by Felipe Alou
RIGHT FIELD: Hank Aaron. Roberto Clemente was the best I saw defensively. But Aaron is underestimated as a defensive right fielder, as was Frank Robinson. Hank had a great arm, accurate. Exceptional base runner. Power. But because of his home runs, people forget what an all-around offensive talent Aaron was. Hank was the complete package.
CENTER FIELD: Willie Mays. Defensively, Curt Flood was the best I saw. His range was incredible. You couldn’t hit the ball over Flood’s head. Willie was great at all five tools. So graceful in outfield. He played the position beautifully. Great at charging the ball and throwing people out. He had speed on the base paths with outstanding instincts. And then there’s Willie’s offensive numbers, which speak for themselves.
RIGHT-HANDED PITCHER: Greg Maddux. Probably the best command of pitches—plural—I ever saw. Extremely smart. He always seemed to throw the pitch needed to get a hitter out. Great fielder of his position, with eighteen Gold Gloves to go with four Cy Young Awards. I once saw Maddux in winter ball in Venezuela and asked what he was doing. He said, “I want to get better command of my fastball.” He did. Maddux painted the black like few ever have.
LEFT-HANDED PITCHER: Warren Spahn. It might be Clayton Kershaw by the time his career ends, but right now it’s Spahn and his 363 career victories. Great all-around athlete who superbly fielded his position. Hit 35 home runs. Fierce competitor. Best move to first base of any lefty I ever saw. He finished with 382 complete games and 63 shutouts and even had 28 saves.
CLOSER: Mariano Rivera. His natural cutter—the cut fastball—was almost like a slider, and it was unhittable. Rivera brought it every day. He had the three C’s. Consistency. Clutch. And incredible command. He never seemed to sweat. Performed with ice in his veins. Outstanding athlete who also fielded his position. Durable. He’s the standard you measure everyone else against.
MANAGER: Bruce Bochy. If I was a team owner and I had to pick one guy to win a pennant, it would be Billy Martin . . . and then I’d release him. As an everyday and every-year manager, Bochy with his four World Series appearances and three championships is the best. Bruce can see the unseen. His level of anticipation is unlike anything I’ve witnessed. He sees plays well before they happen. He’s probably the best at blending today’s sabermetrics and analytics with the human element.
I ended my assessment on Bruce Bochy talking about sabermetrics and analytics because it’s become a fixture, and I often get asked about them. Statistics have always been around, and managers have always used them as a guide, as a reference point. But you still have to manage a game with your eyes, and you never want to overlook that baseball has a heartbeat. Numbers serve a purpose, but they’re there to do just that—serve. Not dictate. Besides, nowadays everybody has the same analytics. So if everyone has the same information, what’s the difference? Answer: the human element.
I do fear that sabermetrics is encroaching too much into the game. I fear that before long they’re going to have analytics on how a player hits on a cloudy day with the wind blowing from east to west between five and ten miles per hour just after he got a haircut. I say that jokingly, but at some point it can get ridiculous.
I especially think it can get ridiculous with Minor League players, where I believe data is accumulated and implemented too quickly. Players need time to develop, to learn the game, to adjust. A player at eighteen might be completely different than he is at twenty. Young players should develop under a manager’s care instead of by an edict from a spreadsheet. You should also give every Minor League player a fair opportunity to perform. Your prospects will get that opportunity. But the second-tier guy deserves that opportunity, too.
Speaking of prospects, probably because of my years with the Expos, where we always needed to make smart trades for prospects, I constantly preached that nobody should know our Minor League talent better than we do. That might sound like a simple edict, but it isn’t always. You should not only know your Minor League talent better than anyone else, but also strive to know the Minor League talent of other organizations better than they do. It’s key to surviving as a small-market franchise. It’s how we got Pedro Martínez from the Los Angeles Dodgers. Conversely, we almost lost Andrés Galarraga the same way.
When I was with the Expos on the last day of spring training in 1981, we were having an organizational meeting in Daytona Beach, finalizing rosters from the Major League club to the lowest level in the Minors. I was slated to manage the Class Triple-A Denver Bears. With my roster set I was reading a newspaper and half paying attention when the discussion turned to the Class A rosters. I heard someone mention that Galarraga should be released.
“You’ve got to be kidding me!” I said, punctuating my incredulity by throwing my newspaper down.
“He can’t hit the breaking ball,” someone said.
“He’s nineteen!” I shot back. “How many guys at nineteen hit the breaking ball?”
I reminded them of Tim Wallach, who couldn’t hit the breaking ball early in the Minor Leagues but later became a great Expos player. I finally managed to convince the organization to keep Galarraga, who was sent to Class A West Palm Beach.
The next day I heard from Marty Martínez, a former Atlanta Braves teammate who was working with the Seattle Mariners. “Felipe, did you guys release Galarraga?” Marty asked.
“Why?”
“Because I heard you guys were going to release him. And if they release that kid, we’re going to sign him.”
Andrés Galarraga almost became a Seattle Mariner because of underevaluating our talent and not allowing that talent to develop. It took Galarraga four more years to develop to where he made the big leagues in 1985, en route to a nineteen-year career where he hit 399 home runs while recording a .288 batting average.
Players need that time to develop—in the Minor Leagues and even in the Major Leagues.
The 1998 Expos team I managed was very young, especially our pitching staff. That season was also the year of the home run chase between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire. I’ve known Sosa, a fellow Dominican, since he was fifteen, when he was shining shoes and playing baseball, trying to help his family. Sammy was a good kid, small but put together, kind of naive. I managed him in winter ball and could see his talent, that he had all five tools and big-league potential. I tried hard to get Montreal to sign him, but the asking price was $4,000—too much for the Expos. Omar Minaya, who was a Texas Rangers scout, eventually signed a seventeen-year-old Sosa for $3,500.
In 1998 we were scheduled to play against McGwire and the St. Louis Cardinals in the final four games of the season, when we were about forty games out of first place. In my heart I was rooting for Sosa to win the home run title. I also knew there would be pressure from the Dominican Republic, and especially from the media there, to pitch around McGwire and thus give Sosa a better chance to win. That wasn’t going to happen, though.
Number one, you respect the game. I expect Major League behavior from the umpires, the media, the players, and from me, too. I’m demanding that way. You respect the game.
Number two, in 1998 I had a young pitching staff. Asking them to pitch around McGwire wasn’t going to help them develop. I had been instructing them all season to be aggressive. So now, for the last four games, I’m going to ask them to be cowards? That wasn’t going to happen.
I called the pitchers together before the series. “We came here to play baseball,” I said. “I want you guys to be aggressive. You’ve got to pitch, and we’re going to pitch to McGwire. We’re going to go after him.”
In the first game, against 22-year-old starter Javier Vázquez and a young bullpen, McGwire didn’t hit a homer. In the second game he connected off reliever Shayne Bennett, 26, for his 66th homer. In the third game he hit home runs 67 and 68 off starter Dustin Hermanson, 25, and reliever Kirk Bullinger, 28. And in the final game he hit home runs 69 and 70 off starter Mike Thurman, 25, and reliever Carl Pavano, 22.
I regret that McGwire hit 5 homers in four games against us, finishing
with 70, 4 more than Sosa, who couldn’t keep pace with him. But I don’t regret respecting the game. We didn’t pitch around McGwire, and he still had to hit those pitches we threw.
After the game, while still in our dugout, I heard someone shout, “Hey, Felipe!” I turned, and it was McGwire coming across the field toward me. He had his batting gloves and a Sharpie in his hands. He signed each glove with the words:
To Felipe, Home Runs 66, 67, 68, 69, 70. Mark McGwire.
He handed me the gloves, shook my hand, and said, “You’re a real gentleman. You could’ve told your guys not to pitch to me.” It was brief, but it was impactful. And it was Mark McGwire’s classy way of acknowledging I respected him and the game.
Maybe a younger me might have approached those four games differently. But by 1998 I felt confident in my managerial skin because I had paid my dues. And I’m a believer in managers paying their dues in the Minor Leagues, because it’s such an excellent place to develop. It’s the best school for any baseball man. The more seasoning you get in the Minor Leagues, the better you’ll be as a field manager. You learn the bad. You learn there are many ways to lose a baseball game. You learn how to anticipate an approaching catastrophe and how to avoid that catastrophe. You see things in the Minor Leagues you don’t see anywhere else.
I prided myself on my observation. The difference between winning and losing is so fragile that you have to observe everything, assimilate quickly, and make a decision. Your mind is always working, which is why many managers don’t like doing those mid-inning interviews for TV. You have so many other things on your mind that you’re thinking through. I’m always anticipating. I like to act rather than react. People used to accuse me of lifting my pitchers too soon. But I’d rather act and lift a pitcher on my terms rather than react and be forced to take a pitcher out.
Some events—catastrophes—you can’t avoid. I’ve never asked my son Moisés about the play in Game Six of the 2003 National League Championship Series—known as the Bartman Incident. I’ve never asked Moisés because I’ve been around him when people have asked him, and he doesn’t like it. He tenses. He doesn’t talk about it.
Moisés was playing left field for the Chicago Cubs, who were five outs away from defeating the Florida Marlins and heading to the franchise’s first World Series since 1945. Luis Castillo hit a lazy fly ball into foul territory along the Wrigley Field wall. Moisés jogged over, jumped to catch it, only to come away empty-handed because Cubs fan Steve Bartman got his hands on the ball first. Moisés was livid then, and I believe he’s still seething today.
As a manager, when I saw that on TV, I knew things were going to unravel for the Cubs. And they did. When an opposing batter gets an extra pitch, or a team gets an extra out, it has a deflating effect on everybody, and it often leads to catastrophe. I could immediately see that happening to the Cubs, and I don’t believe I was the only person who saw that coming.
Even now, if I go see a ballgame, I go to see a ballgame—every pitch, every swing, every action that occurs. I evaluate what I see, not what somebody tells me. It takes constant concentration. We didn’t have sabermetrics and analytics when I was coming up. The information you had was the information in your head, having a good memory. Remembering the last swing, the last pitch, the last at-bat—and sometimes that swing, pitch, and at-bat was last year.
Pedro Martínez remembers times when I would bring in a right-handed pitcher to throw to the left-handed Tony Gwynn. Why? Because of something I saw. Maybe it was something I saw in Gwynn’s swing plane, and I knew a certain right-hander with his delivery would give him problems. In those instances I would go with my eyes and against the book and the computer.
It is, after all, the manager and not the book or computer who is the boss. I played for Dick Williams in Oakland and coached under him in Montreal, and I learned from Williams that the manager has to be the boss—the boss of the coaches, the players, and the game. Dick was tough, and you absolutely knew he was the boss. Once the game starts the manager is the biggest authority. He has the most influence. He’s in charge of the game and the players.
In connection with that, a good manager must stay on top of his coaching staff. Maybe it’s because of my years managing in the Minor Leagues, but I believe a manager should coach his coaches. He should teach and correct his coaches. This is critical, because one man cannot manage a team. He’s going to need the input of his coaching staff, as well as the input from his medical people and the head trainer.
The manager should know something about everything—pitching, hitting, base running, fielding, all of it. He should know the game inside out. But while he should have an excellent working knowledge of pitching, his pitching coach should be the expert, and he’s going to need to rely on that man. Joe Kerrigan, when he was my pitching coach in Montreal, was a good example of that. Kerrigan was intense, and sometimes his interpersonal skills weren’t the best, but he had a knack for finding weaknesses in hitters and knowing how to expose them. He helped me win a lot of games. Another guy I had in Montreal, Perry Hill, is, I believe, the game’s best infield instructor. You rely on guys like that, but at the same time, as a manager you need to know your stuff, too. It always comes back to the manager, and I do mean always. He’s the authority.
When a player comes up from the Minor Leagues he is in the hands of the manager. When he proves that if he doesn’t play every day the manager is criticized or fired, that’s when he’s free. A player free from the manager doesn’t have to worry about the lineup. He knows he’s in it. Until then he is at my disposal, under my control. Very few players come into the big leagues and are right away free from the manager. Cody Bellinger and Aaron Judge did it in their rookie years. But they are the exception rather than the rule.
Older players, when their numbers and their range and their speed start to decrease, return to the hands of the manager. The manager controls them again. The player might find himself being platooned or not in a day game after a night game. If it’s the American League, he might find himself in the designated-hitter role more and more—perhaps exclusively.
I’m a proponent of the DH. It’s time for Major League Baseball to institute it in the National League, which I believe is the only league in the world that doesn’t use the DH. Traditionalists talk about the strategy in the NL. What strategy? The number-eight hitter doesn’t get much to hit because the pitcher comes up next. If someone is on base and the pitcher is up, everybody in the stadium knows he’s going to bunt. And he’s not going to bunt very well, because pitchers don’t practice much of anything anymore other than pitching. They don’t practice base running, base stealing, breaking up double plays, hit and runs, none of that. I would argue that the DH creates more strategy, because those are all strategies you can employ if you have a real hitter and a real base runner in the game. Instead, we have a wasted at-bat to the point where I believe it’s criminal to charge fans money to see pitchers hit.
Anyway, whether it’s a rookie or a veteran or all those players in between, a manager should thoroughly know the talent and ability of his players and not ask them to do more than they’re capable of doing. When you know what your players can and can’t do, you’re better equipped to put them in situations where they can perform and succeed. You should mostly find that out in spring training. That’s when you teach the fundamentals—base running, hitting, defense, catching. Once the season starts you don’t have much time to practice. I remember doing pitching drills one spring. We were going over pickoff moves to second base. When my nephew Mel Rojas tried to spin and throw to second, he fell. He simply couldn’t spin and throw to second. So I knew never to ask him to do that.
What you want, though, is effort. You want players to hustle. If a player is not hustling, he should be benched. I don’t care who it is. When the other guys who are busting it see a teammate not hustling, they expect the manager to do something. If you don’t discipline a player, you might lose the team. And believe me, when you bench a playe
r it gets their attention. It looks bad for them, their family, for everybody connected with them. It affects a lot of people. Benching a player is more effective than taking money out of his pocket.
Years ago, when I was managing the Escogido Lions in the Dominican Winter League, our best player was Pedro Guerrero—a superstar with the Los Angeles Dodgers at the time. We were vying for the playoffs, and Guerrero was our center fielder. We were playing our rival, the Licey Tigers, and at the plate was José González, who I knew was a gap hitter. I kept waving for Pedro, who was playing González to pull, to move to right-center, but he wasn’t paying attention. Our second baseman, Nelson Liriano, saw me and turned and yelled to Guerrero. “Hey, Felipe wants you to move over,” he said.
Guerrero didn’t want to move. He was copping a Mr. Big Leaguer attitude.
Finally, he moved to where I wanted him. Sure enough, the batter hit a fly ball right where Guerrero had been standing. He went back over and easily caught the ball. No problem. Except that after he caught it, Guerrero made an exaggerated waving of his arms to show me up, as if he were saying, See, you were wrong and I was right. I tried to ignore him, but when I went to the third base coaching box between innings, I saw a baseball roll past me. Several seconds later a glove the color of Dodger blue tumbled to a stop near me.
I was kind of confused until Teddy Martinez, a player for Licey, shouted to me from the Tigers’ dugout: “That was Pedro who threw the ball and glove.”
I lost my head. I yelled to Amado Dinzey, a guy who hit fungoes for us. “Amado, go coach third base!” I shouted.
“Me?” he said, stunned.
“Yeah, you! Go coach third base!”
When I got to the dugout I took a swing at Guerrero, but he dodged my punch. Suddenly, my brother Jesús, a player on the team, was in the middle of everything.