by Dallas Green
I got Hughie calmed down, but Pope was a little harder to bring under control. He and Monk wanted to continue the bout outside. I decided the best course of action would be to keep Pope with us and get Monk the hell out of the restaurant. Once that was accomplished, however, Pope directed his anger at Hughie, whom he accused of trying to help Monk. When he finished his tirade, Pope stormed out of the restaurant, too.
Since we were regulars, and the restaurant staff knew we didn’t ordinarily cause so much trouble, they let Hughie and me stay. He and I returned to the table and had another couple of drinks. After about an hour, the door of the Island House swung open and Pope came back in. We noticed someone was behind him, and they both seemed to be having a good old time.
It was Monk Meyer. He and Pope had their arms around each other’s shoulders and were suddenly best buddies.
Whether identifying the potential of a player who went on to become the best third baseman ever to play the game or crawling through a Chicago restaurant to illustrate a story about a lion, Pope worked hard, and he most definitely played hard. We all did.
* * *
In our pursuit of back-to-back titles, we kept the team largely intact—with one notable exception. My relationship with Greg Luzinski hit a low point during the postseason after I benched him a couple of times. Years would pass before he and I mended fences. The sad part about it was that I liked Bull. He and I had gotten along well when I managed him in the minors in 1968. What changed? Simply put, I think Bull had become complacent and stopped working on his game. He also wasn’t focused on keeping his weight down.
Pope sold Bull to the Chicago White Sox, and to fill the void in left field, we traded Bob Walk to the Braves for veteran outfielder Gary Matthews. I had always liked the way Matthews played, and Bobby was a high-strung, high-maintenance kind of pitcher. Though he was coming off an 11-win season, which included a gutsy performance in Game 1 of the World Series, we weren’t sure how high his ceiling was. Plus, we felt we needed Sarge more than we needed Bobby in order to compete for another title.
Sarge hadn’t played on a lot of winning teams, but he exuded the qualities of a winner. I liked his hustle and businesslike approach to the game. I also knew he had been taught the game the right way. No organization groomed outfielders better than the San Francisco Giants, who took Gary in the first round of the June 1968 draft. That same year, they selected another outfielder—Garry Maddox—in the second round of the January draft. Now we had both on our team.
* * *
For the first two months of the 1981 season, we were in and out of first place. A June 10 win against Houston that improved Steve Carlton’s record to 9–1 put us two games ahead of the Cardinals in the National League East.
It was the last game played before the players went on strike.
Among the squabbles that led to the strike was a proposal by owners to compensate teams that lost players to free agency. But it was about more than any single issue. There was a lot of antagonism between the two sides in the years leading up to the strike, and it was bound to boil over sooner or later.
The whole situation felt like a double-edged sword for me. I was a player rep for the Phillies during an era when the pendulum was totally on ownership’s side. As a front office guy in the 1970s, I had a different view of the game. I learned what it took to run a successful organization. By the early 1980s, I saw that the pendulum had swung the other way. I empathized with owners who feared the union was becoming too mighty.
The power shift away from the owners started in 1966 when Marvin Miller became executive director of the union. Having worked previously on behalf of America’s auto and steel workers, he had impeccable credentials. Before Marvin, there was no such thing as collective bargaining in baseball. When I was a player rep in the early 1960s, our most significant lobbying effort was for a television in the Connie Mack Stadium clubhouse.
Under Marvin’s leadership, the floodgates of free agency opened, putting an end to the days when owners and general managers controlled players’ destinies. At the time of the strike, the players were well on their way to running the game themselves.
I respect what Marvin did for the players union. He was a marvelous negotiator and a tough sucker. Our lawyers could not match up with him at all. A couple of the Phillies—Bob Boone, who was the National League player representative, and Larry Bowa, who was the team’s player rep—got closely involved in the labor negotiations.
By the second week of August, enough issues had been resolved to the union’s satisfaction to put an end to the strike.
With a bitter taste in my mouth, I went back to trying to defend our title.
* * *
In light of the strike, which bit a two-month chunk out of the season, Major League Baseball cooked up a revised plan for the playoffs and World Series. It went like this: the four teams leading their divisions before the strike would automatically advance to an opening round of the postseason. In our case, we would play whichever National League East team posted the best record in the “second half” of the season. If that turned out to be us, then we’d play the team that had the second-best record in the second half.
When play resumed, I told the press we didn’t view the rest of the schedule as exhibition games. Maybe that was lip service on my part. I wanted us to stay hungry, but as we went on a six-game losing streak at the end of August, I realized our players were just going through the motions. It didn’t matter how they performed, because they were already in the postseason.
After a while, going 0-for-4 at the plate didn’t hurt. Losing a game didn’t sting. The media started pounding me. It reached the point where I couldn’t keep up the charade any longer. “It’s a horseshit rule,” I told Jayson Stark, who was covering the Phillies for the Philadelphia Inquirer. “We’re in the playoffs. So, yeah, I want them to play hard, but they have no incentive to win.”
That on-the-record quote was preceded by a more colorful rant, prompted by Jayson’s question about whether the team lacked motivation. It started with a “Fuck you, Jayson!” and went from there. Another writer, I think it was Hal Bodley, recorded the outburst, which included 30 or 40 variations of the word fuck. Sylvia took a transcript with her to school the following day. The English teachers had a ball noting how I utilized the f-word as a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, and gerund.
We went 25–27 in the second half of the season and limped into a division playoff against the Expos, the second-half winner of the National League East.
* * *
In fairness to my players, my attention during the second half wasn’t squarely on the field, either. While serving a five-game suspension in late August for bumping an umpire, I took a call from the Tribune Company, the new corporate owners of the Chicago Cubs.
Initially, they contacted Ruly Carpenter, who had yet to turn over daily operations of the Phillies to Bill Giles, seeking permission to talk to me about a job.
I had no intention of leaving Philadelphia. But this was a time of transition for the Phillies. With Ruly on his way out, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to at least listen to what the Cubs had to say.
Andy McKenna, the liaison between the Tribune Company and the Cubs, told me the company wasn’t interested in me managing the team. They wanted me to be their general manager.
McKenna flew into Philadelphia and met me at the Holiday Inn across from Veterans Stadium. It was there that he spelled out his vision for my future with the Cubs.
“We like what you did with the Phillies’ minor league system, and obviously we’re impressed by what you accomplished last season,” McKenna told me. “We think you’d be perfect for the Cubs.”
At the end of his pitch, he proposed scheduling a follow-up meeting between him, me, and Tribune president Stan Cook.
“When the Phillies are in Chicago later in the season, let’s have dinner and discuss this further,” h
e said.
The talks were in an early stage, but I realized they couldn’t continue without the participation of my wife. Intrigued enough by the idea, I agreed to the chat with Cook in late September. The Tribune Company agreed to fly Sylvia to Chicago for the meeting. But rather than just booking her a ticket on a commercial airline, they flew their corporate jet to Wilmington to pick her up. Sylvia finished teaching school on a Friday afternoon and boarded the Tribune plane for the short flight to Chicago. That was the first clue I got about the Tribune Company’s largesse.
By the time Sylvia arrived, we had polished off a matinee victory over the Cubs. A few hours later, we were at Cook’s house for dinner. The conversation that night dealt mostly with my ideas about how to build an organization and my general philosophy of the game. I have to say I laid my BS on them pretty heavy that night.
Whatever I said must have convinced them that I was their guy, because on the limousine ride back to the hotel, McKenna cut to the chase. “Here’s what Chicago’s willing to do,” he told me, launching immediately into dollars and cents. The numbers knocked our socks off. It was a helluva lot more than the nearly $100,000 I was making with the Phillies. Some covert inquiries in the following days about other executive salaries around baseball led me to believe the Cubs were willing to make me one of the highest-paid general managers in the game. This surprised me. I’d never been a GM before, after all. But I knew I was up to the task. And the Tribune Company obviously had studied my background enough to reach the same conclusion.
I was still very much on the fence about leaving the Phillies, however.
Sylvia and I discussed it. Pope and I discussed it. But I didn’t make any final decisions. We still had postseason baseball to play. As we were preparing to take on Montreal, news leaked that I was a candidate for the Cubs job. I didn’t confirm the reports. That would have turned a rumor into a fact and created a major distraction.
* * *
The Expos were making the first playoff appearance in their history in 1981. We opened our best-of-five series with two losses at Olympic Stadium before returning to Philadelphia to try and reel off three consecutive wins.
We almost achieved that. Two wins at the Vet evened the series. We had Steve Carlton, who was between his third and fourth Cy Young Awards, pitching in Game 5, so I liked our chances of making a return trip to the National League Championship Series. But the Expos and starting pitcher Steve Rogers whipped our ass. We couldn’t touch Rogers, who shut us out 3–0.
If not for the strike, I am convinced we would have won another World Series. Now, my future in Philadelphia was up in the air. I hadn’t expected to manage the Phillies as long as I did, and the allure of being a general manager was strong. The more I thought about it, the more I realized it might be time for a change.
As we did at the end of every season, Pope and I went down to Clearwater to check out our minor leaguers in the Florida Instructional League. But this time, we had other business to discuss. And we aired things out pretty good. We were friends who didn’t hide anything from each other. I needed to know whether the new Phillies ownership still planned to have me succeed him when he retired.
“Giles wants you to continue managing, but the other stuff hasn’t been ironed out yet,” Pope told me. “As far as I’m concerned, you’ll be the guy, but I’m not going to have the same pull as I had with Ruly.”
I appreciated Pope’s honesty. We had known each other for 25 years. And in the end, I knew he wanted what was best for me.
With that, I resumed my conversations with the Cubs.
* * *
I turned the Cubs down three times before I finally said yes.
Having been interested in an escape from city and suburban life, Sylvia and I purchased a 60-acre farm in West Grove, Pennsylvania, which was about an hour from Philadelphia. Sylvia was happy teaching in the area. The youngest of our four children was about to enter high school. And after the 1980 World Series, we felt even more attached to Philadelphia.
After several conversations with Sylvia, I decided against the move to Chicago. I called McKenna and explained about the farm and everything else. He listened to what I had to say and told me he’d get back to me. And he did. He upped the offer with stock options and some of the usual bullshit that corporate guys usually receive. Still, I said no. “Andy, I’m sorry, but we just can’t make it work,” I told him.
With his repeated attempts to woo me, McKenna had made it abundantly clear I was the guy the Cubs wanted. Each time he contacted me, I thought a little bit more about the job. I guess his persistence was paying off.
He called back a little while later. “I’m coming in,” he informed me. By that, he meant he was going to board the Tribune jet and pay me another visit. I picked him up at the Wilmington airport, which was closer to West Grove than Philadelphia, and brought him out to the farm. I wanted him to see what we had and would be giving up if I took the Cubs job. With his starched shirt and perfectly knotted tie, McKenna was anything but a farm guy. Sylvia and I were decked out in our sloppy stuff. Shortly after we pulled up, one of our cows got loose, and I had to get her back in the pen. McKenna watched all of this unfold with big-city bemusement.
Over lunch, he attempted to further sweeten the deal. He showed me photos of a very stately house in the Chicago area.
“We’ll buy you this house or let you pick out any house you want,” he said. “If you decide to sell it at any point, you can keep any windfall you get from it.”
That got us a little bit more excited—but I still turned him down.
McKenna left the farm disappointed. But that son of a bitch kept coming back to me. A few days later he called while on his way to South Bend for a Notre Dame football game. “I’m not giving up,” he said. “I think you belong in Chicago. I know you do. We can make it work.”
He rattled off all the components of the offer: the money, the stock options, the house, and the control I would have over all baseball decisions. “Just think about it,” he pleaded.
I went back to Pope and told him what the Cubs were willing to give me.
“Dallas, you have to take it,” Pope said. “This is crazy. You’re not going to make that kind of money here or anywhere else. I know you love everything about the Phillies and your farm, but Chicago is a great city, and you’ll love it. Wrigley Field is special and so is Chicago. You’ve got to take it.”
The Phillies were a part of me. But I finally said yes.
13
I didn’t plan on leaving Philadelphia empty-handed. After accepting the Cubs job, I sat down with Paul Owens to discuss which members of the Phillies I could take with me. Lee Elia and John Vukovich were at top of my wish list.
I wanted Lee, an old friend and Phillies coach in 1980, to manage the Cubs. And I knew Vuke, who retired as a player after the 1981 season, would make a wonderful coach. Both had been trained the Phillies way. The three of us had experienced a World Series victory, and together I hoped we could instill a winning culture in Chicago, where the Cubs had lost a lot of games in recent years.
Lee had only managed at the minor league level, but he had the baseball smarts, passion, and work ethic to whip a major league clubhouse into shape.
He and I went way back. We both attended the University of Delaware, though not at the same time. Lee entered school as a freshman the same year I signed professionally with the Phillies. When I returned to campus to take winter courses during the off-season, he and I got to know each other a little bit. Lee, a Philadelphia native, was a helluva athlete, and like me, a recipient of scholarship money from Phillies owner Bob Carpenter’s Friends Foundation. At Delaware, he played baseball, football, and basketball. A knee injury in college likely kept him from having a more successful professional baseball career. Also like me, he played more games in the minors than the majors.
Nine years after I signed with the Phillies, I
played with Lee at Triple-A Little Rock, where I pitched and he played shortstop. We drifted apart again after that season but were reunited in the early 1970s when Lee joined the Phillies as an infield instructor and third-base coach for a minor league team managed by Jim Bunning. Before taking that job, Lee was out of baseball and selling insurance.
When I became the Phillies’ farm director, I tapped Lee to manage teams at almost every level of the organization. Then in 1980, I asked him join the major league coaching staff.
I was convinced Vuke would be a valuable asset to Lee’s staff. As a player on the ’80 Phillies team, he assumed a vital leadership role. Whether reminding Greg Luzinski to watch his weight or telling Larry Bowa to shut his trap, Vuke got players to listen.
“You can have Lee and Vuke, but that’s it,” Pope told me.
“I want Gordie, too,” I replied.
Gordon Goldsberry, the Phillies’ West Coast scouting super- visor, had outstanding baseball instincts. I wanted to name him director of minor leagues and scouting for the Cubs.
“Okay, but nobody else!” Pope yelled.
So that’s who I satisfied myself with—at least at that moment.
As it turned out, I hired many more people I considered assets after the Phillies decided to cut loose several so-called Dallas Green guys. They included coaches and scouts Jim Snyder, Tom Harmon, Glen Gregson, Erskine Thompson, and Brandy Davis, all of whom I welcomed to Chicago with open arms.
* * *
The Tribune Company, which owned the Cubs, liked five-year plans. But when I got to Chicago, I wasn’t looking five years into the future. I intended to change the culture of the Cubs right away. That meant getting my people to contemplate what it would take to win a championship. Anyone incapable of thinking in those terms wasn’t welcome in the Cubs executive offices.
I recognized we faced an uphill battle. The Cubs hadn’t played postseason baseball since 1945. During the Wrigley family’s decades of ownership, the Cubs’ mantra was, “Open the doors, and they will come.” Ownership didn’t really care what kind of product it put on the field. Wins and losses stopped mattering.