The Mouth That Roared

by Dallas Green

  That was Hughie—a man full of energy, ingenuity, and smarts.

  Hughie never let his disability get in his way. When Sylvia invited him to our house for dinner soon after he arrived in Philadelphia, she served steak and corn on the cob. Much to the amazement of our wide-eyed children, Hughie managed to manipulate his knife and fork with only one hand. He became a regular guest at our home and shared wonderful stories of his baseball-related travels through America. He also taught our younger son, Doug, how to cheat at cards. It took me a while to figure out why Doug kept beating me, hand after hand. I should have known Uncle Hughie had something to do with it.

  * * *

  Some of the guys I worked with in Philadelphia had been friends and confidants since my early days in professional baseball. One of them was Ruben Amaro Sr.

  As I look back over the course of the past five decades, I couldn’t have asked for a better friend, ally, and like-minded baseball man than Ruben, who was an instrumental part of helping Pope and me revitalize the Phillies in the 1970s.

  My first contact with Ruben came in 1958 when I was trying to throw strikes by him. He played shortstop for the Cardinals’ top minor league affiliate in Rochester, and I was in my first full year of Triple-A ball, with Miami. During the off-season, the Cardinals traded Ruben to the Phillies. We became teammates in Buffalo.

  In the early weeks of our friendship, our longest conversations took place when the infielders would gather around the mound during a game. Ruben liked to talk to the pitchers on his team, especially when they were in a jam. He would later tell me he was hesitant to engage me in these discussions at first. “You were a big, gigantic man with a big voice,” he told me. “I was small and very quiet. I didn’t know if you’d want me to mind my own business.”

  Once Ruben and I got to know each other, he realized I appreciated ballplayers who were thinkers and observers.

  Off the field in Buffalo, Sylvia and I became close friends with Ruben. We supported him as he confronted racist landlords who didn’t want to rent an apartment to a dark-complexioned Mexican, especially not one who was dating a lily-white girl from Philadelphia.

  Our bond only increased in 1960 when he and I both got called up to the Phillies for the first time. Over the next few seasons, we went through the Gene Mauch/John Quinn wringer that turned a young and struggling ballclub into a winner. Then we both endured the highs and lows of the 1964 season in Philadelphia.

  Ruben was traded to the Yankees after the 1965 season and finished out his career with the Angels in 1969, the year I finished my second season of managing minor league ball for the Phillies. Back in Philadelphia, I met with Pope to discuss organizational matters. It was then that I learned Ruben had accepted a managerial job with the Diablos Rojos del Mexico, the Reds of Mexico, and was on his way there. His family was a big deal in Mexico. Ruben’s father, Santos, a native of Cuba, is enshrined in the Mexican Baseball Hall of Fame.

  “Pope, we can’t let him go,” I said. “We could use a guy like that in our organization.”

  I didn’t need to do much convincing. Pope liked the idea of hiring Ruben to manage our Triple-A team in Eugene, Oregon.

  We somehow found out Ruben had stopped in Harrisburg to get an issue with his driver’s license straightened out. Pope made a few calls, and suddenly there was an all-points bulletin out for a car with a trailer hitched to it and a Hispanic at the wheel.

  Ruben was somewhere on the Pennsylvania Turnpike when he saw the flashing lights of a state trooper’s cruiser. Ruben would later say he was cursing himself under his breath for getting a speeding ticket so early into his trek to Mexico. He rolled down his window to deal with the situation.

  “Mr. Amaro?” the state trooper asked.

  “Yes,” Ruben replied, more than a little surprised at the personal greeting.

  “Paul Owens of the Philadelphia Phillies asked that you give him a call right away.”

  Ruben pulled over and found a phone. Instead of driving to Mexico City, he headed for Eugene, where he served the organization as a player-coach in 1970.

  Ruben went back to Mexico to manage in the winter and took some of our top prospects down there with him for some additional seasoning. He led that team to a championship. During a parade to celebrate the title, a horse stamped on his foot, completely shattering it. No longer able to play the game, he devoted himself to coaching and scouting full-time.

  Thanks to Ruben, we later signed future All-Stars Julio Franco, Juan Samuel, and George Bell to professional contracts. Unfortunately, we lost Bell to the Blue Jays in the 1980 Rule 5 draft after Pat Gillick’s scouts saw him playing winter ball in the Dominican Republic.

  Baseball is all about calculated risk. Not all our signings in Latin America or elsewhere bore fruit. In 1974, we gave a two-year, $30,000 contract to a 14-year-old Puerto Rican kid we felt had star potential. The deal made Jorge Lebron the youngest player ever to sign with a major league team. I predicted he would be the next Cesar Cedeno, a talented outfielder for the Astros in the 1970s. Instead, Lebron never panned out. He played parts of three seasons in our minor league system before appearing in his last professional game at the age of 16. Between the time we signed him and cut him, he fell severely out of shape—fat as a pig, in fact. He and Franco provide an interesting juxtaposition. Both “can’t-miss” prospects, one played professionally until he was 16, the other until he was 49.

  * * *

  I got another chance to visit Cuba in the mid-1970s, when Delaware governor Pierre “Pete” DuPont arranged for a delegation from the state to travel to Havana. His wife, Elise, a State Department representative, led the group. My role was window dressing. Everyone knew Cuban president Fidel Castro loved baseball, so it seemed appropriate to bring a former ballplayer along. Mrs. DuPont’s main goal on the trip was to convince Castro to allow two Cuban women to emigrate to the United States on humanitarian grounds. Unfortunately, Sylvia wasn’t invited, depriving her yet again of a chance to visit Cuba.

  I never met Castro, but I got to take an eye-opening tour of the country, which included a stop at the ballpark I played in as a minor leaguer. Elise DuPont returned home having secured the freedom of the women.

  I never planned on getting mixed up in international intrigue while running the Phillies farm system, but if it meant landing a star player, I was willing to give it a go.

  Not long after my Cuba trip, I was visiting friends in Easton, Pennsylvania, when Ruben tracked me down by phone with urgent news.

  “One of the best young Cuban players wants to defect,” he said. “His team’s playing in a tournament in Mexico City right now. He’ll sign a contract with us if we can get him to the United States.”

  The Cuban team’s first-base coach, who was a friend of Ruben’s, had agreed to help the young infielder evade the team’s security detail long enough for us to grab him before the next day’s game, his team’s last in Mexico.

  “What do you need me to do?” I asked Ruben.

  “Make some calls and get the permission we need to make this happen,” he replied.

  I phoned Phillies owner Ruly Carpenter, who put me in touch with the organization’s lawyers. I also called Elise DuPont for advice. Within a few hours, we had a green light from the State Department to proceed.

  I called Ruben back to let him know he could signal his friend.

  “Tell me when the thing is done,” I told Ruben.

  All the necessary people had been contacted. Everything was in place. In less than 24 hours, we were likely to have a top Cuban player in our farm system.

  There was only one glitch: it rained like hell in Mexico City the next day. The Cuban team sat together at the stadium waiting to see if it would get the game in. The security detail sat with them. There was no opportunity for Ruben’s friend to help the kid slip away.

  The team flew back home with the kid in tow. Thanks
to lousy weather, we lost our chance to defect a Cuban.

  * * *

  At spring training, I encouraged our minor league coaches to play basketball together at the end of a long work day. We put up a rim against a cement wall of our complex and waited until all the players had left before heading to the makeshift court. The competition got pretty intense. During one game, Mel Roberts, an outfield instructor who was several inches shorter than me, drove down the lane and attempted a layup. I blocked Mel’s shot, and in the process, I fouled him so hard that he went flying into the cement wall face first. “I ain’t driving anymore,” Mel said after picking himself up off the ground. “From now on, I’m an outside shooter.”

  Though he was pushing 50, Granny Hamner, a roving instructor who played 16 seasons for the Phillies, was a constant menace. He tripped, shoved, and elbowed opponents in an attempt to create general havoc on the court. After a hard-fought game, we’d all go inside and polish off a case of beer and talk baseball.

  As farm director, one of my favorite parts of the job was going around to our minor league sites to check out our kids. On those visits, I made it clear we expected them to take pride in their preparation and play and to respect what it meant to play for the Phillies organization.

  I guess my reputation for demanding hard work spread quickly. Dickie Noles, who I took in the fourth round of the 1975 draft, later admitted he was “scared out of his pants” every time I showed up.

  During his first year in the minors, Dickie showed up for practice one morning a little worse for wear after a night of drinking. I watched from the roof of the team’s training facility as the coaching staff put the team through sprints. For the first round, Dickie ran hard. On the second, he moved noticeably slower. On the third, he really dogged it. “Hey, Noles, move your ass!” I yelled from my perch. He looked around trying to identify the voice. Then his gaze shifted upward to the roof. Our eyes met. Dickie turned around, went back to the start line, and proceeded to outrun almost everyone in the group, hangover and all.

  * * *

  After the long hours spent trying to improve our baseball team, our gang also squeezed in a little fun.

  Okay, a lot of fun.

  Our annual organization-wide Christmas parties, no wives allowed, typified the freewheeling good times that we had whenever we got together. We’d roll home every year from those parties at 3:00 or 4:00 am knowing our wives would question us about what happened at the party, where we went after the party, and how we got home.

  Pope had a favorite saying for times like these: “Dallas, you gotta have a good offense. It’s your best defense.” So when he got back to his New Jersey home, he’d get himself in a fluster and tell his wife, Marcelle, “That goddamn Dallas Green! I’m never going out with him again. That son of a bitch kept me out all night! I couldn’t get him to leave!” Meanwhile in Delaware, a similar scene played out in my bedroom: “Goddamn it, I couldn’t get Pope to leave that party! I had to keep an eye on him, make sure he didn’t hurt himself.”

  Sylvia and Marcelle, who Pope met in Belgium during World War II, would always compare notes later. “Did Paul have a lot of white hair on his socks when he got home?” Sylvia asked the day after one of the parties. “Yes, Dallas did, too.” Then I’d have to explain why I had white hair all over my socks when I wasn’t really sure why I had white hair all over my socks. I ended up blaming it on Pope’s dog, Queenie.

  Another year, the holiday party at the ballpark spilled over into a celebration at the house of a friend of a Phillies employee. We got a lift out there and, after a few hours, caught a ride back to the stadium parking lot. It was a typical mid-December night in Philadelphia, and I looked forward to the warmth of my car. There was only one problem. I couldn’t find my car.

  “Jesus Christ,” I bellowed at Pope, “someone stole my car!”

  “Mine, too!” he responded.

  We took a minute to digest the bad news. Then we breathed a sigh of relief, and without exchanging a word, started walking to the hotel parking lot where we’d moved our cars before going to the after-party.

  Pope escorted me back to my car, reminiscing about an eventful evening on the Christmas party circuit. He kept yakking as I tried to start the car. It took a good minute or two for my engine to turn over, and when it finally did, I only got a short distance before it cut out again. Pope came back over to check on the situation.

  “Open the goddamn hood,” he ordered. “I know what to do.”

  Pope had a lot of talents, but I didn’t think car maintenance was one of them. In fact, I was pretty sure he didn’t know a goddamn thing about fixing cars. And even though my dad had been a mechanic, none of his knack for auto repair rubbed off on me.

  I decided to give Pope a chance to prove himself. The hood of the car popped open, and Pope took a long look inside. Lucky for us, one of Philadelphia’s finest was out on patrol and saw Pope “working” on my car.

  “Officer, you have to help this guy,” Pope told the police officer. “He has to get home.”

  The cop, who recognized Pope, got out a pair of jumper cables and connected them to my battery. Pope, still fancying himself a car expert, reacted with disgust: “Goddamn it, you’ve got it on wrong! Let me see that!”

  Pope rearranged the cables and took a step back to admire his handiwork.

  “Okay, fire her up!”

  I turned the key in the ignition…and the battery exploded.

  The police officer sized up our predicament. “You gentlemen get home safely now. I’ll catch you later,” he said.

  Pope and I went back to his car. I dropped him off in New Jersey and drove his car back to Delaware with another Christmas party story to tell.

  * * *

  We didn’t just blow off steam and blow up car batteries. I’d like to think our work ethic as well as our ability to have a good time earned us respect around the majors. At the annual winter meetings, our suite became a command center for 14-hour workdays. Pope always left the door to the suite open so that anyone who wanted to talk about a trade or baseball in general could come in and bend our ears. We also worked to make sure all our minor league affiliates felt connected to the major league club. The officials who ran those teams were welcome to join in our discussions. While our wives were touring Hawaii or whatever locale hosted the meetings, we stayed holed up in our hotel room. Following these marathon work sessions, we’d get our fun in. Pope often spoke of the importance of “bounceability,” which he defined as the capacity to stay up until the wee hours and arrive at work with little or no sleep, alert and ready to go. He had bounceability, and so did I.

  Pope and I liked to engage in hijinks on our down time, but the most important thing in the world to us was making the Phillies organization the pride of baseball. People who disagreed with Pope on a baseball matter were likely to end up in a toe-to-toe confrontation with him and his finger in their chest. That’s how we hashed things out. You’d have your say, and he’d have his. And by the end, you could be damn sure you’d settled on the right course of action.

  By the late 1970s, we had put together a contending ballclub. In the eighth year after divisions were put in place for the 1969 season, the Phillies finally won the National League East. That breakthrough marked the beginning of an unprecedented period of prosperity in Phillies history.

  Ozark, who beat out the likes of Richie Ashburn and Jim Bunning to land the managing job in 1973, was leading the team when it reeled off 101 wins in 1976 and 1977 and 90 wins in 1978. But after enormously successful regular seasons, we went a combined 2–9 in the postseason during that period. The Big Red Machine swept us in ’76 and Tommy Lasorda’s Dodgers beat us three games to one in both ’77 and ’78.

  In baseball, “What have you done for me lately?” is a valid question. But so is “What have you done for me in your biggest games?”

  Neither of the answers bode
d well for Ozark.

  Despite three opportunities, Danny couldn’t get the team over the hump into the World Series. And when we struggled to win games in 1979, Pope had seen enough. He fired Danny, and I took over as interim manager. We won a lot of games in September 1979, so I returned to the dugout the following season.

  That, of course, brings us to 1980.

  9

  I felt we could overcome the disappointment of 1979. In my opinion, that fourth-place season was an aberration. Not everybody shared my optimism. Most sportswriters picked the 1980 Phillies to again finish fourth in the National League East behind the Pirates, the Expos, and the Cardinals, the three teams that finished ahead of us the season before.

  There had been some rough patches in spring training. Some of my ideas about conditioning and methods of motivating didn’t go over well with cliques of veteran players that had been coddled by my predecessor, Danny Ozark.

  At the end of camp, major league players went on a brief strike, wiping out the final week of the exhibition season. The players agreed to open the season as scheduled on April 9 but they threatened that another work stoppage would begin Memorial Day weekend if they couldn’t work out an agreement with the owners on issues dealing with free agency.

  During the mini-strike in spring training, all our guys chose to stay in Clearwater and continue working out. To me, that signified a dedication to making the 1980 season special. Fortunately, a Memorial Day strike didn’t materialize.

  “We’re not going to out-talent anyone in the National League anymore,” I reminded the team before we broke camp. “We’re at the point where the rest of the league has caught up to us in terms of talent.”

  On Opening Day in 1980, we beat the Expos 6–3 at Veterans Stadium for our first season-opening win since 1974. A three-run home run by Greg Luzinski in the first inning got us off and running. Not normally a guy who showed much emotion on the field, Bull pumped his fist in the air as he rounded the bases. After the game, I told reporters I expected Bull to bounce back from an off year and regain the form that had established him as one of the league’s best home run and RBI guys.