The Autocrat of Astroturf

Everybody in baseball says the same three things about Whitey Herzog: He's the best manager in baseball or else the first name mentioned on a very short list. He's the most abrasively self-confident and outspoken executive in the sport. And, whether he's in the middle of a controversy or a pennant race, he seems to have a better time than everybody else.

Once, between the fifth and sixth games of the World Series, Herzog was asked if he'd be available for interviews during the off day. No, he said. Not unless you're in a fishing boat or on a golf course.

Which would it be? Fish or play golf?

"Both," said Herzog. Fish first, then golf. Maybe 36 holes if the sun stayed up long enough.

Herzog's life is one long extra-innings game. When you need only five hours' sleep a night, when the U.S. Army says you have an I.Q. of 140, when everything about the world fascinates you, when you're the kind of man who laid every one of the 18,000 bricks in his first home with his own hands, then you just naturally can't sleep much later than 5:30 A.M. Why sleep when being awake is such a kick? Herzog can always sit in that big, quiet house he designed himself and read until Mary Lou, his wife, wakes up.

"Mary Lou bought that game Trivial Pursuit for Christmas," says Herzog. "We got the family around. But we had to stop playing. I knew all the answers. Every damn question."

Herzog barely graduated from high school. He preferred skipping class so he could hitch rides with truckers, hang out in burlesque houses and watch the St. Louis Browns. But Dorrel Norman Elvert Herzog--a man in search of a nickname since birth--shocks people with his knowledge. Even Mary Lou, who has known him since they were kids, was impressed by his prowess. "She was amazed," he says, grinning. "She said, 'Where'd you learn all that stuff?' I told her, 'Whaddaya think I been doing down here all these years while you've been sleepin'? I read everything.'"

•

"Whitey has a special place in our game, like Casey Stengel once did," says Frank Cashen, general manager of the New York Mets and Herzog's archrival. "A few of our prominent citizens can, shall we say, scratch themselves at inopportune times and get away with it. Whitey can."

And Whitey does. Herzog the manager is revolutionary enough--preaching such heresies as "Relief pitching is more important than starting pitching" and "Speed beats power." But it's Herzog the cocky, self-reliant White Rat who fascinates people most.

Nobody else seems able to survive managing. Earl Weaver, Gene Mauch and Dick Williams, recent managers who resemble Herzog the most, have all retired--none contentedly. Cheerful Sparky Anderson ended up in a hospital with "total exhaustion." Billy Martin flamed out, too.

By contrast, Herzog is in beaming health and bumptious spirits. "Talk about a man who enjoys life," says Royals public-relations director Dean Vogelaar. "I've never seen anybody who can go as hard, twenty-four hours a day, as Whitey."

And talking every step of the way.

Since Weaver retired, Herzog has become baseball's annual best bet to add a quotation to Bartlett's. He once called the Oakland Coliseum "a graveyard with lights" and still refers to Candlestick Park as "a toilet bowl with the lid up." A hint of what he says in private after a few beers may be gleaned from what he says in public. "I'm not going to second-guess Dallas Green. All I'm going to say is that he just traded his best pitcher for a sack of garbage." He deliberately got thrown out of the seventh game of the 1985 World Series, telling umpire Don Denkinger, "We wouldn't even be here if you hadn't missed the fucking call last night."

"Whitey doesn't care whether people like what he says or not," says Milwaukee general manager Harry Dalton, chuckling. "With him, it's 'I think it; therefore, I say it.'"

•

Herzog has built contenders for 15 years with raw materials that other teams discard: mediocre pitchers who are lucky to go six innings and swift glove men who can't hit a ball to the warning track.

"You look at the Cards year after year and say, 'They're not that good.' But damn if (continued on page 126)Autocrat of Astroturf(continued from page 115) they don't keep grinding it out for Whitey," says Cleveland general manager Hank Peters, a 40-year front office veteran who first hired Herzog for a nonplaying baseball job in 1963. "He has the confidence to evaluate and the courage to act."

Herzog's St. Louis teams hit the fewest home runs in baseball. And his starting pitching staffs have been almost pathetic. How on earth did he win three National League pennants in the Eighties? Except for a couple of legendary bad breaks--Denkinger's blown call in 1985 and Jack Clark's ankle injury in 1987--he would probably have won three world titles in the past eight years

Nobody knows exactly how Herzog got the better of the New York Mets in the Eighties. They had the talent. He got the rings. No wonder Peters says, "Whitey Herzog is the best judge of talent I've ever seen."

No setback seems to outflank Herzog's capacity for personnel improvisation. That's why 1990 may be a typical Herzog season. He has lost his All-Star catcher (Tony Pena) to free agency and his bull-pen star (Todd Worrell) isn't expected back from elbow surgery until midseason. In a situation where most managers would be expected to fail, it's assumed that Herzog, until proven otherwise, will find some ridiculous way to succeed.

Herzog creates the impression that he can bully, finesse or laugh his way through anything. On the first day of spring training this past March, after the 32-day lockout, every team scrambled to work out at the earliest date. Except the Cards, who began a day-later than everybody else. The three week spring was wonderful, said Whitey, far superior to seven weeks. "Shit, we just come down here in February so the general managers can play golf."

•

Herzog is the only man in baseball history who has held every significant job in the game--big-league player, third-base coach ("I was the best ever"), head scout, farm director, general manager and manager. He may know more baseball--firsthand and at more levels--than any man who has ever lived it. Whether he does or not, he acts like it. One former colleague says, "He's one of my favorite people. But you just have to understand that his ego is bigger than the stadium."

"I'm not as stubborn now as I was," says Herzog. "I had a lot of Dutch in me. But when I know I'm right and someone disagrees with me, that's when I have a problem with him. Because when I know I'm right, I almost always am right."

Backing up that confidence is a commanding ball-park presence. His white burr-cut hair might as well be a rooster's comb, announcing his arrival. His hands are enormous. He also has the comfortable belly that the wants. He has had that thumbs-at-the-waist farmer hip cock mastered for years. But you need some heft, some ballast to pull off the look. Friendly, solid but daunting.

The man has been a ham, a hot dog, a dude ever since his mother started sticking him in amateur hours to sing. He loves to play a role to the hilt, hiding behind it all the time. Check out those old Fifties black-and-whites from his playing days; nobody in Damn Yankees dressed that sharply, not even the Devil. Although his eight-year playing career was mediocre, he could run and throw with the best and got more money than Mickey Mantle coming out of high school. Ted Williams even said that Herzog had one of the best swings he had ever seen. Too bad he couldn't hit a slow curve with a canoe paddle.

Back then, Satchel Paige nicknamed Herzog "Wild Child." Now, his style is shameless middle-American gothic. That's as it should be. He has boxed the compass and returned to his origins, as few men even dream of doing. Today, he lives just 40 miles from the small town of New Athens, Illinois, where he was born and raised.

"My bedroom now is bigger than the whole house I grew up in," he says, not so much proud of now, or ashamed of then, as surprised at how little difference it seems to make to him. The house is big and comfortable, with a confident, sweeping progression to the rooms, all of which are understated by jock standards. The memorabilia and awards are there, the signs of wealth and celebrity, yet the over-all impression is unpretentious.

Herzog has an enormous sense of self, but not an enormous sense of selfimportance. He may be a showman and a shoot-from-the-lip go-to-hell guy, but he also respects and enjoys other people. And he doesn't think baseball is the whole world.

Perhaps that's because he has seen so much of it. "My family didn't have much money. They' had to scratch," says Herzog. "My mom had to be a house cleaner." Some boys have a paper route. "My route was the whole town." He didn't just work in a funeral home; he dug the graves, then drove the hearse. Whether mopping the brewery, moving lawns or fixing water pipes when it was ten degrees below zero, no job was too hard for him. Nothing was as had as taking a pick into the mines, as his forebears had. New Athens had two lumberyards, as foundry, a brewery, a shoe factory, 13 grocery stores "and sixteen taverns, to make it all bearable," according to Herzog, who remembers his father as a goodhearted man who drank a lot, never took care of himself and died when he was 48. "I never asked my dad for a dime."

In those days, Herzog lived to play sports. And to get out of New Athens. Both of Herzog's brothers spent most of their lives in their home town. That suited them but not Whitey. Four years after he left to play in the minors, Herzog passed through New Athens on a team bus. He told his teammates who'd be sitting where on the street, who'd be sitting on which stools in which bars.

"Every one of 'em was right where I said they'd be," recalls Herzog. "Still are, unless they're dead."

•

When one of Herzog's teams has a bad year--and his Cards have followed all three of their pennants with losing seasons--his response is unique in baseball. He shrugs, fishes a little more and starts planning for next year. Why make everybody miserable?

"I really enjoy managing. In July of 1979, the Royals lost fourteen out of fifteen. Our pitching fell apart. In two weeks, I gave only two signs, because we were always behind by five or six runs so fast. The writers brought me a half gallon of Scotch with a nice note. They thanked me for not being a jerk. I could've locked the clubhouse, blown up at everybody. I didn't. I managed my ass off that year to keep us in the race until the last week."

Herzog got fired after that season. "It's no big deal. The way to make more money is to get fired. The first time I got canned [in Texas], our friends wouldn't come around, because they didn't know how to act. So Mary Lou and I threw a party." (continued on page 144)Autocrat of Astroturf(continued from page 126)

How does Herzog get away with such a laid-back style? For one thing, he's as tough on the inside as his coalmining and farming ancestors. He may look like a big old kindly bear these days, but nobody has forgotten the Garry Templeton incident in 1981. The shortstop, then considered a future Hall-of-Farmer, gave the finger to the hometown fans who were booing him for jaking. Herzog grabbed him with both hands, dragged him into the dugout and had to be pried off him by other players.

"Templeton doesn't want to play in St. Louis. He doesn't want to play on turf. He doesn't want to play when we go into Montreal. He doesn't want to play in the Astrodome. He doesn't want to play in the rain," Herzog said the day after the fight. "The other eighty games, he's all right."

Templeton was lucky that Herzog traded him to San Diego instead of Tokyo. Everybody said the Rat's anger had gotten the better of his judgment when he dealt Templeton for Ozzie Smith. Funny thing: Templeton's career withered immediately and it's Smith who'll go to the Hall of Fame. Herzog's mystique grew.

The manager has only four rules: Be on time. Bust your butt. Play smart. And have some fun while you're at it, for Chrissakes. Transgress the big four, and you'll hear about it plenty. "People sayyou've never had your ass chewed out until you've been chewed out by me," he says flatly. "I let 'em have it with both barrels. Then it's done. I don't have a doghouse.

"My door is always open. But a lot of guys come in thinking they're gonna tell me off and leave wishing they'd never come in."

Herzog has a way with a harsh word. Asked if Willie McGee reminded him of a young Mickey Rivers, he answered, "Yeah, except Willie doesn't play the horses, he shows up on time and he can throw." At his first press conference in Texas--never having managed a pro team anywhere--Herzog said, "This is the worst excuse for a big-league ball club I ever saw."

On the other hand, when the players earn Herzog's respect, he reciprocates. He always arrives at the ball park four hours early so he can post the line-up before his players arrive. Then they know where they stand and can prepare properly from the moment they arrive. (Sometimes, Billy Martin, when hung over, wouldn't post his line-up until after batting practice. His players had to guess who should hit with the regulars.)

As usual, Herzog has sensible ulterior motives for arriving so early. Casey Stengel taught him "to bullshit with the writers" every day. He got the message: They can dig up their own stories or you can write their stories for them.

Patting backs and taping ankles, Whitey fills every notebook every day and doles out off-the-record quotes and background info like a master White House propagandist. Thus, his version of reality dominates the coverage of his team as completely as any other recent manager's. Herzog is one of the few who understand that either the manager controls his team through the media or the media sense a vacuum and gradually take control from the manager.

Herzog even invites reporters into his dugout in spring training. What's to hide?

"You see why I let him hit," crows Herzog when one of his pitchers hits a home run. "I had to talk that man into goin' up there." Next time the pitcher is due up, he snaps, "Sit down. I can't stand to watch you hit another one. It's embarrassing to my other players."

The stars he cajoles and instructs, nagging about technique. "Release that split-finger right from the ear, like a catcher. Don't reach back." The humpty dumpties, the guys who make a living by sitting, are his buddies. "Whitey handles role players especially well," says Duke Wathan, now the Royals' manager but a role player for Herzog in the Seventies. "He keeps making small talk, finding out about your family, doing his Casey Stengel imitations, making sure you understand how he plans to use you and where you fit. He's very honest. He never sugar-coats to pacify a guy."

Once, Herzog shocked a scrub, Tito Landrum, by walking up to him in midgame and apologizing for not having him in the line-up. "The last time we faced this [pitcher], you hit the ball hard three out of four times up," Herzog explained.

"That was two years before," said Landrum. "Even I didn't remember."

Herzog, like Earl Weaver in his day, can stay with one team indefinitely, because every clubhouse grievance is aired and then usually forgotten. Very few managers have been smart enough or glib enough to flourish in such an atmosphere of candor. It works only as long as the manager, in a pinch, has the personality to intimidate any of his players.

Also like Weaver, Herzog has little fear of eccentrics or hard-to-manage players. Herzog didn't care if Amos Otis wouldn't talk or Hal McRae dressed like a Third World insurgent. He traded for Darrell Porter after his cocaine problems became public and won a world title with him as series M.V.P. Herzog's tolerance finally snapped when he discovered that he had about seven heavycocaine users. Even then, he didn't get rid of them all and didn't trade Keith Hernandez and Lonnie Smith until he was convinced their play was being hurt.

In trades, he sought out Joaquin Andujar, Jack Clark and Pedro Guerrero, supposedly the head-case trifecta. To Herzog, they were invigorating. What better way to spend an off day than to have a star player slam on the brakes, pull into a Porsche dealership, point to a $92,000 item and say, "I'll take two of those. One for me. One for my wife."

"That guy had at least ten cars. Couldn't get out of his own driveway," says Herzog. "He went broke. But a great guy."

•

Only direct, no-bullshit dealings appeal to Herzog. He once proposed a trade to Harry Dalton by saying, "How'd you like to win the pennant this year?" When they finished swapping players, both the Cards and the Brewers were so vastly improved that they met each other in the next World Series.

"Whitey's one of the few guys who know how to make a trade," says Frank Cashen. "He's very frank, not trying to be sinister like some [executives] who think they're in the CIA. You ask Whitey, he tells you. And you can believe what he says, including what he says about his own players. He's a bright, inventive guy who doesn't waste time beating around the bush."

Perhaps the nickname White Rat--given to Herzog in the Fifties because he resembled a former player with the same moniker--is unintentionally appropriate. Perhaps it is synonymous, in a baseball sense, with benevolent dictator. In other words, a rat, yes, but a white rat. Sharp teeth and a mean bite? Sure. But this rat, who never pretends to be anything else, is one you laugh with when he steals the cheese--even when he steals it from you.

•

Put it all together and you have The Autocrat of Astroturf--the man who may be the prototype of a 21st Century manager. Herzog's success has been predicated on a central guiding idea of a new way to build a modern team. The Eighties Cardinals were a concept with several parts--none of them entirely new, all of them the culmination of trends that had been building since the Sixties. First came the notion that speed and raw athletic ability are preferred at every position over any other virtue, even at the expense of power or baseball savvy. Herzog didn't invent the bunt, the steal, the hit and run or taking the extra base at every chance. Ty Cobb did all of that. Also, Herzog didn't conceive the all-out running attack, with six or seven thieves who steal at any time. Chuck Tanner did that in Oakland in 1976. And the Dodgers had five switch hitters in one line-up long before Herzog put six slap-hitting switchers in the same batting order.

But Herzog put it into one formula: the Runnin' Redbirds--a team that could lead the major leagues in scoring while being dead last in home runs. He realized that players who aim at the middle to top of the ball, instead of at the middle to bottom like power hitters, have the advantage of turning modern pitching theory on its head. Keep the ball low is an adage that has been chiseled in stone since the home-run age began. However, a knee-high strike only fuels the Cards' game.

Herzog also realized how team speed in a big park can turn a mediocre starting pitching staff into a good one. His starters allow lots of hits but few walks or home runs. They may not strike out many hitters or pitch complete games, but they get lots of double-play grounders.

Herzog claims only one true radical idea as his own: "Start with the closer. Build your bull pen first, then worry about your rotation.... I was the first to look at it that way. My job is to put us in a position to win come nut-cuttin' time."

The old sport of baseball is so afraid of new ideas that few teams have followed any of Herzog's principles. One, however, did--the hopelessly desperate Baltimore Orioles, after they lost 107 games in 1988. "No question about it. I'm a great admirer of Whitey," says Os' G.M. Roland Hemond, who put his fastest and best defensive players at every position, sacrificed power and put the franchise's best young arm (Gregg Olson) in the bull pen, not in the rotation. The Orioles broke the major-league record for fielding percentage. Great defense rekindled team morale. Hapless pitchers suddenly became mysteriously decent. Olson was Rookie of the Year. And the Orioles showed the third-greatest one-season improvement in the history of baseball (32-1/2 games).

•

When a manager has such a looming personality, when he is the public focus of the franchise, it tends to diminish the stature of the team's potential charismatic leaders. In crises, the top dog is in the dugout, not on the field. That can be a slight disadvantage in a play-off or in the series and may be part of the reason that Weaver and Herzog each have only one world title to their credit. Sparky Anderson and Tommy Lasorda may not be as tactically acute, and their teams do not exceed expectations as consistently. But Anderson and Lasorda teams are not psychologically dominated by good old Sparky and Tommy.

If Herzog has a weakness as a manager, it is that his moods become his players' moods and his fears become theirs, too: Call it The Gene Much Syndrome. Last season and right into last winter, he seemed fixated on his club's inability to sign either Bruce Hurst or Mike Moore as a free agent in the 1988-1989 off season. As the Nineties begin, Herzog has his doubts and, as with everything, does not bother to hide them. True, he was hailed for extracting 86 wins from the Cards last season and keeping them in the pennant race until Labor Day, when injuries to relief ace Todd Worrell and center fielder Willie McGee caught the team right at the kneecaps.

Still, Herzog has big-picture worries about the shape of his team. The Cards' over-all speed isn't what it used to be. "The league is catching up with us. Defense against the running game is better," he says. "Our club doesn't manufacture runs like it used to." Will the Cards be shuffled again?

The White Rat will think of something. He always has. And even if he doesn't, so what? He's already a man who has left more than a mark on his game; he has left a truly personal signature. "I'll retire when it's not fun anymore. Right now, I couldn't be happier. If I get fired here, that'll be the end of it, anyway."

All fates await Herzog with equal promise. He has made his life the way he made that first house--one brick at a time. And that is why it is so solid. He is almost entirely self-created.

When, in his autobiography, White Rat, Herzog writes about his own children--smart, educated, normal--he winces, because they remind him of kids in general. "I think we had it better then," he writes of a time when he had nothing. "For kids today, everything is organized. Everybody tells them where to be, what to do.

"One time, we built an airplane on the roof of the shed behind my cousin's house. We modeled it after one of those balsawood jobs with the rubber-band motor, only we used an inner tube from a truck tire as a motor. We wound that sucker up, and I jumped in and hollered to let it go. Went right off the shed and landed on my head. I was lucky I didn't break every bone in my body."

Herzog has been making crazy airplanes ever since, making them his own way, flying them himself as he damn well pleases and never worrying whether he lands on his head. He takes the chance, he takes the ride, he takes the credit and he has the laughs.

For all of that, Herzog has never maintained that his dream occupation is baseball manager. "Perfect job?" he says. "Ski instructor." His only avowed goal on snow is to go in a straight line as fast as possible.

Maybe.

Or maybe Whitey Herzog just wants to see if he can break every bone in his body.

"Nobody knows how Herzog got the better of the New York Mets. They had the talent. He got the rings."

"Herzog's tolerance snapped when he discovered that he had about seven heavy cocaine users."