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1|2|3|4 excerpted from the Introduction
Now, when I was first wearing that blue cap of the Kansas City Royals, I had an outfielder on my spring roster named
Willie Wilson. If you're a baseball fan, you've heard of him: rangy kid, good speed, stole a lot of bases. Hit for a high average when I managed him. Willie is a good person, but when I first saw him in our rookie camp, he had himself a big problem: He thought he was a power hitter. He had size -- he was 6-2, 6-3, weighed about 190 -- but I still don't understand what in the hell told him he had home-run pop in his bat. Even in the minors he hadn't gone deep much; the fly balls he hit just gave the outfielders a long way to run before the catch. Well, I watched Willie hit a few times, and it didn't take Connie Mack to figure out that swinging for the fences wasn't going to be his ticket to the Hall of Fame. He might hit his 12 homers, but the rest of the time he was going to make himself an out, kill our rallies, and put the Kansas City fans in a coma.
What Willie did have, though, was speed, and a home ballpark that favored speed. Royals Stadium -- now called Kauffman Stadium or "the K," for my ex-boss, the late Royals owner Ewing Kauffman -- had big dimensions, which made it even harder to hit the ball out, and fake turf that turned ground balls into states of emergency. With the wheels he had, if Willie'd just learn to switch-hit, beat the ball into the ground, and take off running, he'd be on base more often than Babe Ruth ate hot dogs. Now, even today, most good baseball people don't recognize what an edge it gives you just to get your guys on base, let alone speedsters like Willie. He doesn't have to hit home runs; just having him on base jacks up the odds you're going to score runs, and that raises the odds you'll win games. Then it becomes like compound interest: Game in and game out your edge adds up, and before you can say Jackie Robinson, you find your ass at the top of the standings.
One day in spring training I'd had enough, and I put it to him plain. I said, "Hey, man, do you want to play in Fort Myers all your life, or do you want to make it to the major leagues?" He looked a little put-upon, and I said, "I'll let you make that choice, but I'm gonna have Chuck Hiller in the cage tomorrow morning at eight o'clock" -- Chuck was going to be his batting coach -- "and if you want to learn to switch-hit, be here. If not, I don't give a damn." Let him try his Hank Aaron impersonation in Triple-A. I had a big-league team to run.
Boy, he didn't like that. Smoke was coming out of his ears. But next day, eight o'clock sharp, here comes Willie. He sets to work on grounders. A year later, his average jumps about a hundred points. Willie won a batting title, stole 83 bases one year, and led the league in hits and runs for an American League champion. The Royals played hard, heads-up ball, the kind I enjoy and that fans have always paid good money to see. They set Kansas City attendance records five years running. That's baseball like it oughta be.
I learned something important in Kansas City: Never finish second. We finished three games out in 1979, first time I hadn't won a division title in four years there, and just as I expected, old Ewing sacked my ass the minute the season was over. Well, a couple of years later, Willie figured he'd try the home-run thing again. It didn't work out too good. His run totals dropped, his hit totals fell, and he was never the same player. A manager's job is to look at the assets he's got, evaluate them, and get the most mileage out of them he can. In dealing with players, you have to ask yourself what each guy does best. Can this guy hit for power? Does that one have a good arm? You look at what each person does well and doesn't do well, then put him in situations that maximize his abilities. Don't ask him to do what he isn't good at; let him succeed with the talents he's got. He deserves that! It makes him feel a part of the team, it's good for the ballclub, it gets your different parts working together. It's also how you end up with a pennant in your back pocket and another year on your contract.
I'm leading things off with Willie because he reminds me of what's happening in baseball today. The game's had some good luck the last couple of years, like Mark McGwire's home-run chase with Sammy Sosa, which really has drawn a lot of fans and sparked interest. But it still has big problems -- bigger than it has any idea. You and I could sit here all day and bullshit about what they are and how to fix them. We all know what some of them are. But I'm telling you, a lot of the biggest problems, baseball ain't even talked about yet. Not too far down the line, that's going to cost us in a very, very big way.
The reason major-league baseball is so hard for me to watch today, and the reason some fans have had a hard time figuring out whether they still enjoy it or not, is simple. It's like Willie. It's a singles hitter trying to go deep every time up. I've never seen such uniformly horseshit baseball, such a lack of understanding of how to play the game or run it. I can't stand looking at it any more than I could stand there and watch Willie fly out to the warning track day after day. A singles hitter trying to go deep is not only going to fail at what you already knew he couldn't do, he's also going to forget how to do what he's actually good at. A lot of what's passing for baseball today is about as fun to watch as Willie popping up with a runner on third.
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