SPRING TRAINING: HOW SWEET IT IS

The Boston Globe offers an excerpt from columnist Dan Shaughnessy’s new coffee table book, “Spring Training: Baseball’s Early Season.”

No other professional sport has anything like it. Football, basketball, and hockey have exhibition seasons, tuneups that they insist on calling “preseasons.” In truth, these are merely conditioning/attrition boot camps, usually held very near the city where the team plays during the regular season.

…Contrast that with baseball spring training. Hardball’s early season is a six-week, laid-back warm-up followed by legions of retirees and vacationers, many of whom wait to inspect Grapefruit and Cactus schedules before they plan their February-March trips. My favorite moment comes after the first full-team meeting, which is usually followed by one lap around the warning track before the ballplayers commence with stretching and drills. That’s right – one grueling lap, an appropriate juxtaposition when measured against the preseason drills that go with football, basketball, and hockey.

Legitimate year-round conditioning by most modern baseball players has rendered much of spring training obsolete, of course, but few people are calling for the early season to be shortened. In fact, the baseball boom of the last 20 years (too often interrupted by those nasty work stoppages) has transformed spring training into a cottage industry for franchise owners. In 2002 The Wall Street Journal reported that spring training generated an economic impact of $600 million. Preseason ticket sales were running 20 percent higher than in 2001.

But the surge in spring training popularity is not an entirely positive development. The average spring crowd is only 6,000 fans and the entire spring season draws a little more than 2.5 million fans, but it’s become difficult to score tickets in too many spring sites. In places like Tampa (Yankees), Fort Myers (Red Sox), Kissimmee (Braves), and Peoria, Arizona (Mariners and Padres), this loss of the spontaneous ticket purchase has sucked some of the charm from the early season.

Still, spring provides relief from a winter of hardball news focused on labor, arbitration, ballplayer relocation, trade speculation and other forms of player transaction. The hot stove season keeps the fires burning, but too much of it is muddied by money and litigation.

STUCK: THE 9 LIVES OF STICK MICHAEL

There is a humorous account of Gene “Stick” Michael’s history with George Steinbrenner and the Yankees in Bill Madden and Moss Klein’s book, “Damned Yankees.” (1991) Michael first came to Steinbrenner’s attention in a dubious manner. In 1973, shortly after Steinbrenner had purchased the Yanks, the new owner attended a game in Texas. As he watched infield practice before the game, Steinbrenner was horrified to see one of the players playfully throw his mitt in the air. A hot dog flew out of his mitt into the air as well.

Steinbrenner had no idea who the player was, but he made a note of the uniform number and told manager Ralph Houk he wanted the player severly discilponed, benched, or evern traded for this blatant act of frivolity. Once he realized the Boss was serious, Houk called Michael, the guilty player, into his office and told him, between laughs, that he was deep onto Steinbrenner’s shit list.

Michael was often the victim of pranks such as the hot dog caper because he had a phobia about small crawly, creepy creatures…The hot dog had been placed in Michael’s glove by Hal Lanier, who, years later, wound up managing the Houston Astros.

…From that day on, the owner closely monitored the tall, slim shortstop. As times passed, though, Steinbrenner no longer viewed Michael as a hot dog man. Instead, he saw a shrewd, intelligent baseball man with a sharp personality. “A bright, young executive type,” is the way Steinbrenner described him.

Thus, when Michael’s career ended, Steinbrenner brought him back to the Yankees, first as a “walkie-talkie” scout in the press box in 1976, then as a coach, a minor league manager, and in 1980, as general manager. As general manager, Michael played a vital role. He was the middleman between Steinbrenner and manager Dick Howser. Michael and Howser were close friends, and Michael succeeded in bearing the brunt of Steinbrenner’s verbal assaults on his manager before relaying the owner’s often illogical suggestions to Howser. But when Steinbrenner decided to fire Howser after the Yankees were swept in in the 1980 playoffs at the hands of the Royals, he turned to Michael, his all-purpose man.

As soon as he became manager, Michael learned the painful lesson: in Steinbrenner’s mind, the least-knowledgeable person in the entire organization is the manager. And who’s to say say he’s not right since so many of them have taken the job, knowing they would have no support from the owner and inevitably be fired.

As Michael once said to Moss Klein, sitting in a bar during one of those stormy periods in 1981, “In every other jjobs I’ve had with him, he seemed to respect my opinion to some degree. But when you become his manager, it’s like your IQ drops by 50 percent. All of a sudden, you don’t know anything.”

Stick Michael didn’t last long as manager during the strike-shortened 1981 season. After winning the first half of the year, he was replaced by Bob Lemon in early September. A few days before he was axed, Michael had some reporters up to his hotel room.

“You know what my ultimate fantasy is?” he said. “Someday I’d like to buy a ball club and hire him as my manager. I think that would be fun.”

A week after Michael was fired, he was invited back to the Stadium to meet with Stienbrenner.

The owner, feeling remorse as he always does when he fires a manager, told Michael he still regarded him, “like a son.” Accordingly, he asked Michael to take a front office job. But Michael, still smarting over being fired as manager after guiding the Yankees to a strong enough early showing to earn a spot in the postseason playoffs, said he still felt he had been a good manager.

“Sure you are,” said Steinbrenner. “But why would you want to stay manager and be second-guessed by me when you can come up into the front office and be one of the second-guessers?”

That is as prescient a comment as Steinbrenner is ever likely to make.

Michael was back the next season however, after Bob Lemon was canned 14 games into the season.

Stick was the manager that late April night when Reggie Jackson first returned to the Stadium as a member of the California Angels. I distinctly remember watching that game on our old 13′ sony TV. Reggie hit a bomb in his 3rd at-bat against Ron Guidry (he had previously singled and popped out) and Yankee Stadium erupted in a spontanious chant: “Steinbrenner sucks, Steinbrenner sucks.” I gleefully jumped around my apartment, shook my fist, and joined in the chant.

Again, Michael didn’t last the season, going 44-42 before he was fired on August 4th (he was replaced by Clyde King).

Ironically, after Steinbrenner had fired Michael the first time, in September of ’81, he announced the following December at the winter baseball meetings in Hollywood, Florida, that Michael would return as manager for the ’83, ’84, and ’85 seasons, with Lemon staying on for 1982. That afternoon, Michael, Dick Howser, and Billy Martin were all sitting around the bar at the Diplomat Hotel joking about the Yankee revolving manager’s chair.

“You’re coming back for ’83, ’84, and ’85?” Howser said to Michael. “Well, then I’ve got ’86, ’87, and ’88.”

“Okay,” chimed in Martin, “and I’ve got ’89, ’90, and ’91!”

“The crazy thing about it all,” said Michael, “is that I never got to 1983 because I got hired and fired again in ’82!”