by Felipe Alou
But it was more than that. Dombrowski shared with me that he wasn’t much of a baseball player in school. He told me he played a little bit of college football, but it wasn’t what he wanted to do. “I have a passion for baseball,” he told me, and his passion came through louder than his words. I saw potential in him. He was a people person who had time for everyone. And he wanted to learn. He was incredibly committed to the job and to the organization. He wasn’t a know-it-all. He took a bus ride with me and asked a lot of questions. You appreciate that. He was player and organization first, and it’s not surprising to me that Dave Dombrowski has become such a successful MLB executive.
In the Minor Leagues, and especially in Class A ball, you are a father figure. I took that seriously. I saw too many promising careers ambushed by immaturity. In 1977 the Expos drafted both Scott Sanderson and Bill Gullickson—two good-looking kids and pitchers who would go on to have solid Major League careers. At that level it’s like a college team, with players behaving as though they’re living in a frat house. For many kids it’s their first time on their own.
Gullickson’s parents came to me before he was assigned to West Palm Beach and expressed a desire that their boy would be with me. When he finally did get to me, I could see he was a talent. Right out of high school he pitched five shutout innings in his first game as a pro. About half of the team was staying in an apartment complex across the street from the stadium. One day the landlord came to me and complained about some things that were going on, that some of the players were flashing, or what they call mooning, other tenants from their apartment window. It was stupid stuff, kid stuff. I called a team meeting and discerned it was Gullickson and a couple of other guys. I talked to the three of them together, but later I called only Gullickson into my office. I told him I expected more from him, that I knew he was of good character and came from good parents. I also told him his parents hoped he would be entrusted in my care.
“Listen, we’re going to leave it this way,” I said. “Everything starts right now. I don’t want to hear anything new. If I do, I’m going to have to contact your parents.”
Nothing ever happened again. Gullickson kept his nose clean, and he kept progressing, pitching fourteen years in the Major Leagues, winning 162 games.
In 1986 I had a tall left-handed pitcher who could really bring it with an abusive fastball that instilled fear in hitters. But he was a bit wild—on and off the field. One night the team was in Daytona Beach during spring break, so there was a lot going on in the way of partying. At 2 a.m. I awoke to a phone call in my hotel room.
“Is this Mr. Alou?”
“Yes.”
The voice on the other end of the phone informed me that he was a police officer in Ormond Beach, a town just north of Daytona Beach.
“I have one of your players here,” he said.
“What’s his name?”
“Randall David Johnson.”
“You mean Randy Johnson?!”
Randy was driving a scooter on the street with a suspended California license. He had also blown past our 11 p.m. curfew, which I wasn’t happy about. I had to take a cab to the police station and dig into my wallet for $100 to bail him out.
I can only imagine what it must have looked like to have seen a six-foot-ten Randy Johnson riding a little scooter. But that was Randy. He had a girlfriend who had a convertible he would drive around West Palm Beach, with his head jutting above the windshield. I would laugh every time I saw him in that car.
But I wasn’t laughing now. Randy was scheduled to pitch later that same day, and he assured me he would be okay. But he wasn’t. In the first inning he airmailed several pitches over the catcher’s outstretched glove, all the way to the backstop screen, and also walked about six guys. He didn’t last an inning. But he was a good kid after that. I never had any more problems with him. I think Randy learned a lesson that served him well during a twenty-two-year Major League career that saw him garner five Cy Young Awards and a 2015 first-ballot induction into the Hall of Fame.
You see a lot of young talent and a lot of crazy things in the Minor Leagues. I remember one game that merged the two. We were playing the Cocoa Astros in 1977, back in the same town where I started my playing career in 1956 with the Cocoa Indians. All those swarming mosquitoes that were always there when I was a player must have been waiting to reconnect with me, because they were swarming around me again. My players were making fun of the Astros’ catcher because of his large head, which I didn’t appreciate their doing. The Astros, meanwhile, were getting the last laugh because their pitcher, Dave Smith, was not only throwing a no-hitter against us but also pitching a perfect game.
With two outs in the ninth inning, our catcher, Bobby Ramos, was walking from the on-deck circle to home plate for our last chance. I don’t know why, but I turned and looked down our dugout and saw one of our infielders, Godfrey Evans, holding a bat in his hands.
“Hold on, hold on!” I shouted to the umpire. “I’m going to pinch-hit.” Turning to Evans, I said, “You’re going to hit.”
I thought he was going to crap his pants. Dave Smith had been unhittable, nasty, throwing heat. Evans took so long getting to home plate that the umpire had to shout at our dugout to get a batter up.
The first pitch was a sizzling fastball inside. Strike one. The next pitch was a curveball that Evans waived at. Strike two. Smith decided to waste one with his third pitch, throwing a fastball up and in. Evans took an awkward tomahawk swing and somehow connected. The ball blooped over the first baseman’s head for a single . . . and there went the perfect game.
Dave Smith went on to play thirteen years in the big leagues, saving 216 games with a 2.67 earned run average, primarily as a closer. Unfortunately, he died young, at fifty-three, from a heart attack.
As for the Cocoa Astros’ catcher with the large head—he went on to win three World Series championships managing the San Francisco Giants. In fact, he succeeded me in managing the team. And someday soon, Bruce Bochy’s plaque will also grace the Hall of Fame. Bruce has become a good friend, and he and I still laugh about that game.
As for Godfrey Evans, he played two more years in the Minor Leagues before he was released. I have no idea where he is today.
I was fifty-six years old in 1991, finishing my sixth consecutive season managing the West Palm Beach Expos. I expected to finish my career managing there, when the big-league club came calling again. Dan Duquette had taken over for Dave Dombrowski as president and general manager, after Dombrowski left to become the first general manager of the expansion Florida Marlins.
Dombrowski fired Buck Rodgers forty-nine games into the 1991 season and promoted the third base coach, Tom Runnells, to manage the club, even though Runnells was only thirty-six years old, making him the youngest manager in the Major Leagues. Rodgers had a laid-back style, and Dombrowski wanted someone who was more of a disciplinarian. Runnells, who managed the Class Triple-A Indianapolis Indians to the 1989 American Association championship, had that reputation. But Runnells’s record for the remainder of the 1991 season (51-61) wasn’t any better than Rodgers’s record (20-29).
That offseason, after Duquette took over for Dombrowski, he told me he needed a veteran man to help Runnells, and he wanted me to be the bench coach. I told Duquette I didn’t want to do it and to find someone else. I didn’t want to go back to the big leagues. At fifty-six I was getting older, and like a lot of older people I was enjoying life in Florida. I also had a home there, and I knew all of the local fishermen. I was happy. A few days later Duquette called to tell me he hadn’t found anybody else—in reality he never even looked—and that I was the bench coach.
“Okay,” I said. “I guess I’m the bench coach.”
Although I didn’t want to go, there were some side benefits. After coming up in the Pittsburgh Pirates organization, my son Moisés was now with the Expos. So was my nephew Mel Rojas, my father’s grandson from the woman he had been with before marrying my mother. It felt good t
o be with family, but that 1992 season didn’t start off well, even though we had some good talent. In addition to Moisés and Mel, we had Dennis Martínez, Ken Hill, John Wetteland, Marquis Grissom, Larry Walker, Delino DeShields, Brian Barnes, and Spike Owen. We also had some solid veteran players—guys like Tim Wallach and Gary Carter—in the last years of their careers. This was a good team, but we weren’t winning.
The team was tight, too tense, probably because of the way Runnells tried to enforce so many rules and regulations. Runnells liked his reputation as a disciplinarian, even going so far—as a joke—to show up on the first day of spring training wearing army fatigues and brandishing a bullhorn. It didn’t go over well with the media, who skewered him. Serge Touchette, a sportswriter for Le Journal de Montréal, nicknamed Runnells “T-Ball,” because he thought what he did was a Little League move.
We were in San Diego when the Rodney King riots erupted in Los Angeles, and our four-game series against the Dodgers was canceled. Runnells ordered the team to San Diego’s Jack Murphy Stadium for an early morning workout before our coast-to-coast flight later that day to Montreal. That rankled some players, especially the veterans.
In spite of Runnells’s efforts to impose himself as the authority figure, my son Moisés came to me one day when we were standing around pregame on the field. It was a father-son talk in Spanish.
“You know, Papá, to all of the guys you look like the manger,” he said. “The guys keep telling me that you look like the leader.”
I certainly wasn’t trying to present myself ahead of Tom Runnells, but I understood what Moisés was telling me. There was a twenty-year age difference between Runnells and myself, and you couldn’t deny the way that looked. I was also probably carrying myself like a manager because I felt like a manager. Not the manager. But I was a manager. After all, I managed at all levels in the Minor Leagues and in Venezuela, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. I couldn’t simply hide my experience. I couldn’t change my countenance. If you’re around a trade long enough, you carry the air of someone who knows what they’re doing. My job, though, was to help Tom Runnells, and I was 100 percent committed to doing that.
It puzzled me, then, when Duquette pulled me into his hotel room when we were on the road in St. Louis. He wanted to talk. The team was 7-11, not playing to its potential. “Are you helping Tom?” Duquette asked.
I didn’t know what he was getting at. Did he think I wasn’t doing my job? I wasn’t sure. “I’m trying to help him,” I said, “but he’s the manager.”
A short while later we were home playing San Francisco. Clinging to a 3–2 lead in the ninth inning, Runnells summoned our closer John Wetteland. What he didn’t do, though, is shift our fielders to protect the lines against an extra-base hit.
“Are we going to protect the line?” I asked, loud enough so that those in the dugout could hear. I was trying to get Runnells’s attention. He heard me. But he didn’t do anything. He didn’t believe in protecting the line, which I know is the philosophy of some managers.
“I’d like to see this guy pull a 98-mile-an-hour fastball,” Runnells said.
Sure enough, batting left-handed, the Giants’ Kevin Bass pulled a pitch, hitting a three-hop grounder between our first baseman, Tim Wallach, and the bag that slowly rolled into the right-field corner. Bass raced to a triple, and one out later he scored the tying run on a Matt Williams single.
Two innings later the switch-hitting Bass came to the plate again. This time he was batting right-handed against our left-handed reliever Bill Landrum. He pulled the ball down the line between our third baseman, Archi Cianfrocco, and the bag. It led to an explosion of five Giants runs in that eleventh inning, and we lost 8–3. Had we followed basic baseball strategy, we probably would have won that game. Those things don’t go unnoticed to general managers.
We struggled to a 5-4 record over the next nine games before we had an off day on May 21. I went fishing with a group of Expos people, and we were spread out over three boats on Lake Saint Pierre, about an hour northeast of Montreal. I was in the boat with one of the Expos’ French broadcasters, Jacques Doucet, when another boat approached us from the marina and told me that Dan Duquette called and wanted me at Olympic Stadium. I went straight from the lake to Duquette’s office. I was still in my fishing clothes, smelling of fish, smelling awful.
“We’re going to make a managerial change,” Duquette said. “I’m going to fire Tom Runnells. I want to name you the manager.”
His words stung me. If Runnells was failing, then I was failing. I was hired to help him, and now they wanted to fire him. I took it personally.
“I don’t want the job,” I said. “I feel too bad. I feel like I didn’t do enough to help TR. Why don’t you give him more time to get things together? The team is young. And so is TR.”
We argued and debated for what seemed like hours.
“We are making a move,” Duquette finally said. “I’ve already decided. Do you want the job or not? If you’re not interested, I’m going to offer the job to Kevin Kennedy.”
Kennedy was a career Minor League catcher who had worked his way up managing in the Minors and was now the Expos’ Minor League coordinator. I knew him to be a good guy, but good guy or not, if the Expos were going to hire a new manager and the job was being offered to me first, I was going to take it. And I did.
Still, there was one hang-up. Duquette wanted to fire the entire coaching staff. I didn’t want that. “If you’re going to fire all the coaches, then go ahead and name Kennedy the manager,” I said. “Those guys have been with me in the Minor Leagues, and they’re not going to be with me now? No, no, no. Go ahead and fire all of us together and name Kennedy the manager.”
Duquette gave in, and I agreed to manage the team the rest of the season for $160,000, which at the time was the most money I had ever made in baseball. Two of those coaches who didn’t get fired—Joe Kerrigan and Jerry Manuel—later became Major League managers.
It didn’t hit me at first that I had become the first manager in Major League Baseball from the Dominican Republic. I thought about it later. I also thought later about how Montreal, this wonderful and diverse city, the city that paved the way for both Jackie Robinson and my friend Roberto Clemente to play Major League Baseball, was about to be a part of history again.
I had more pressing concerns, though, the first of which was my introductory press conference on May 22, 1992, and then taking over the helm and managing my first big-league game.
I knew there were sportswriters wondering why it took the organization so long to name me manager. Since I had twenty more years of experience over a thirty-six-year-old Tom Runnells, there was the feeling I should have initially been offered the job over him. Now there were questions as to why I was named an interim manager instead of the permanent skipper. Also, because Duquette named Kevin Kennedy my bench coach, there were already rumors that my interim status was so Kennedy could learn from me and then take over the job the following season.
Serge Touchette, the sportswriter from Le Journal de Montréal who had lambasted Runnells for showing up on the first day of spring training wearing army fatigues and holding a bullhorn, was now challenging Duquette.
Touchette asked why I had been given the job only on an interim basis. He pointed out my experience and history with the Expos organization. It also wasn’t any secret, especially to the media, that over the years, the Expos had passed me over five times for managerial jobs. So why the interim title?
“We are going to evaluate him at the end of the season,” Duquette said, with the clear implication that my job status going forward hinged on that evaluation.
I felt a surge of indignation. Maybe it was too much pride. I felt the same way when, after I had played baseball in America, I returned home and told my father I was going to be in the game for a long time. I now knew my level of talent as a player, and I knew I belonged. Now here I was, a fifty-seven-year-old man who had managed thousands of games
and won championships in the Minor Leagues, as well as in the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. I knew I could manage, and I knew I could manage at the Major League level.
When it was my turn to talk I looked straight at Dan Duquette and said, “If an evaluation at the end of the season is going to determine if I’m going to continue to do this, then I am going to be doing this for a long time.”
Little did I know how true those words would prove to be. I would go on to win 1,033 games as a Major League manager, 691 of those with the Montreal Expos, more than any other manager in the franchise’s history.
Years later, in 1995, Dave Dombrowski told Sports Illustrated writer Michael Farber that he regretted how long it took the Expos to name me their manager. Said Dombrowski: “The biggest mistake I’ve made in my career was not recognizing his ability to be a terrific major league manager. He’s one of the best in the game.”
Those were nice words, which I’ve always appreciated. And I’ll also always be grateful to Dan Duquette for being the man who gave me my opportunity. But even with my strong words to him and everyone else at my introductory news conference, I knew they were only that—words.
All I had in front of me was an opportunity.
Now it was time to deliver.
24
A New Beginning
Sitting at my desk as the new manager of the Montreal Expos, I opened one of the drawers and was startled at what I saw—check after check written by players, plus envelopes stuffed with cash. I realized it was money Tom Runnells collected from fining players for violating one of his many rules—including frequent bed checks on the road—which many of the players chafed at. It was a lot of money, more than what would normally be collected six weeks into a baseball season.
