The man who guided the Reds to two World Series trophies, four World Series appearances and five postseason trips was placed in a hospice facility Wednesday near his home in Thousand Oaks, Calif.
It is difficult to imagine this once-vibrant, astute baseball Einstein suffering from dementia, but it happens. If you have a moment, say a prayer for one of the nicest, classiest men ever to put on a baseball uniform.
Although he won 863 games and his .596 winning percentage is the best for a Cincinnati manager, Anderson never took credit for any of them, not one, always saying it was the players who made him famous.
Famous was not in his vocabulary when talking about himself. That was reserved for Johnny Bench and Pete Rose and Tony Perez and Joe Morgan.
Anderson loved it during a World Series game when the Reds were behind and Bench walked past him in the dugout, tapped him on the knee, and said, “Don’t worry. Just stay out of our way, and we’ll win it for you.”
And that’s the way he operated. He didn’t try to reinvent the game, never considering himself a Gene Mauch or a Tony La Russa — guys always looking for an edge. Anderson just managed the game the way it was designed to be played and it worked.
‘Captain Hook’
For the most part, Sparky put down the same eight names in mostly the same order every day for the position players and watched them pound the bejabbers out of the opposition.
Strangely, for a guy who barely made it to the majors as a player and hit .218 over 152 games for the 1959 Philadelphia Phillies, he messed mostly with the pitchers. He often laughed about the story of catcher Tim McCarver running out to the mound to talk to Bob Gibson, only to hear Gibson say, “What are you doing out here? The only thing you know about pitching is that you can’t hit it.”
Sparky couldn’t hit it, either, but he knew it. He knew exactly when a pitcher was about to lapse into distress. He made pitching changes before disaster happened, earning the nickname Captain Hook for his propensity for pulling pitchers quickly.
From a media standpoint, Sparky was a treasure. He never saw a pen and pad or a microphone he didn’t like. And his stories and observations regaled everybody who wandered into his office, which was always overpopulated with writers and broadcasters.
One of my favorites was before the start of the 1975 World Series against the Boston Red Sox. A phalanx of writers trooped into his office to quiz him. One writer asked a question, and Sparky gave a long, detailed answer.
The first group left his office, and another wave wedged its way in. Another writer asked the same question, and Sparky launched into a long, involved answer. But he gave the exact opposite answer to the same question.
When that group left his office, I said, “Sparky, two guys asked you the same question, and you gave them two totally opposite answers.” Sparky gave me that impish grin and said, “Hey, you can’t give everybody the same story.”
Talking baseball
Anderson never rose above his common-man position, never made out that he was anything different than a lucky guy who fell into a plush job. Up until this week he lived in the same house he lived in when the Reds hired him, and he never changed his telephone number.
He was known for disabling the English language with a spray of double negatives and mispronounced words, but never felt self-conscious and never asked writers to clean up his misplaced pronouns and misused adverbs and adjectives.
His devoted wife, Carol, pleaded with him to speak the King’s English, but he was happy with Sparky’s English and never changed. A typical Sparky sentence from one of my old notebooks: “I got no doubts we’ll beat them Dodgers this year. Ain’t no way because they ain’t got no tonkers like we got in our lineup.”
Vintage Sparky.
He would always laugh when players thought they were putting something over on him. There was a period when Anderson thought his players were enjoying too much night life on the road, so he put in a curfew in St. Louis.
How did he enforce it? Anderson handed a baseball to the hotel doorman and said, “Get an autograph on this ball from every player who comes in after midnight, then give me the ball tomorrow.”
The bellman complied, and the next day Anderson had a complete “list” of the violators who had signed their own doom.
That was Sparky Anderson — the most modest, unassuming and probably best manager the Cincinnati Reds ever had.
He never quit thanking former Reds President and General Manager Bob Howsam “for bringing in some guy nobody ain’t never heard of and giving him the chance to go along on a wonderful ride.”
And it was immense fun riding along with him.
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