Free The Mouth That Roared by Dallas Green Page B

even angrier that the teams he managed in the early 1960s were too young to compete with the rest of the league. But he also had trouble handling a team once it started winning.” In the words of Philadelphia Daily News columnist Stan Hochman, Gene was “a woeful people person.”
    Gene considered himself a manager and a strategist, but not a teacher. He demanded that players be fully formed major leaguers the day they joined his team. This attitude was difficult to understand considering he was 34 years old when the Phillies hired him and not that far removed from his own days as a rookie.
    His in-game strategy reflected his disdain for young players. For a while, Gene platooned Ruben and Bobby Wine at shortstop. He’d fill out a lineup card with one or the other’s name on it, but if he changed his mind once the game started, he’d have no qualms about pinch-hitting for the starter in the first inning . If you’re going to bench a guy, then bench him. But that way of handling players left us all walking on eggshells.
    Gene didn’t care if he made you look like an ass, either. In a game against the Cubs, rather than coming to the mound to take me out, he stayed on the bench and signaled his displeasure with my outing by putting two fingers in his mouth and letting out a piercing whistle. I left the ball on the mound and walked off the field. Yep, Gene was a lousy people person, all right. That act was as unprofessional as it gets.
    Gene hated to lose, which must have made the 1960 and 1961 seasons agonizing for him. Then again, he might have realized the futility of getting worked up about a lost cause. Once we started winning more often, he seemed to take every defeat personally.
    And he threw some legendary fits.
    After a tough loss at Houston in September 1963, a game that ended on a hit by rookie Joe Morgan, Gene raced into the clubhouse and with a couple of violent sweeps of his arm cleared a buffet table loaded with ribs, chickens, and salads. By the time the team came off the field, he had retreated to the shower. We looked around at the mess and wondered if a Houston fan had sabotaged our postgame meal. Some of the food was still dripping off lockers, indicating that whoever committed the crime was still in the area. A teammate with a future in detective work put two and two together.
    “I think Gene did this,” he said.
    A few minutes later, we heard the click-clack of Gene’s plastic shower shoes on the hard clubhouse floor. We all stood in silence as he entered the dressing area. All of us had our street clothes on, except for Wes Covington and Tony Gonzalez, whose wardrobe had taken the brunt of the flying food.
    Gene looked at their stained clothes and growled, “Buy yourselves a couple of suits and give me the bill.”
    After Gene walked back to the shower area, Gonzalez picked a rib up out of Covington’s shoe. “Hey, roomie,” he asked Covington. “Do you think this is still good?”
    *
    Back in those days, a college boy like me was assumed to have the intelligence and communication skills necessary to advocate for his teammates’ needs. That’s how I, by default, became the Phillies’ player representative. The Major League Baseball Players Association formed in 1954, but until Marvin Miller came on the scene 12 years later, it didn’t really have much clout.
    Player rep was a thankless job in the early 1960s. The most frequent complaint I fielded dealt with the facilities at Connie Mack Stadium. Our clubhouse had a radio, but no TV. We had stools, but no chairs. And perhaps worst of all, our training room was located in a room above the clubhouse, meaning an injured player had to walk up a flight of stairs to get treatment. Quinn brushed aside all of these gripes.
    On the road, there was a rule stating we had to wait for our beat writers to finish their game stories before returning to the team hotel. Gene also took his sweet time getting on the bus after games. That meant sitting around