The Mouth That Roared

by Dallas Green

  On the road, there was a rule stating we had to wait for our beat writers to finish their game stories before returning to the team hotel. Gene also took his sweet time getting on the bus after games. That meant sitting around for two hours before leaving the stadium.

  My teammates felt this was unacceptable. They agreed the bus should depart for the hotel exactly one hour after the end of the game. I mentioned this demand to Quinn, but all I got back was a grunt.

  Back in Houston for another game, we decided to unilaterally put the policy in effect. The entire team sat on the bus, but several writers, our traveling secretary, and Gene were nowhere in sight.

  “Hey, Big D, we got two minutes,” someone yelled from the back of the bus.

  A few more minutes passed. Some writers scurried onto the bus, but still no Gene.

  Figuring there was safety in numbers and surely a cab somewhere on the premises of the ballpark, I gave the bus driver the green light to leave.

  The bus started rolling away, but the driver missed the entrance to the freeway and had to circle around to where we started. And there were Gene and our traveling secretary. The doors swung open, and they got on.

  I think I saw steam coming out of Gene’s ears.

  “This goddamn bus doesn’t leave until I tell it to leave!” he fumed.

  It got real quiet. Then a couple of teammates finally broke the silence.

  “But Dallas said to go.”

  Ah, the life of a player rep in the early 1960s.

  When Jim Bunning came to the Phillies from the Tigers after the 1963 season, our complaints got taken more seriously. As a veteran who had established himself as one of the better pitchers in the game, Jim wasn’t a guy Quinn could send down to the minors or trade. In other words, he wasn’t like the rest of us. Even Robin Roberts had fallen out of favor with the Phillies, who sold him to the Yankees after the 1961 season.

  Quinn and Phillies ownership established another rule that forbade us from leaving tickets for friends or family when we played the Dodgers or Giants. Both teams still had large East Coast fan bases and Quinn hoped games against Los Angeles and San Francisco would sell out. A sign on a mirror in the clubhouse spelled out the rule: “No tickets/No passes for Dodgers/Giants.”

  My teammates already were unhappy about their families being given nose-bleed seats. But no seats at all? That crossed the line. When Bunning heard about the rule, he went upstairs to Quinn’s office and had a word with him. After a few minutes, Jim came back down, walked over to the mirror, and ripped up the sign.

  A few years later, Bunning and Roberts were instrumental in bringing Miller over to the players association. With that, a new era of baseball began.

  * * *

  John Quinn was one of the toughest general managers you’d ever run across. He was old-school and hard on everyone, from his players to his subordinates. At home, he was probably hard on his family. He came to work every single day dressed to the nines in a coat and tie, and he stayed that way the entire day. The son of a baseball owner and general manager, he felt you couldn’t run a team professionally if you didn’t dress professionally.

  Mr. Quinn, as players addressed him, was also a heavy drinker. And when he drank, he became erratic. He was sharp as a tack earlier in his career, but as the years went by, he developed an off- putting demeanor.

  I experienced that side of him after the 1963 season, which turned out to be my best season in the big leagues. When Quinn sent me my contract for the following year, I was surprised to see I hadn’t earned a raise. I wrote him a note explaining why I felt my performance warranted an extra $500.

  At 29, I wasn’t getting any younger, and I felt I needed to stick up for myself. A few days passed before his secretary called me at home and said he wanted to meet with me.

  On the appointed day, I went up to Philadelphia to make my case for a raise. Quinn greeted me with, “Hey, Dallas, how are you? How’s the family? Good, good, good!” It was classic Quinn small talk. He loved to ask and answer his own questions. The players joked that someone could say, “Well, Mr. Quinn, my wife’s dying of cancer, and my kids got eaten by a bear,” and he would still respond, “Good, good, good!”

  I knew he didn’t like to waste time, so I got right to the point. “I had a nice season, Mr. Quinn, and I think I’ve earned a raise,” I said.

  I waited for an answer but got none. He didn’t say anything. He just sat at his huge desk staring out the window. I didn’t say anything, either. It remained silent for a long while. Occasionally, he would refocus his attention on something other than what was going on outside his window. But he never looked at me.

  “Well, it was nice meeting with you, Mr. Quinn,” I finally said, fleeing his office.

  Without a contract, I couldn’t participate in spring training activities. There was a picture of me in one of the Philadelphia papers peering through a chain-link fence at my teammates taking batting practice. In the photo, you can see Quinn standing a few feet away from me.

  A few days into camp, Phillies owner Bob Carpenter called me and said, “Sign the damn thing, Dallas. You don’t want this to go on any longer.”

  We ended up working out a deal that allowed everyone to save their pride. Per its terms, I would get an extra $500 at the end of the season if we drew a certain number of fans to Connie Mack Stadium in 1964. It was an unrealistic figure that we had no way of reaching. We drew a record-setting number of fans in 1964, but not enough for me to collect the bonus.

  That meeting remains my most vivid memory of Quinn. I guess I was lucky. Some of my teammates saw his uglier side. Ruben Amaro Sr. still talks about Quinn’s habit of calling him late at night and berating him.

  Quinn wasn’t all bad. The Jack Tar Hotel in Clearwater, our spring training home, refused to rent rooms to our African American players, forcing them to stay in apartments and eat their meals in a segregated part of town. As the team’s player representative, I went to Quinn in 1963 and asked if we could switch hotels to protest the Jack Tar’s discriminatory policy. To his credit, he agreed to my request and made arrangements to move to a motel over the causeway, near Tampa.

  The story didn’t have a happy ending, however. We moved the whole team to the other motel, which was owned by George Steinbrenner. On our first goddamn day there, Ruben went down to eat at the motel restaurant—and they wouldn’t serve him. We said, “Screw this,” and went back to the Jack Tar.

  * * *

  The mouth that roared wasn’t doing so much roaring in those days, at least not in the newspapers. Behind the scenes, however, I enjoyed frank conversations with teammates about Gene, our team, and the game in general. The Philadelphia teams of the early 1960s had genuine camaraderie. Our common bond was that Gene had managed to put the fear of God in all of us. Even Johnny Callison, who made three All-Star appearances with the Phillies, was scared to death about getting sent back to the minors.

  “Christ, Johnny, you’re playing every day,” I told him. “I haven’t been on the mound in eight days. If I screw up, I might not get back out there for another month.”

  I can only remember one time that a conversation with a teammate turned into an argument. It happened when a bunch of us were yakking and Art Mahaffey, who pitched for the Phillies from 1960 to 1965, confessed to me he didn’t necessarily want other pitchers on the staff to do well.

  “If you’re pitching, I don’t root for you, because you never know who might end up taking your job,” he said.

  Art was four years younger than I was and enjoying considerable success the majors. In a game against the Cubs in 1961, he struck out 17 batters, a Phillies team record that still stood at the end of the 2012 season.

  I had a hard time understanding his way of thinking. Then again, he was the same guy who demanded to know why Quinn had promoted me instead of him from the minors in 1960.

  “Jesus Chr
ist, Art,” I said. “We’re a team. You have to root for your team. When you go out there, I’m rooting like hell for you. I hope you strike everyone out. If you look good, we all look good.”

  Art didn’t buy it. He firmly believed that the success of others, even if they were teammates, could only hurt him.

  In all honesty, he didn’t have anything to worry about from me. I was the 24th or 25th man on the roster every season.

  I’d like to be able to say that my major league career was marked by sheer enjoyment. But I don’t think I ever really stopped to reflect on how lucky I was to have made it to the game’s highest level. Instead I was locked in a constant battle with myself.

  As my teammate Bobby Wine says, “We were at the mercy of the manager and general manager. Nobody dared buck the system. If you did, your butt was off to Triple-A.”

  In a way, my experience toughened me in the long run. I trusted my baseball abilities and instincts, even if my body wouldn’t allow me to perform at an elite level. The adversity I faced as a player helped prepare me well for the future. At the time, I didn’t view it that way, however.

  6

  My 1963 Topps baseball card featured this bit of information about me: “Once plagued by wildness, Dallas can now consistently get the ball where he wants it.”

  Unfortunately, just as often I put the ball exactly where hitters wanted it. And after a couple of subpar outings in 1964, I was back in the minors.

  I badly wanted to be in Philadelphia that August helping the Phillies sew up a pennant, but instead I was a member of the Triple-A Arkansas Travelers.

  This wasn’t supposed to be how the 1964 season played out. I had grinded out a major league existence long enough to experience one of those magical years where everything falls into place for a team. But a few lousy games did me in. And all I could do upon my return to the Phillies in September was watch as the team blew a chance to go to the World Series.

  That season, coupled with the death of my father, sapped my drive to stay in the game. I was angry that my damaged right arm couldn’t make the pitches it used to. And I was furious at the Phillies for considering me minor league talent and dumping me just when it looked like we were going to win a pennant.

  * * *

  During the off-season, I returned home to Delaware and contemplated a life after baseball. I met with a businessman in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, whose company serviced all the big farms in that area. As a local kid made good, I had helped him drum up business by joining him on sales presentations. We got to know each other pretty well, but Sylvia was suspicious of the guy. She thought he was more interested in me helping him improve his social life than his business. “Of course he likes having you with him at bars,” she said. “It helps him meet girls.” I ultimately turned down his offer to come work for him full-time. It was a wise choice. About a year later, he lost his business.

  A couple of buddies at the DuPont Company in nearby Wilmington helped me get interviews there. And a former ballplayer friend of mine, Harry Anderson, who worked for a machine company in Elkton, Maryland, that manufactured heavy machinery, arranged for me to meet with the owner of the company.

  “Dallas, you’ve got all these years in baseball, and the game’s been a part of you forever,” Harry’s boss told me. “If you come here, you might end up running the company, but you’re going to start low.”

  Sylvia shared that point of view. She had seen the ups and downs of my playing career, because she had been by my side every step of the way. She knew the ’64 season had taken a toll on me and encouraged me to wait a while longer before deciding to write off baseball.

  Coming to terms with my father’s death helped straighten out my thought process. He and I were never close, and for much of my adult life I resented him for allowing alcohol to take over his life. His drinking caused him to lose the family business, but it also caused him to look in the mirror and confront what he saw. He loved fixing cars, but because of his addiction, he couldn’t do that for a living anymore.

  He also saw he had been neglecting his family. He began to take an interest in my career, but not in an overt way or because he hoped my salary could help support the family. It was because he was proud of me. It crushed him to see me sent to the minors in 1964. And I held that against the Phillies, particularly after he passed away.

  In hindsight, I realized the Phillies weren’t to blame. I hadn’t pitched well enough to assure myself a spot on the roster all season. Everybody has to earn his keep, and I hadn’t. That experience gave me insight that I later used when I became a major league manager and general manager.

  * * *

  The Phillies wanted to give me an opportunity to play in the majors, if not for them, then for a team willing to pay a few bucks for me.

  At the end of spring training in 1965, they sold me to the Washington Senators on a 30-day trial basis. If the Senators liked my performance, they could pony up $20,000 to keep me. If they weren’t satisfied with their purchase, they could return me to Philadelphia.

  It bothered me that the Phillies didn’t want me anymore, but I decided I would no longer take baseball personnel matters personally.

  I did okay with the Senators, starting a couple of games and relieving in others. According to the terms of my sale, Washington wouldn’t have had to pay the Phillies a nickel if I accepted a demotion to one of their minor league teams. So, they tried to demote me. That’s how cheap the Senators were at that time.

  If I was going to finish my career in the minor leagues, I wanted it to be with friends and allies in the Philadelphia organization. So, I returned to the Phillies and reported back to Arkansas to finish out the 1965 season.

  My wife, Sylvia, and our two young children, Dana and John, had just arrived in Little Rock to move into an apartment that would be our home until the Phillies decided to recall me. If the Phillies decided to recall me, that is.

  When I got to the apartment complex, Sylvia met me outside our unit with a frown on her face. “We’re leaving,” she informed me. “It’s filthy.”

  So, we went back to the motel where I’d been staying until the apartment got cleaned up.

  It sure wasn’t the big leagues. I remember getting stuck on an airport runway in Little Rock after an all-night flight from the Pacific Northwest. The Spokane Indians, managed by future Phillies skipper Danny Ozark, sat on the Trans World Airlines flight with us. On our way east, we had dropped off the Denver or Salt Lake City team. Or maybe it was both. That’s how long the flight felt. The Pacific Coast League must have gotten a heck of a deal on the booking of the TWA Constellation, a huge plane with three tail wings best known for making military transports during World War II.

  I guess some signals got crossed, because when we landed at 5:00 am, no one was at the airport to roll a stairwell up to the plane. It was already 90 degrees in Little Rock, and the plane didn’t have air conditioning. All I wanted was for somebody to open the goddamn doors!

  We waited and waited. Finally, my teammate John Boozer, a country boy from South Carolina who liked spitting tobacco juice in the air and catching it in his mouth, had an idea.

  “If they’re not coming for us, we’re just going to have to go to them,” he said.

  Booze convinced the flight crew to open the cabin door and release an escape rope. One by one, we shimmied down the rope onto the tarmac.

  * * *

  The Phillies came back to earth in 1965. A season after coming agonizingly close to a pennant, they finished sixth in the National League. They wouldn’t sniff the playoffs again until the 1970s.

  I can’t help but think Gene Mauch’s style hurt the Phillies in the long run. He managed the team to winning records from 1962 to 1967, but his lack of people skills undermined the team’s chances of getting to the next level.

  Gene’s inherent mistrust of younger players was one of his most significant fla
ws. In 1965, the Phillies had a 22-year-old pitcher who had performed well in the minors and in his first outings in the majors. But Gene simply didn’t like Ferguson Jenkins, so he had general manager John Quinn trade him to the Cubs for two pitchers in their midthirties. “It’s the best deal we could have made,” Gene told the newspapers at the time. “I think it complemented our staff exactly the way we wanted.” The pitchers acquired by Philadelphia stuck around the majors another couple of years. Fergie reeled off six straight 20-win seasons with the Cubs during a Hall of Fame career.

  In June 1968, with the Phillies at .500, Gene got fired. He went on to manage the Expos, the Twins, and the California Angels. Though he got close a few times, he never managed in a World Series.

  I’ll be the first to admit that Gene possessed extraordinary baseball knowledge. And I’d like to think some of it rubbed off on me. He was a firm believer in the value of fundamentals and playing the game the right way, offensively and defensively. He expected his teams to build big innings by hitting in the clutch and running the bases well. I embraced this philosophy when I later became a manager. For all his faults, which included the belief that all of his players were dummies, Gene influenced me a lot.

  * * *

  As one of the few major or minor leaguers who remained in the Philadelphia area during the off-season, I became a regular on the banquet circuit, representing the Phillies at all manner of engagements in the Delaware Valley. Every late fall and winter for several years, I appeared and spoke at about 75 events, earning $25 a pop. In the process, I handed out more goddamn Little League trophies than you could shake a stick at. Occasionally, I walked away with some hardware myself. As a sign of appreciation for my attendance, some of the groups would present me with a plaque.

  There were no GPSs back then, so I spent a lot of time getting lost on the back roads of many towns and suburbs in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. That made me nervous as hell, because I knew the banquets couldn’t start without me.