Tales from the White Rat

Anybody who hangs around me for, oh, two minutes realizes that I'm a lifelong St. Louis Cardinals fan. It's part of the birthright when you're from Missouri (along with giving grief to anyone who's a Cubs fan).

That, hopefully, helps explain my accelerated heartbeat Thursday morning when I walked into the lobby at the Mariners' spring training headquarters and was stopped by Jim, who mans the front desk.

"Do you recognize this name?" he asked, holding up a piece of paper.

On it was scribbled "Whitey Heltgow" or something like that.

"Could that be Whitey Herzog?" I asked.

"Yeah, that might be it." Jim said.

"Stocky guy with a crewcut?"

"Yeah, that's him."

"Thanks Jim. Which way did he go?"

"He's in the clubhouse with Bill Bavasi."

It was, indeed, Whitey Herzog and, with the help of M's PR boss Tim Hevly, I hooked up with him in the coaches' lockerroom.

Twenty minutes later, we walked out to the practice field laughing about tales of the Cardinals, fishing in Missouri (he still lives in St. Louis and fishes many of the lakes I go back to every summer), his friendships with my old sports editor in Springfield, Mo., and my college baseball coach at Missouri State University, and why big-league teams don't run like they used to.

My story about Whitey, now 76, runs in the Friday morning paper, but here are some highlights of my 20 minutes with the "White Rat":

--On whether "Whiteyball" will ever work in the major leagues again:
“The ball’s too jacked up and the parks are small now. To be able to do that, you’d have to have parks with 375 (feet) down the lines, 385-390 in the gaps and 450 to center. You have to have power. But I don’t agree that you can’t have movement and can’t run a little bit. Things happen when you do that, but they’re so damned worried today about losing a baserunner.
“I watch baseball today and everybody is so damned scared they’re going to lose a baserunner. I see situations now where there are men on first and third, one out, and they don’t run. Damn fellas, you’ve got to run!”

--It doesn't take a team full of speedsters to create havoc on the bases:
“The problem is that they don’t go on running counts and move the defenses around. I’m not picking out anybody. They’re all doing it. The guy that starts playing like that and has a little bit of movement on the basepaths is going to be a lot more successful. That’s a damned All-Star today.
“The catchers aren’t throwing as good, the pitchers don’t quick-step anymore. I could steal on some of those suckers, and I’m 76 years old!”

--On getting together at the ballpark with Cardinals greats:
“I get together quite a bit with Stan and Red, Brock and Gibson,” he said, referring to Hall of Famers Stan Musial Red Schoendienst, Lou Brock and Bob Gibson. “We do a lot of signings together I stay pretty busy. Hell, I get paid more money now to drink beer than I did to manage.
"I’ve been out of baseball since I left the Angels (as general manager) in January of 1993. I’ve been retired 14 years. But it seems like I’ve been busier now than I’ve ever been. Fishing, going here, going there. I do a lot of speaking and a lot of charity golf tournaments. I’m on my own schedule and I kind of like that."

--On his favorite teams:
"I always thought the best team I ever had was the '77 royals. We started the season 36-36 and ended up 102-60. Won 24 of 25 in September and we had the Yankees down 2-1, then we had some drug problems and lost that playoff in the ninth inning of the fifth game.
"Best team I had in St. Louis was '85 when we lost the World Series to the Royals. We didn’t score any runs and (Vince) Coleman was hurt."

--On winning without home runs.
"We could run but we couldn’t hit it very far. The first time we won the divison (the '76 Royals) we had 65 home runs, then when we won the World Series (with the '82 Cardinals) we had 67 home runs. Milwaukee had 228 that year."

--On his relationship with Mariners GM Bill Bavasi, who credits Herzog with mluch of what he has accomplished in his career:
"I knew his brother Pete when he was at Montreal. I was the director of player development for the Mets and I got to know all the Bavasis pretty well. All the farm directors meetings, at the winter meetings we’d all be talking. I didn’t know Bill well until I went to the Angels and he was the farm director. I told them I’d only go there three years. I didn’t stay three. (Bavasi became the Angels' GM when Herzog resigned)."

"The funny thing about when I went to the Angels, I sat with the scouts in the pressbox, everybody said we didn’t have a decent player in the minor leagues. We didn’t have a prospect. I went through the minor leagues myself and wWhen I came back, I went to Buck Rogers and said, 'We’ve got seven guys who can play in the big leagues next year.’ Buck didn’t believe me. But we started bringing them up and they started to play. We had a good young team. We had Langston and we had Finley."
(There are reports that Herzog was upset that the Angels wouldn't spend money to get the quality right-handed starter he believed the team needed to compete, so he quit and handed the job to Bavasi)

--On whether he had the itch to manage after leaving the Cardinals in 1990:
"I had a relationship with (Cardinals owner) Gussie Busch for 10 years. You couldn’t have an owner and a manager who got along like we did. I didn’t have to answer to anybody but him. When I was the general manager and the manager and I put the team together, he didn’t really know what I was doing. He said as long as I told him before it got into the paper, he was happy.
I'd tell him, “Hey Chief, I just got so-and-so.”
And he'd say, “Ah, wonderful, wonderful.”
Hell, he didn’t know.
I was able to do things that other people couldn’t do without having a lot of meetings and everything else.
"WhenI left St. Louis, I didn’t think I could ever be happy again managing because I could never find another owner like that. Money is such a key now. If an owner doesn’t want to spend the money or he wants to release somebody who’s making money, you can go from a guy who’s a pretty good manager to a dummy in a pretty big hurry.
"In the meanntime, after 1990, I probably turned down four managing jobs for big money and longterm contracts. My wife said to me, ‘Did you ever think they’d offer you that much money to manage?’
"I said, ‘Did you ever think I’d turn it down?’ It doesn’t really make sense, but I did.
I had some good clubs that I could have gone to, but I didn’t think I would enjoy it anymore.

"I haven’t lost a game since 1990, but I haven’t won any, either."