PEORIA, Ariz. — Mike Hargrove returned to the Seattle Mariners this week, numbed by a touch of anxiety nine months after he left the team abruptly last July 1 when he resigned as manager.
Hargrove said then — and maintains now — that he lost his passion to handle the everyday chores of managing, that he couldn’t ask a commitment of his players what he wasn’t willing to deliver himself.
There have been other theories why he left — that health or Ichiro Suzuki also were factors in his departure — that Hargrove flatly denies.
“There are always people out there who don’t want to believe the truth,” he said Tuesday.
Hargrove is back in Peoria at the request of general manager Bill Bavasi, watching players and giving his observations.
“I may get into uniform; I probably won’t,” he said. “I’ll just walk around and look at the hitters, go down to the minor league side and see some of those kids. I’m scheduled to leave Sunday but I may leave before that. It’s up in the air.”
He still has the red pickup truck he bought after he resigned as manager, and it’ll be handy this summer when he manages the Liberal Bee Jays, a college-level team in southwest Kansas. Liberal is less than an hour’s drive from his hometown of Perryton, Texas, and the Bee Jays play in the seven-team Jayhawk League that spreads nearly 450 miles from Liberal to Joplin, Mo.
“The last time I took a 10-hour bus ride was 1988, from Albany to Williamsport,” Hargrove said. “That was a long one. I may have to drive my truck and follow the bus. That bus is a nasty looking thing.”
Until that season begins in June, Hargrove will continue a life he now loves.
He and his high-school-sweetheart wife, Sharon, have spent time together at home in Cleveland that didn’t exist during the 35 years he was so deeply involved in baseball.
For about 20 minutes Tuesday, Hargrove sat in the Mariners’ spring training clubhouse and reflected on his sudden departure last year, his life now and whether he still has the itch to manage.
What was it like walking back into this building?
Hargrove: “It was a little tough. I was fairly nervous. My stomach was in my throat a little bit. In a lot of ways it felt good, in some ways it felt uncomfortable.
“I saw all those guys (the players) back when the Mariners came into Cleveland in August, so it wasn’t that at all. It was coming in and for the first time not being in uniform that was nervous. Nervous probably is the wrong word. It was uncomfortable, but I was not unsure of the kind of reaction I would get.”
Did you manage this team differently last year knowing so much was at stake?
Hargrove: “I didn’t. We had starting pitchers who for the most part didn’t pitch deep into the ballgames. The whole idea is to win and to be a legitimate contender, and you’ve got to take advantage of an opportunity when it presents itself. If you sit there and wait for tomorrow in order to save today, then you end up chasing your tail. I didn’t manage any differently. People may disagree with that.
“I know I never had a sense where I tried to manage to save my job. If you start doing stuff like that, you’re ensuring the ending you don’t want. If you start going against what you believe and who you think you are, then you don’t have a chance and you shouldn’t be doing it anyway. I know I never did that.”
Would more consistent pitching have changed your decision?
Hargrove: “I don’t know that. I made the decision when I made it, and for the right reasons. There were no sinister manipulations behind it. The decision I made then was right for me and my family, and I think for the Mariners. Do I regret making the decision? Not at all. I’ve enjoyed the time off to be with my family, I really have. We’d won eight games in a row before I made the decision to leave, so I don’t know how much better it can get.”
There have been “sinister” theories mentioned as reasons for your departure. How to you react to that?
Hargrove: “If you react to it at all, you just give credence to the sinister theories. I don’t know how to react other than to say what I said then, that it was the truth. There were a lot of people who didn’t want to believe that. But there are people who believe that the U.S. government took down the towers.”
Was July 1, your last day as manager, the toughest day of your career?
Hargrove: “Yeah, it was tough. It would probably rank right up there with when I finally made the decision the day before. I didn’t totally decide until I was on my way to the ballpark the day before.
“That was a tough day. When I talked to Bill (Bavasi, the Mariners’ general manager), that was tough. Probably the toughest thing I’ve ever had to do was to tell the players. But maybe the most gratifying and satisfying day of my career was when that game was over on Sunday and I walked in and they all (the players) gave me a standing ovation.
“I’d walk through the fires of hell to be recognized by the people who depend on you for leadership. To get a reaction out of them the way they attacked that game that day, and then the standing ovation in the clubhouse, I broke down.
You made your decision before the game on Saturday. What was it like to manage that day?
Hargrove: “It was a little different. It wasn’t difficult because nobody knew except Bill and I, and I would imagine Chuck (Armstrong, M’s president) and Howard (Lincoln, M’s CEO) and my wife.
“There was a little bit of nostalgia — one more day and we’ll never see this stadium again as a Mariner manager, probably. It was sad. I didn’t do this with a light heart. It wasn’t, ‘Yea, I’m out of here!’ There was a lot of sadness.
“But no regret.”
How long did that feeling last?
Hargrove: “We stayed around Seattle probably four or five days after that, trying to get the house on the market, buying the pickup. The Mariners had offered to let us drive the Tahoe home and ship it back, which was absolutely fantastic. I don’t know many organizations that would do something like that. We bought the pickup and didn’t have any need for the Tahoe after that, so we turned it back in.
“The first couple of days were a little out of sorts. It’s the middle of the season and for the last 35 years I’ve been involved in something on the field.
“I watched the games on TV. The only time I didn’t follow it real close was on the drive home. But on my cell phone I subscribed to the internet so I could get the scores and read some of the things you guys were writing about it.
“Then when I got home I would catch the highlights on ESPN. There wasn’t a whole lot in the papers back there on the Mariners.”
When were you able to finally let it go?
Hargrove: “The first time was probably when I realized the winter meetings had come and gone and I hadn’t even thought about them happening. The time when it sank in that I’d made the right decision was when spring training started — I went online to see how the Mariners had done that day — but I haven’t missed it.
When spring training rolled around, was there anything in your body clock that said it’s time you should be back on the field?
Hargrove: “No.”
What has the past nine months together meant to you and Sharon?
Hargrove: “Sharon said she married me for better or worse, not for lunch.
“This is the first time that Sharon and I haven’t had somebody at the house. Shelly is a freshman in college, so we’re officially empty-nesters. It’s been liberating in the fact that we went to Tucson (their second home) and didn’t worry about any of the kids. We went for one week and we stayed for 3½ because we didn’t have to come back.
“Sharon said on Valentine’s Day, ‘Do you realize that every year for the last 30 years, this is the day you left for spring training?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I thought of that this morning when I woke up.’
“But it’s not a sense of loss or a sense of missing anything. It doesn’t mean I don’t still love the game or at some point in time that I won’t want to get back in. But for right now, I’m in a good place.”
Who’s gotten more out of the time together, your or Sharon?
Hargrove: “We’re both getting a lot out of it. Sharon and Shelly went down to the University of Cincinnati on Thursday to look at the campus. That’s the first time since I resigned that I haven’t slept in a bed by myself.
“I woke up in the middle of the night thinking, ‘What’s wrong here?’ All of a sudden I realized that’s what it was. That was kind of a comforting feeling.
“We’ve gone to movies together, which we would do sporadically. But we figured out that we don’t like the same kind of movies. We’ve agreed not to go to movies together because the kind I like she doesn’t, and the kind she likes I don’t. One of us is going to be bored to tears. I told her I would go to see ‘Juno’ but she said I didn’t have to.”
Have you seen “P.S. I Love You?”
Hargrove: I haven’t.
Don’t.
Hargrove: “Thanks. I took her to see ‘No country for Old Men.’ That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. No longer will we go to the same movie together.”
Does Sharon miss the ballpark?
Hargrove: “I think she does.”
Then folks in Liberal had better watch out this season?
Hargrove: “You know Sharon. She kind of sort of talked me into this thing. She’ll deny that she did, but she did. She kept saying how much fun this would be, working with kids again, and on and on.
“All of a sudden it dawned on me, ‘Sharon, this will be fun for you because we’ll be 45 minutes from our hometown and you’ll be there most of the time while I’ll be up there sweating my ass off.’
“She’s kind of the Ballpark Mom. She enjoys going to the park and talking to people. She would talk to that chalkboard as long as it didn’t move.”
Are you finding things to occupy your time?
Hargrove: “Sharon and I were talking about that a couple of days ago. I know people who had retired and most of them talked about how it was OK for the first couple of months, and then they had to find something to do. They had to get a job here or there to keep them occupied to keep them from going nuts. I haven’t found that to be the case at all. I’ve enjoyed it.
“If you can find enough things to do in Cleveland in the middle of the winter to keep yourself occupied and busy, then I think you’re probably going to be OK. There’d be times I sat there feeling guilty thinking I should be doing something, thinking I should be fixing something. But I’ve fixed everything that needs to be fixed and taken care of everything that needs to be taken care of, so I stopped feeling guilty.”
Will getting past this period — spring training and the beginning of the season — convince you that you have moved on?
Hargrove: “I convinced myself I made the right decision and I’m beyond that. That’s not to say it won’t bite me in the rear. That’s why I left my name out there in case I do start having interest.
“I’ve said that if the right job came along I might be interested. Maybe I mis-spoke when I said that. The job here was the right job. This was a great job, great people, a great organization, not afraid to spend the money, not afraid to go out and be aggressive and make things happen and make us a winner. That’s what they’ve done.
“One thing I feel real proud about my time here is that I feel like I was a part of what turned this around, from a 99-loss season in ’04 to every year we got better and won more games. I take a lot of pride and satisfaction in the fact that I was a part of doing that. They did a lot of right things while I was here.
“So this was the right job. I’m not looking for a job that’s better than this. That’s not why I resigned. I don’t know that there is a better job managing in baseball than this, to tell you the truth.
“But I don’t want to close the door. I may want to come back as a third-base coach, a bench coach, or maybe I’ll get the itch to manage again. That may happen. I don’t know that it will, I don’t know that it won’t. If it doesn’t, that’s OK. If it does, then I’ll have to look at it and see if it’s the right thing to do.
“But for right now, I’m in a real good place for me, for Sharon and my family.”
Read Kirby Arnold’s blog at www.heraldnet.com
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