Former Reds manager was gregarious, loving and well-loved.
By Paul Daugherty
Cincinnati Enquirer
http://news.cincinnati.com/
November 4, 2010
Former Reds Manager Sparky Anderson with his bronzed image in 2004. The Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame celebrated its completion with a gala attended by former and present day Reds players. (Enquirer file photo)
If sports provide the carnival music of our lives, Sparky Anderson was the barker.
It was a good time to be alive and in Cincinnati in the 1970s. You could thank Sparky for some of that. Leaning forward from the dugout rail, yapping at his “boys,’’ loving baseball and his role in it. A lucky man who knew it.
Not long ago, he stopped eating. Dementia does that to a person. Swallowing can be impaired; the connection between eating and staying alive is lost. It’s as if the brain tells the body “enough.’’
He died peacefully and without fanfare Thursday. George Lee Anderson was 76. There’s some wonderful and ironic Big Red symmetry there.
Dying peacefully wasn’t especially like Sparky Anderson. He was gregarious, loving and well-loved. The no-fanfare would have been OK with him, though. He’d have appreciated that. Sparky wouldn’t want no fuss made.
“It’s them guys out there that do it,’’ he might say, stretching a finger in the direction of the ballfield. “It wasn’t what I did. It was what they did. I got the easiest job in the world.’’
He managed the Reds to four pennants and two world titles. He arrived in 1970, a 36-year-old career bus rider that Lee May referred to early on as “that minor-league mother.’’ He departed nine years later as the jockey who rode the Secretariat of major league teams.
Anderson was comfortable with fame. It just never changed him, which was remarkable. He was also easy with crediting everyone else, a trait that served the Reds well during their star-filled run. “He had everyone’s respect, but he had to earn it, and he did,’’ Johnny Bench recalled Wednesday.
Reds manager Sparky Anderson in 1977, watching a game versus the Dodgers at Riverfront Stadium. (Enquirer file photo)
A few years ago, I did a book with Bench. We talked at length about Sparky. Bench said the Main Spark’s best attribute was his ability to manage people. From the book, Catch Every Ball:
Sparky took the time to know his players individually, so when he needed to motivate someone, he knew what made him tick.
Anderson would consult The Big Four (Bench, Pete Rose, Tony Perez, Joe Morgan) before recommending a trade to the general manager. If we didn’t like the player or didn’t believe he’d fit our team, we’d veto him. If there was a guy available we wouldn’t like to have dinner with, he wouldn’t be on our club.
Joe, Pete, Tony and I ruled the clubhouse. One spring, Sparky told the team, “I have one set of rules for you guys, and one set for them,” pointing to The Big Four. “Their rules are, they have no rules.”
“He relied on our information, but made the decisions,’’ said Bench. “And 99.9 percent of the time, he was right.’’
The Big Four repaid Anderson’s respect for them with championships, and love of the sort only ballplayers know. Pete Rose visited Anderson recently; Bench and Morgan saw him in August, in Cooperstown at the Hall of Fame induction ceremonies. “It was sad,’’ Bench recalled.
Anderson couldn’t hear. He’d gotten new hearing aids not long before he made the trip to Cooperstown, but had forgotten to remove them when he took a shower. “When you can’t hear, it’s like you’re living in a vacuum. His social life stopped,’’ Bench said. “We were just all holding our breath in Cooperstown, hoping he’d make a comeback.’’
Bench recalled a photo he took of his former manager that day. “He had a faraway look in his eyes,’’ Bench said, “like he was already gone.’’
I asked Bench to look into his mind’s eye and fetch an image of Anderson.
“Smiling, happy and brilliant,’’ Bench said. “That lean he always had. . . The fact he never stepped on a foul line. . . ‘Big John, how ya doin’?’ … we’re in spring training once, in the outfield doing calisthenics. He came up, started feinting, like he was boxing. I clipped him with a left jab on top of his head. He wanted to be one of the guys.
“Sparky gave me stature,’’ Bench continued. He gave the team a level of professionalism and the fans a team that would be respected.’’
Icons die ingloriously, same as the rest of us. The difference is the memories they bequeath. Once upon a time, there was a team that played baseball as well as any before or since. Sparky Anderson managed it. We all were younger then.
pdaugherty@enquirer.com
An essay on Sparky Anderson
Enquirer writer shares his thoughts on Reds great
By John Erardi
Cincinnati Enquirer
http://news.cincinnati.com/
November 4, 2010
Sombebody once asked Sparky Anderson what was his favorite kind of music.
"The love songs," he answered.
No three words ever described a man better.
In 25 years of covering sports in Cincinnati, I only once got somebody's autograph – Sparky Anderson's.
2008 Goudey
Under the strictures of the Baseball Writers Association of America, I wasn't supposed to get any. I made a one-time exception for my mother, bedridden from multiple sclerosis. Sparky was one of her favorite guys, so I figured what the heck.
Besides, it wasn't a public setting; it was just me and Sparky. I recall it taking place in Louisville in the mid-to-late 1980s when Anderson's Detroit Tigers were in town to play an exhibition game.
I think we talked about Sparky's and my mother's love of country music. I've never been a big fan of the genre, but I understood their point: Country and western songs have the best storylines.
I remember leaving our meeting thinking, "Man, what a nice guy."
I've never had a feeling on the job quite like that since – except when I'd see Sparky again.
I'm writing this today not because Sparky has just died. I've been saying it for years whenever somebody has asked me who is the nicest person I've ever met in sports. My answer's always been the same: "Sparky Anderson - nobody else even close."
Everybody who ever met Sparky has a Sparky story, because he was congenitally kind. Sparky would dispute the congenital part. He says he learned it from his father growing up in Bridgewater, S.D.
It doesn’t cost anything to be nice to people.
My Enquirer colleague Bill Koch recently told me of having driven with another journalist to the Otesaga Hotel in Cooperstown, N.Y., late in the afternoon on the day of their arrival for Induction Weekend at the Baseball Hall of Fame. They were scrambling for a first-day story, as often happens for journalists.
They found a side road onto which to pull their rental car. As they approached the hotel, who should be walking down the driveway and headed back to the hotel?
"Hey, Lonnie, check this out," Koch pointed.
It was none other than George "Sparky" Anderson, media gold, dropped down from heaven.
"He didn't know me," Koch said. "He didn't have to stop and talk. But he stood there and talked to us for 30 minutes like we were his next-door neighbors."
Which was, of course, the charm of the man.
I didn't know Sparky well, but he always gave me a smile and handshake that I took to mean he remembered my face.
How sweet that twinkle of recognition.
I remember once being in the manager's office in Detroit where I had gone to write a feature on the Tigers manager.
I lost track of the time. It was Sparky who woke me from my reverie.
"Excuse me – that's the national anthem," he said. "I'm always out there for the anthem."
It was 10 minutes before game time. I should have been out of his office a half hour earlier. We'd been talking about the Big Red Machine; he could've gone on forever. Not because he needed to, but because I needed him to.
There is only one other person I've ever met who was so totally devoid of any pretense whatsoever about his celebrity: Joe Nuxhall.
Toward the end of Sparky's 17-year run in Detroit, I recall hearing that he had to take a leave of absence; he was exhausted. There was, we were told, a public and a private Anderson. "Sparky" never said no to anybody when he was managing, on the field or off. Back home in Thousand Oaks, "George" Anderson could say no.
But it wasn't a phony "Sparky." It couldn't have been. Nobody can be that nice that long unless it's real. Besides, there are countless stories of him back home in the neighborhood, being everybody's best friend, even when he was just out taking a walk.
Before I got into sports writing, I was driving to work one day in the mid-1970s, and who should cross the street in front of me – between downtown and Riverfront Stadium – but Sparky Anderson. I'd never before seen the man except from the stands or on TV. He was carrying his dry cleaning. It caught me off-guard. It shouldn't have. It was Sparky. He picked up and dropped off his own laundry. I would later learn that Sparky was a "neat freak."
That day, a couple of horns of recognition honked. I remember yelling something at the Reds' skipper – he was God in this town in the mid-1970s – something like, "Hey, Main Spark!" He waved back.
That's the way I'll remember him.
I've never written a story about somebody without saying something more than "What a nice guy." I don't expect I ever will again.
Sparky Anderson was one of a kind.
jerardi@enquirer.com
Losing Sparky like losing family
The Skipper held court, built up his players and lit up a room
BY MITCH ALBOM
DETROIT FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
http://www.freep.com/section/SPORTS
November 5, 2010
I had a dream about Sparky Anderson a few days ago. He looked old and his hair was brown, and I called to him, but he didn't recognize me. Only after I said my name did he smile.
And then it ended.
Detroit Tigers manager Sparky Anderson relaxes with his pipe and a newspaper in the Tigers locker room before a game against Milwaukee in Detroit on Oct. 2, 1981. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
I'd been wondering about that dream because Sparky doesn't usually show up in my REM cycle. And why was his hair brown? Sparky? The original White Wizard? Then, Thursday afternoon, I heard the jarring news: At age 76, Anderson, one of the most colorful, charming, perfectly suited managers baseball ever produced, had died in California.
I don't know what that means for the dream. I know what it means for baseball. A mold has been forever shattered. Fans of a certain generation need only hear the word "Sparky" and they'll know what just passed. And kids, well, it may be hard to explain. Anderson didn't belong to today's fantasy league/money ball/analytics world of baseball. He was born to manage it. Not study it. Not even play it. (He was a pretty lousy player.) Manage it. He got the game. He felt it. He gripped the clubhouse the way Ruth or DiMaggio gripped a bat. He played hunches, pulled pitchers, tinkered lineups. He lived the game's lore until he became part of it. Baseball wasn't a diamond to Sparky, it was a planet. His home.
Unlike most managers, Sparky Anderson actually looked more natural in a baseball outfit than in regular clothes. If you saw him in a shirt and tie or, heaven forbid, one of those colorful sweatsuits he sometimes wore, you wanted him to yank it off, Superman style, and reveal the leggings, the belt, the cap.
You know. The Sparky look.
He knew the game inside out
George Lee Anderson was baseball. As a kid in Los Angeles, he played the game with Buckwheat from the "Little Rascals." True story. I learned this in one of countless visits to his inner sanctum, the manager's office. Those lucky enough to get inside recall a whirling dervish of a man in his underwear, scarfing spaghetti, his head almost in the sauce, but talking. Or a man hurled back in his chair like a king, hands raking through his white hair, still talking. Or a man stuffing his pipe with tobacco, eyes on the stem, still talking.
I've heard Sparky talk about the Pope ("Oh, that man there, what a face!"), an alternative career ("I woulda been a painter like my daddy"), even a punk rock group, The Dead Milkmen. Ain't? None? Nobody? No? I have heard Sparky use so many negatives in one sentence that it became a positive.
But the players who heard him talk baseball were the luckiest of all. He knew the game's DNA. Don't misunderstand. Sparky was no Kumbaya campfire skipper. He made his players shave. Dress in jackets and ties. To paraphrase Kipling, they all counted with him, but none too much. Kirk Gibson remembers a time Anderson called him into the office, yelling, "Big Boy, come in here! ... You got something to say?" And Gibson did. He ranted and raved for three minutes, uninterrupted, about playing time and usage. Finally, Sparky nodded and said, "Are you done?" Yes, Gibson said. Sparky motioned to the door -- go on now, get out -- and never added a word.
"But I felt better," Gibson recalled.
And that was Sparky's touch.
Hall of Fame inductee Sparky Anderson views a display featuring artifacts from the Detroit Tigers' 1984 World Series win at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., on April 18, 2000. (Tim Roske/AP)
'A father figure' to his players
Anderson's accomplishments speak for themselves. (And given how much Sparky spoke, that's saying something.) Sixth on the all-time wins list. World Series titles in both leagues. Hall of Famer.
But in the flood of memories Thursday from former players, few focused on that, and nearly all focused on how cherished they felt by him, how much he molded them. Cecil Fielder referred to him as "a father figure." Jack Morris said the team felt like "his family." Lance Parrish recalled Anderson's endless charity work.
It would be fitting to ask Ernie Harwell -- he and Sparky walked together every morning on road trips -- but we lost Ernie this year, too, and it seems like some heavenly roll call is taking place in our town.
I know this. The Sparky I saw in my dream wasn't the Sparky we loved -- nothing brown about him -- and if that was to be his path with the dementia he suffered, perhaps this is a kinder fate. Better to recall the best manager Detroit ever had as smiling, chatting, lighting up a room with a gravelly "How ya doin'?" Forever young in name and spirit, forever white and bright.
A Manager Who Stuck to His Guns and Fired Away
By DAVE ANDERSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
November 6, 2010
Lennox Mclendon/Associated Press
Sparky Anderson, who died Thursday, managed Detroit and Cincinnati to World Series titles.
To everyone in baseball he was Sparky Anderson; hardly anybody called him George. But as a manager, he was not just a spark. He was a bonfire who sometimes burst into a three-alarm blaze.
He led Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine to World Series championships in 1975 and 1976, but when the Reds finished second the next two seasons, he was abruptly dismissed.
“I burned inside ever since I was fired in Cincinnati,” Anderson, who died of complications of dementia on Thurday at 76, often said. “I hold no grudges — that’s part of the game. But I won’t stop driving until I prove I’m right.”
Hired early in the 1979 season by the Detroit Tigers, he slowly assembled the team with Kirk Gibson and Alan Trammell that soared to a 35-5 start in 1984 and dominated the San Diego Padres in the World Series. He had proved that he was right, that he was much more than a “push-button manager” who in Cincinnati had won those two Series, four National League pennants and five divisional titles.
“We heard that for nine years, my coaches and me,” he said with a serrated edge in his voice when the Tigers won that 1984 Series. “But we only had three people from the team we inherited: Johnny Bench, Pete Rose and Tony Perez. Three men make a dynasty — I didn’t know that.”
His teams in Cincinnati also had second baseman Joe Morgan, an eventual Hall of Famer, as well as shortstop Dave Concepcion; outfielders George Foster, Ken Griffey Sr., and Cesar Geronimo; and pitchers Don Gullett, Jack Billingham, Pat Zachry and Rawly Eastwick. In the classic 1975 Series, the Reds beat the Boston Red Sox in seven games, and then they swept the Yankees in four games in 1976.
During his news conference after the Series finale in 1976, Anderson was asked to compare Yankee catcher Thurman Munson, who was voted the American League’s most valuable player that season, with Bench, the Reds catcher and eventual Hall of Famer who had been the National League’s M.V.P. in 1970 and 1972. The question lighted the bonfire of Anderson’s loyalty to his players.
•
“Munson is an outstanding ballplayer and he would hit .300 in the National League,” he replied sharply, “but don’t ever compare nobody to Johnny Bench; don’t never embarrass nobody by comparing them to Johnny Bench.”
Standing nearby, Munson heard Anderson’s words, and when he followed Anderson to the microphone, he said he felt “belittled.” Three weeks later, Anderson wrote Munson a letter of apology, released by the Reds, that he had “no intention of trying to belittle you or any other catcher.”
Anderson’s devotion to all major league players was evident when club owners, mired in a labor dispute with the Players Association that eventually canceled the 1994 World Series, were considering using replacement players to start the 1995 season. Anderson took a leave of absence until the regular players returned.
As a 5-foot-9, 170-pound second baseman, he spent only one season in the big leagues, with the Philadelphia Phillies in 1959, hitting .218 with only 34 runs batted in and no home runs before returning to the minors and managing. He was a coach with the Padres before he joined the Reds as their manager in 1970.
“Please let’s don’t think of such a horror story that we’re going to have baseball with replacement players,” he barked, adding that he would decline his $1.2 million salary, then the highest of any manager, and refuse to manage such a group. “I don’t like my intelligence insulted by telling me this is the Detroit Tigers.”
By then, he was speaking with the security of what would be more than a quarter of a century as a major league manager — 9 years with the Reds, 17 with the Tigers. But in the days before the Tigers won that 1984 Series, he knew what a victory in it would mean to his career.
“I told my wife, Carol, that if I’m the first manager ever to win the World Series with a team in both leagues, we can always get a job,” he said.
His syntax was seldom perfect, but his meaning was always clear. “I see now,” he once said with a smile, “they even put ‘ain’t’ in the dictionary, so I’m good. I’m covered.”
When a pitcher joined the Reds or the Tigers, he knew not to argue or show up the manager known as Captain Hook when he came to the mound and called for a relief pitcher.
“Just put the ball in my hand like an egg,” he told them, “and leave quietly.”
•
When he managed, he decided on the lineup. The day he transferred Pete Rose, who had played second base and the outfield, to third base, he was reminded that Bob Howsam, the Reds’ general manager, was out of town.
“It doesn’t matter where Bob is,” he said.
In one of his last seasons with the Tigers, he was annoyed that George Steinbrenner had seemed to be stalking Manager Buck Showalter before the Yankees ran off six straight victories. “I hope he,” Anderson said, meaning the Yankees’ principal owner, “doesn’t think he won any of those games.”
Yes, his nickname was Sparky, but he really was a bonfire who sometimes burst into a three-alarm blaze.
Sparky Anderson on baseball
Reds manager wrote this foreword on baseball
By John Erardi
Cincinnati Enquirer staff writer
http://news.cincinnati.com/
November 4, 2010
Sparky Anderson provided the foreword, as told to John Erardi, for our 2006 baseball preview section, Baseball by the Book, which talked about his way to play the game:
I’ve heard about “the book.” Baseball by the book. I didn’t have a book, didn’t go by the book, never once in my life copied anybody. My attitude was, "What if they’re wrong?" But some things I believed in.
Left-handed pitcher vs. left-handed hitter. The left-hander’s breaking ball runs away from the left-handed hitter. Makes it harder to hit. Righty-righty, same thing. Well, except for Clay Carroll. Clay was a righty, still is I guess, and he could get anybody out. Didn’t make no difference to Clay, and so it didn’t make no difference to me. I’d say, "Hawk" - that was his nickname - "Hawk, we need some all-star relief tonight." And he’d say, "You got it!" Boy, he was something else.
My eyes, that’s what I believed in. That’s what I went by. Leave your heart at home. Your heart’s for your family. I didn’t need no computer to tell me what my eyes were seein’. The sacrifice bunt? No, I didn’t believe much in that, except for the pitchers, of course.
You know why I wasn’t big on the bunt? I didn’t like giving my team one less out. Outs? I guard outs with my life, especially those last six outs.
But some outs I give you. Like at the beginning of an inning. Joe Morgan walks by and says, “Skip, when I get on” – see, when I get on, not if I get on, and, oh yes, he would get on, walk, hit, whatever – “don’t bunt me over; I got this guy” – the pitcher – “down pat. I’ll get myself over.” And then, when Joe took that lead and shook up the pitcher – who knew there was no way he could keep Joe on first, but he’d try, anyway – well, when Joe got to second, and he always got to second, that’s when I’d bunt him over, and the next guy or the guy after that would hit the sacrifice fly.
Boom! Game over, we go home.
Talent makes the manager. You get all the talent out of your players that you can. That’s all that managing is. Getting every ounce out of them that you can. Tony LaRussa and Bobby Cox, I marvel at them. They’re really good. They get the most out of their talent, year after year after year.
The hit-and-run? Now you’re talkin’. I believed in the hit-and-run. I saw John Bench hit three home runs on hit-and-runs. See, when John was having trouble at the plate it was because he was coming off the ball, you know, pulling off with his left side. Give him the hit-and-run sign and he’d stay on that ball because on the hit-and-run the hitter needs to make contact, otherwise the baserunner, who is running on the pitch, could easily be thrown out by the catcher unless the runner’s fast.
Stealing a base? Yeah, I loved the stolen base. Larry Shepard, our pitching coach, said, "You took a league that wasn’t moving and got it moving." The stolen base gave us another way to beat you. You aren’t always going to hit. But the speed, the speed’s always there. They say I was three years ahead of the rest of the league, having more stolen bases than home runs, but I wasn’t doing it just to be doing it. I was doing it because I knew you couldn’t stop it.
Captain Hook? Yeah, I used what I had. We weren’t blessed with the Dodgers’ starting pitching, but we had a really deep bullpen. People say I was ahead there, too, five years ahead of the league, you know, having more saves than complete games, but I didn’t do it because it was in some book. I did it because we didn’t have but a couple of guys who could go much past six innings.
The other thing is, you got to know what the other guy’s got. You got to know what the opposing team has available to them to try to get themselves back into it. Coach Georgie Scherger called it having the last six outs. Get us to those last six outs and we’re going to beat you, because our last six outs are better than your last six outs, and we know what we want to do.
So, yeah, you manage what you got, and you know what the other guy’s got so you can trap him. That was the way I managed. That was the book I used.
- Sparky Anderson
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