The Rotation (19 page)

Back in the States after his playing days, Manuel was hardly a household name. He worked as a manager and hitting coach in the Minnesota and
Cleveland systems.

Manuel skippered the Twins' Double-A team in Orlando in 1984 and 1985 when he developed a friendship/rivalry with John Hart, then-manager of Baltimore's Double-A Charlotte club. In those Southern League battles, Hart became impressed with Manuel's will to win—even if it sometimes infuriated him.

In 1984, Hart's club made a 10-hour bus ride to Orlando for a one-game playoff to determine which team would play in the postseason. Hart's club jumped out to an early 7-0 lead. The skies darkened in the fourth inning and it started to rain. Eventually it started to pour. The game was not official. Hart wondered why the grounds crew was not covering the field. He later found out why.

“Charlie paid the guy $100 to take off,” Hart said with a laugh years later.

“Our groundskeeper was this guy named Big John,” Manuel recalled. “Big John was 6-6 and weighed 350. I knew he liked to drink red wine. We were losing and I saw the rain. I told him to go have some fun. It was pretty funny. Hart was over there yelling for the tarp. I said, ‘You want the tarp, put it on yourself!' But he has the story wrong. I only gave Big John fifty bucks.”

Big John got his buzz and Manuel got his wish. The game was rained out. Hart's Charlotte team won the makeup and went on to win the league title.

Hart loved Manuel's passion for the game and the way he led a team. When he joined Cleveland's front office a few years later, he hired Manuel. Manuel rose from minor-league instructor to minor-league manager to big-league hitting coach to big-league manager during his time in Cleveland. Hart moved on to the Texas Rangers in 2001. Manuel was fired in Cleveland in 2002 and hired by Phillies General Manger Ed Wade as a scout later that year. After a stormy season in 2004, Wade fired Manager Larry Bowa and hired Manuel as manager. Wade had grown to like Manuel's folksy, easygoing manner. He was impressed with Manuel's gift for building a player's confidence, and figured it would be a good salve for a clubhouse that had trouble with Bowa's barbed-wire ways.

The hiring was ripped in every corner of the city.

“Wade whiffs at skipper search” read a
Philadelphia Inquirer
headline over a column that proclaimed Manuel as the sixth-best candidate in an eight-man field.

Jim Leyland was the people's choice. He had a World Series ring. And he was tough and hard-nosed, the kind of guy Philadelphians liked. Phillies officials liked Leyland, but he probably had a little too much sandpaper in his personality at a time when club officials were looking for someone the polar opposite of Bowa.

The Phillies finished in second place during Manuel's first two seasons, but that hardly brought him acceptance in the community. He was ripped and ridiculed, but always managed to stay upbeat. When you've survived your father's suicide, a heart attack, a bout with kidney cancer, and diverticulitis so bad that you had to manage with a colostomy bag under your jacket, how much can a rip job on the radio from Howard Eskin really hurt?

Pat Gillick took over as GM before the 2006 season, Manuel's third. Gillick considered letting Manuel go after that season. Gillick stuck with Manuel for 2007 and on the last day of that season, Manuel began to gain a foothold with Phillies fans. The team won the National League East and players nearly tripped over their tongues praising their unpretentious leader. And, oh, by the way, just because he was easygoing, didn't mean he was a wimp. Manuel stood up to players when he had to. He just did it privately without putting on a big show.

If Manuel caught a break in the community in 2007, he gained full acceptance when he hoisted the World Series trophy in 2008 and shouted, “Hey, this is for Philadelphia! This is for our fans!”

Suddenly, his Southern accent and fractured syntax were charming. (How can you not warm up to a guy who described the difficultly of picking an All-Star roster as “a Catch 42 . . . or 29 . . . or whatever it is?”) Suddenly, he wasn't the Mayor of Simpleton anymore. He could have been the Mayor of Philadelphia if he had wanted to.

“My favorite memory from the World Series parade was being on a float with Charlie and hearing all the fans yell, ‘Chuck for mayor,' or ‘Char-lie . . . Char-lie . . . Char-lie,' ” said Bill Giles, the Phillies chairman and part owner. “He went from a bum to a monster hero. He was the most popular guy out there.”

But even as Manuel gained popularity and earned contract extensions, he never forgot who helped him gain that popularity.

“Anything I've ever gotten as a manager in this game is because of my players,” he said.

Players talk. They talk about equipment.
Hey, let me try that bat.
They talk about reporters.
Watch out for that guy
.They talk about restaurants.
Why did they take the bone-in filet off the menu?
They talk about managers. Let's not kid anybody here. Winning and money are the two main reasons that Philadelphia became a destination for star talents such as those in The Rotation. But Charlie Manuel didn't hurt. Guys love playing for him.

“He's the same every single day,” said Jimmy Rollins, who has felt Manuel's seldom-seen wrath and been benched a time or two. “As a player, especially when times get a little rough, you want your manager to be the same guy. It's easy to be nice and joke around with everybody when you're winning, but what happens when things aren't going the right way or the team just can't seem to figure it out? All of a sudden is he going to change and completely become a different person? Charlie doesn't do that. If you're struggling, you know he's going to run you out there. He believes in his players.”

It's all very reassuring to a team.

The affection that players have for Manuel was evident moments after Carlos Ruiz and Brad Lidge teamed for the last out of the 2008 World Series. Drenched in champagne, Ruiz and Lidge found Manuel in the clubhouse and presented him with the ball. They didn't have to do that. One of them could have tucked it away and taken it home. But they wanted Manuel to have it.

“That was a great honor,” Manuel said of the gesture. “It's the best thing I've gotten in my career.”

Three years later, in September 2011, Manuel became the Phillies' all-time leader in managerial wins. As always, he credited his players, particularly the starting pitchers that he sent to the mound.

“I don't know where we'd be without them,” he said.

One of Manuel's favorite expressions is “know thyself.” He's a hitting guy, not necessarily a pitching guy, and he knows it. That's why, when he interviewed for the job in the fall of 2004, he told Wade he would need a good pitching coach.

Rich Dubee, a baseball lifer who pitched in the Kansas City Royals system and began coaching in 1982, was promoted from Triple-A and has been at Manuel's side ever since.

“Dubee is my man,” Manuel said. “I lean on him. He totally handles our pitching.”

Manuel loves to talk hitting. He'll talk about his lineup, why this guy is hitting here and that guy is hitting there. But ask him about his pitching rotation, who'll get the ball on the first day back from the All-Star break, who needs some extra rest, and he'll always defer to his pitching coach.

“I've got to get with Dubee and talk about it,” Manuel will say.

Ask him why he stuck with a pitcher in the eighth inning and he'll say, “Dubee and I thought he had plenty left.”

The two men are so close that Dubee can finish Manuel's sentences and often does when he sits on daily media sessions during spring training.

While Dubee, Manuel, and Ruiz are prominent members of the cast that supports the Phillies' all-aces pitching staff, there are more, many more, from the playing field, to the front office. In 2011, Phillies pitchers had eight players who had made at least one All-Star team playing behind them, and the bullpen, led by Ryan Madson and Antonio Bastardo, was strong.

Late in the 2011 season, Manuel was asked to name his choice for team MVP.

He thought about the starting pitching and the bullpen, he acknowledged Shane Victorino's strong play and Ryan Howard's sixth-straight 30-homer, 100-RBI season. He mentioned ownership's willingness to spend money on top talent. Finally, Manuel tabbed General Manager Ruben Amaro Jr., the chief architect of the club, as his MVP.

“I don't want to stroke Ruben's ego, and I'm damn sure not kissing him, but he's done a hell of a job,” Manuel said.

There is, of course, one more piece of the supporting cast, perhaps the most important of all.

They are the folks who buy the tickets that lead to the sellouts that fuel the huge payroll, the folks that watch the nightly drama—reality television at its finest—and push the TV ratings skyward. They are the folks that give the team the revenues it needs to secure the talent that wins the games that makes more players want to come play for the Phillies.

This is the cycle that led to the Philadelphia Phillies putting together one of the greatest pitching staffs ever in 2011, the cycle that led to The Rotation.

On to the Season.

T
he schedule says the new season dawned on April 1 when the Phillies rallied for a late win over the Houston Astros in front of the 124
^th
-straight sellout crowd at Citizens Bank Park, but really it started weeks before that. Seeds for the season of great expectations had been sown in December when Cliff Lee spurned the Yankees and Rangers and signed with the Phillies, the very beau that had dumped him for someone more attractive just a year earlier. Within a week of Lee's pulling on that red Phillies cap at his re-introductory news conference, fans gobbled up 100,000 tickets and the club was on its way to another standing-room-only season.

It wasn't until February 14—Valentine's Day, fittingly—that Phillies fans could really fall in love with The Rotation and all its possibilities.

First workout for pitchers and catchers.

Pitchers and catchers
, for short.

Every baseball fan knows what those words mean when they pop up on the schedule. Soon it will be time to store the snow shovels. Soon the sun will coax the crocuses from the ground, the grass will turn from brown to green, and it will be time to tune into the daily narrative of the baseball season. Even in the darkest days of Phillies baseball, pitchers and catchers was a special day, a day when the team was tied for first place in the National League East and hope soared as high as Liberty Place, even if everyone knew it would crash down by Memorial Day. But there was something different about the first day of pitchers and catchers in 2011. Before this day, The Rotation was a collection of names and stats on a piece of paper. Yes, those names and numbers might have been written in gold, but now everything felt as real as the scruff on Cliff Lee's face. The winter was over, and now The Rotation was a reality, all dressed up in crisp new, red practice tops, ready to take to the emerald fields of Carpenter Complex for the first time together.

Standing in the middle of the clubhouse, Rich Dubee, pitching coach of the stars, smiled like a lottery winner.

“I was going to bring a recliner to spring training,” he joked.

Dubee had gone to bed on December 13 when a late-night text message alerted him that the Phillies had signed Lee. He scrambled to his computer, verified the news and went to sleep with visions of two-hit shutouts dancing in his head.

“I always said your Number One starter is the guy who is pitching that day,” Dubee said. “Now we're running out four Number Ones. Our front office has done a tremendous job piecing together four frontline guys, and Joe Blanton is not chopped liver by any means, so we feel very good about what we've got.”

Once upon a time, a signing like Lee's would have been revealed over a bowl of Cheerios in the next morning's newspaper. But news waits for no one in this real-time world of 24-hour updates. From Florida to California, Lee's signing set off a series of beeps and buzzes among Phillies players. Thumbs went into overdrive as quick text messages were sent between the players.

Ben Francisco had just beaten Brad Lidge in a fantasy football game when he delivered some consoling news in a text: “It's OK. Don't cry.We just signed Cliff Lee.” At home in suburban Denver, Lidge digested Francisco's text message. His mind immediately harkened back to Halloween Day 2008 when the Phillies rode down Broad Street as World Series champs.

“All right,” Lidge said to himself. “This is it. We've got to win this thing.”