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From Player to Manager excerpted from Chapter One: My Life in Baseball
Sometimes you'll hear people talk about a particular player in terms of what kind of a coach or manager he would make. But I can tell you that as a player, I wasn't thinking about that sort of thing -- I was just concentrating on playing the game and moving up the ladder. I guess when I was in the minor leagues I probably thought in the back of my mind that if I was unable to move up as a player, or if something happened as far as an injury, I would want to stay in the game as a manager or a coach. But you don't give much thought to that when you're playing.
Here's how I first came to consider managing: It was in March of 1961, and I was twenty-five years old, coming off my best year in the minor leagues -- a .281 average and 74 RBIs in 107 games at Class B with the Orioles' Fox Cities affiliate in Appleton, Wisconsin, while playing for a twenty-nine-year-old manager by the name of Earl Weaver. (Cal Jr. was born on August 24, 1960, so that had been a pretty good year all around.) I was catching for Rochester, Baltimore's Triple A club, in a spring training game in Daytona, and I got hit on the right shoulder with two foul balls in succession. I didn't think too much of it at the time, because after that happened I still threw two guys out at second base.
But the next day when I came to the park, I couldn't hold on to the ball. I went to play catch on the side and the ball fell right out of my hand. I went to Jim Dudley, our trainer, and said, "Dud, I can't throw the ball." He thought I was kidding, because I kidded around a lot with him, but then he realized that I was serious. There wasn't a lot he could do, though. When I finally was able to get a hold of the ball and throw it, my shoulder hurt terribly. I couldn't throw, which meant I lost strength in the shoulder. They sent me to the Orioles' Double A club in Little Rock, Arkansas, where the climate was a lot warmer, which they thought might help, and I played in thirty-two games there, but the shoulder just got progressively worse.
That's when I began thinking about trying a year managing in the minor leagues. As it so happened, Harry Dalton, the Orioles farm director, called me and said, "I've got a managing job for you." All I said was, "Thank you." I didn't ask where, when, how much money, or anything else. I went to Class D Leesburg, Florida, to manage, as a replacement for Billy DeMars, who had just been promoted to Class B. I managed my first game with Leesburg on June 7, 1961, and I wound up playing fifty-two games there as well.
I was young for a manager -- because a guy of twenty-five was usually still playing, or if he didn't have a lot of talent he was released and was out of baseball -- but by that point in my playing career I had shown the ability to run a ball club. I was a catcher, and the catcher ran the ball game. I moved people around on the field and showed that I knew the game and could handle people.
The kids in Class D were seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old, and in those days when you were managing you weren't just the manager, you were the pitching coach, you were the hitting coach, you were every kind of coach. I didn't have a coach working with me in the minor leagues until Chico Fernandez coached for me at Rochester in 1969.
In mid-August, after about ten weeks with Leesburg, I went back to Rochester because they needed a catcher, and I finished the season playing in eleven games there. The next year I continued to manage and play in the minor leagues, this time with the Class D Club in Appleton, but I knew by the end of that season that I wasn't going to play any more because of my shoulder. Had it not been for the injury I probably would've played at least a few more years, but a catcher who can't throw does more harm than good.
They found out that those foul balls back in March of '61 had knocked the deltoid muscle back and out of place, and the whole shoulder had been set incorrectly for a three- or four-month period. We were able to work on it and get it back in place, but the muscle that I used to throw with -- that comes up my arm and goes to my shoulder and down my back -- had shrunk. It was a matter of being able to get that muscle stretched out to where it should be, and that took a long, long time. In fact, it was six years before I threw without pain.
I was probably the one who started the practice of managers and coaches throwing batting practice from in front of the pitching rubber, because I threw batting practice every day in Leesburg from about forty-five feet away. The groundskeepers would get mad at me because I was stepping on the edge of their grass in front of the mound. Once I got the muscle stretched out, and I was able to throw without pain, I continued to throw batting practice every place I ever coached or managed. In the big leagues, there was many a time that I'd throw for an hour and a half of early hitting, and then throw to my regular group for fifteen or twenty minutes of regular hitting.
My injury was just one of those freak accidents that happens. Fortunately for me I was able to come up with a managing job and stay in baseball, move along, and eventually get to the big leagues as a coach and manager.
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