and Keith Moreland, and veteran Del Unser. Smith replaced Luzinski in left. Unser was in center, Maddox taking some rest. Moreland shoved Boone to the bench.
That’s what Green had promised. He’d promised to make the Phillies winners at any cost to egos. And he had the bulk and the mouth and the reputation and the support of the front office and the recent history as his back-up posse. But by Game No. 161, a 6-4, 11-inning victory in Montreal, there they all were, soaked in champagne, division champions again.
By then, the season-long carry-on had become oddly therapeutic. Finally, the Phillies had shed the personality
that had doomed them to disappointment for generations. They were mirroring Green. They were tougher. They were stronger. They were intolerant of losing. They would win the NLCS, a best-of-five, in 10 innings in Houston. They would win the World Series in six games over Kansas City.
Two million showed up for the parade that started with that one-man march into that clubhouse.
By 1982, Green was gone, becoming general manager and then president of the Cubs. From there, he would manage both the Yankees and Mets, but eventually would find his way home. In recent years, he was a senior adviser in the Phillies’ front office and, as often or not, the go-to voice for sports writers ever likely to elicit a stinging criticism of the onfield performance whenever a Phillies losing streak grew substantial.
The Phillies have had struggles since Green became manager in 1979. But they won pennants in 1983, 1993 and 2009, the World Series in 2008 and division championships in 2007, 2010 and 2011. And while much of that sounds too far removed from 1980 for there have been a connection, it was not. Rather, it was all connected. It was all connected because George Dallas Green saw potential in a franchise forever spreading failure.
He saw it and demanded better.
To contact Jack McCaffery, email him at jmccaffery@21stcenturymedia.com; follow him on Twitter @ JackMcCaffery