The August day one man rocked Three Rivers like no other
It was in July that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette sports department delivered, on the 50th anniversary of its grand opening, a comprehensive retrospective on Three Rivers Stadium, a fairly forgettable edifice with seriously unforgettable moments.
I wouldn’t touch a single rhetorical hair on the series of articles and artistic presentations our writers and editors sculpted to honor the mostly unlamented TRS, but I am humbly submitting this brief coda, should it please the court.
This probably has less to do with the old hulking doughnut’s sports history as with its audio history. For the record, I heard the Rolling
Stones at Three Rivers, also U2, also Genesis, all of whom offered an acoustical assault powerful enough to loosen your teeth. But I never heard anyone or anything as fearsomely loud as I did in a ground level corridor outside the visiting baseball clubhouse between games of a Sunday doubleheader on Aug. 10, 1980.
Forty years ago this weekend, the Phillies were in town for another important divisional series they would turn into another perfectly desultory performance. They had lost nine in a row on the road and 14 of the past 19 in Three Rivers Stadium, including a 7-1 rollover to the defending world champion Pirates in the first of two that day.
That was apparently all that Phillies manager Dallas Green could stand.
In those days, media could not enter the clubhouse between games of a doubleheader, but you could go down there and talk to the manager for a few minutes. I was in my third year on the Phillies beat for the Philadelphia Journal, a long dead bloodand-guts tabloid far less lamented than TRS would ever be. But writers were locked out when we got there because a man was screaming inside in a manner suggesting he was not to be interrupted.
The manager was a loud man to begin with, but in the butt-ripping that had just commenced behind closed doors, his booming voice crescendoed to unstable levels, some of the notes jumped octaves involuntarily. For those flourishes, imagine a 6foot-5, 250-pound Barney Fife. That voice somehow penetrated the cinder block walls so completely that it could be recorded by Hal Bodley, then the beat writer for the Wilmington News-Journal.
“You’ve gotta stop being so [expletive] cool,” Green screeched. “Get that through your [expletive] heads. If you don’t, you’ll be so [expletive] buried it ain’t gonna be funny. Get the [expletive] off your asses. You’re a good [expletive] baseball team but you’re not now and you can’t look in the [expletive] mirror and tell me you are
“You tell me you can do it, but you [expletive] give up. If you don’t want to [expletive] play, get the [expletive] in my office and [expletive] tell me because I don’t want to [expletive] play you.”
We stared at each other wide-eyed, the universal gaze that says, “Holy [expletive]!”
“I had Dallas the whole time that I was in the minor leagues because he was the farm director then,” said Pirates broadcaster Bob Walk, who made 27 starts in his rookie season for that Phillies team. “I knew what his voice could do because he terrified us all the time. We were scared to death of him.”
Mike Schmidt, Pete Rose, Steve Carlton, Larry Bowa, Garry Maddox, Tug McGraw, Bob Boone, Bake McBride, guys like that were not scared of Dallas Green, but they were floundering for him that August.
“We’d go into Pittsburgh and play these series year after year and it was just like this long, incredible déjà vu moment in the way the Phillies played,” The Athletic’s Jayson Stark, then in his second year on the beat for the Philadelphia Inquirer, said on the phone this past week. “We’d seen this movie so many times and we were sick and tired of the same plot.”
A year earlier, again on an early August weekend, the Pirates swept a doubleheader against the Phillies on Friday, beat them again on Saturday and swept another doubleheader Sunday, the second game ending with a grand slam by John Milner.
“So there was no surprise in what Dallas said,” Stark remembered.
“The surprise was that we could hear it.”
Ray Didinger, then a columnist at the Philadelphia Daily News, remembered that after the excoriated Phils went out and dropped the second game of the doubleheader, 4-1, Rose was one of the few players at his locker to review the betweengames eruption of Mount St. Dallas.
Told we could hear Dallas in the hallway, Rose said, “No [expletive] [expletive], I think they heard him back in Philadelphia. Personally, I like a manager like Dallas. He lets you know what he’s thinking all the time. If he’s unhappy, he lets you know about it, and he was unhappy today.”
And then, as Stark put it, something happened.
The Phillies left for Chicago, won eight of the next nine and 36 of their final 55 games, taking the National League East Division title for the fourth time in five years, and they weren’t done. Late in October, the Phillies won the World Series, a clause that had never before been written in the English language.
“I’m not gonna let these guys quit on themselves; they’re too [expletive] good,” Dallas said when we finally got into his office at Three Rivers that day. “They can still win this [expletive] thing but not playing like this. If I have to yell at them to get them going, I’ll yell good and loud. The other way was tried with these guys and that was unsuccessful. OK, now we’ll try it my way.”
That line always reminded me of Walter Matthau in “Plaza Suite,” telling his wife how he planned to get his daughter to come out of the bathroom so that she could attend her wedding.
“We’ve had nice talking; now we are going to have door breaking.”
Dallas died March 22, 2017, from kidney failure as the official cause, but he had an irreparable hole in his heart after his granddaughter was among 18 people wounded in a mass shooting in Tucson, Ariz., six years earlier. She did not survive. He had been pretty much a self-made baseball man with a management resume he could line up against anyone’s. A sore-armed pitcher, he went from low-level Phillies operative to field manager near the end of 1979. A year later, he would deliver Philadelphia’s first world title in 97 years. As general manager of the Chicago Cubs, he put that club in the postseason for the first time in 39 years in 1984. He eventually would return to the dugout to manage the Yankees and Mets.
He essentially was loud, gregarious, brutally honest, and he taught us plenty about baseball. Dallas didn’t necessarily terrify us, but that one day at Three Rivers Stadium, he came pretty close.