Gene Mauch: '64 Phillies' tragic figure

After he was done managing, after baseball was through torturing him, Gene Mauch lived in a California desert community.

Separated from the game that was his life, he golfed daily, played cards, devoured box scores, and watched baseball on TV. By filling his days so pleasantly, he could sometimes forget how unpleasantly they began and ended.

His first waking thought, the longtime Phillies manager once said, was always about the epic collapse of his 1986 California Angels. Then, before he could sleep at night, the equally harsh fate of his 1964 Phillies confronted him.

"If it's true that you learn from adversity," he once told a sportswriter, "I must be the toughest SOB in the world."

Mauch, whose name became synonymous with baseball futility, died of lung cancer at 79 in 2005. Three of his teams, in the most unimaginably cruel ways, were stranded on the doorstep of a World Series. No one ever managed more games without getting to one.

In Philadelphia, where his '64 Phils blew a sure pennant by losing 10 straight in late September, his terse, hard-edged name remains a sporting obscenity. He's blamed for the crash, especially for pitching Jim Bunning and Chris Short on short rest in those final two weeks.

"During that losing streak I remember my dad sitting on the porch, listening to Phillies games and cursing Mauch's moves," said Joe Kerrigan, the Philadelphian who became a big-league pitching coach. "When they blew it, he lost his love for the Phillies and he wouldn't get it back until they fired Mauch."

If the 1964 Phillies season was a Shakespearean tragedy, Mauch was both its tragic hero and its villain, the roles so intertwined that even now, 50 years later, the collapse and their manager's responsibility for it are difficult to untangle.

Surely, the Little General's outside-the-box thinking buoyed the overmatched Phillies through 150 surprising games. But, as when he infamously shortened his September rotation, that cleverness may also have doomed them in their final 12.

His flinty-eyed, martinet's demeanor certainly pushed a young team to unexpected success. But the pressures it created may also have led to its ultimate failure.

What is clear a half-century on, however, is that it's impossible to imagine a scenario in which the '64 Phils flew so high or fell so fast without Mauch.

Mauch, who managed 3,942 major-league games, would eventually temper his excesses, but in 1964 he was a frighteningly intense, chain-smoking 38-year-old whirlwind.

He couldn't tolerate mistakes or sloppy performances. Mauch would punch a hole in a clubhouse wall, kick over a full spittoon in front of a player's locker, and turn over a table of food.

"He told me that, when he got the job, he was scared to death," said Bobby Wine, a '64 Phillie and later a Mauch coach. "He said: 'Here I am, in the big leagues. I'm the youngest manager in the big leagues. I've got to do something.' So he came in like a lion, and he kept that up."

A native Kansan, he had a long, unexceptional career as a backup big-league infielder. At 27, even before that tenure ended, he managed a minor-league team. Immediately, he knew he had found his life's vocation.

Though a fundamentals freak, he wasn't afraid to question baseball conventions. Mauch became the first manager to master the double-switch. He revised the way fielders were positioned and players platooned. He loved to bunt and hit-and-run, and he demanded a laser focus from players.

"You'd be taking grounders or shagging flies," said Ruben Amaro Sr., the current GM's father, then a Phils shortstop, "and, suddenly, he would appear and ask you about something you had done the previous game. Or you might be in the middle of a hand of bridge and he'd walk by and fire a question at you."

He insisted that players study opposing hitters and pitchers. He forced them to look at baseball as he did.

"If they were to hold a managerial clinic, and just have the managers there, I would say Gene Mauch should run it," Dick Williams, the late Hall of Fame manager, once said.

Above all, Mauch was competitive.

At his funeral, poker buddies related that in his final years, they often had to duck a hurled deck of cards if Mauch's luck was running bad.

He regularly ordered pitchers to knock down hitters. The '64 Phils hit a National League-high 51 opponents. Only one other NL staff had as many as 40.

Always seeking an edge, Mauch was a foulmouthed bench-jockey, riding opponents so hard that, some would claim, they played harder against the Phillies.

He conceded that among players and managers he was despised. "And I don't care," he told a Philadelphia columnist.

"I can remember hating him as a player," said Joe Torre, a Milwaukee Braves catcher that season. "He was on you all the time."

When, in 1960, the Phillies gave Mauch his first big-league managerial job, he led them to last place and 95 losses.

But there was steady improvement, and by 1964, though they couldn't match many NL clubs in talent, the Phils nearly stole a pennant.

Young and inexperienced, they were his creation. As he masterfully prodded them, he ceded authority to no one. He'd ask players what they thought, then ignore their advice. The tactic built respect and fear.

"No player ever came forward and took a leadership role," said first-baseman Danny Cater. "Everyone worried about how Gene might react, whether he'd think they'd crossed him."

The Phillies, in other words, performed so well because they were afraid to fail. Then, when failure came, it exploded like a hidden bomb in their clubhouse.

"We played tight," said Cater, 74 now and living in Austin, Texas. "Some players need a pat on the back, and others need a kick in the butt. I needed a pat on the back - and Mauch never gave it to me."

Still, the manager usually pushed the right buttons. His Phils got stellar pitching; played superb defense; and, when Johnny Callison and Richie Allen weren't hitting, manufactured runs.

"I always tell everyone Gene was the best manager I ever played for," Bunning said. "Especially in '64."

Only Callison and Allen avoided Mauch's platoons.

"It was amazing," Bunning recalled. "He'd take Amaro out and bring in Wine for no apparent reason. Next batter, Wine would make a spectacular play. He just had the Midas touch."

By Sept. 20, when they returned from a West Coast trip, the Phils were in first place by 6 1/2 games. Though only 12 remained, some still sensed trouble.

"We were OK as long as we won," the late outfielder Wes Covington said in 1989. "As the season wore on, we began to concentrate more on Mauch than our opponents."

The way Mauch viewed it, with two weeks left he was going to have to squeeze a couple of wins out of his frayed rotation. Dennis Bennett was hurting. Art Mahaffey was struggling. Rick Wise was 19, Bobby Shantz 39. And he had little faith in Ray Culp.

So over those final 13 days, through 12 games, he started Bunning and Short four times each, twice on two days' rest.

"In his eyes, he didn't feel like he had much choice," Bunning said.

After those 92-win Phillies ended the season a game back, Mauch wanted more seasoned players. That led to the trading of several talented prospects, most notably future Hall of Famer Ferguson Jenkins.

Mauch was fired in 1968. He'd go on to manage the Expos, Twins, and Angels.

In 1982, his Angels held a two-games-to-none lead in a best-of-five American League Championship Series with Milwaukee - and lost. Four years later, despite a 3-1 ALCS advantage - it was best-of-seven by then - and a two-out, two-strike, ninth-inning lead in Game 5, the Angels lost the game and series to Boston.

In spring training 1988, ill health forced him to retire without that World Series appearance he had sought for a lifetime.

"Was Gene Mauch the wrong manager for us in 1964?" said Clay Dalrymple, that team's catcher. "Unless you go back in time and put another manager in our dugout, we'll never know."