Sparky Anderson died

[Guest metsguyinmichigan]

Just seeing reports that Sparky Anderson died today.

Managed Tom Seaver, and was nice to me!

[soupcan]

Wow - that was quick.

[Valadius]

Well, whenever they say hospice, that means death is coming soon, but yeah, that was very quick. RIP Sparky.

[Frayed Knot]

soupcan wrote: Wow - that was quick.

Well, quick from yesterday's news anyway.
Can't think of the last time I saw/heard from or even about Sparky prior to yesterday so this may be the end of a lengthy process.

[Guest Edgy DC]

WKRP airwaves have gone silent.

[seawolf17]

Sparky used to be a great autograph signer through the mail. About a year ago, folks started getting notices back that his health was too poor to sign any longer.

RIP Sparky.

[soupcan]

Frayed Knot wrote: soupcan wrote: Wow - that was quick. Well, quick from yesterday's news anyway.

That's what I meant.

R.I.P. Sparky.

[metirish]

seawolf17 wrote: Sparky used to be a great autograph signer through the mail. About a year ago, folks started getting notices back that his health was too poor to sign any longer. RIP Sparky.

how thoughtful that his family would consider to do that.

rest In Peace

[Guest LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr]

Shoulda had more time. Guess God wanted to play Captain Hook this time around.

RIP.

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

I'm still in shock at how young he was. Growing up when the Big Red Machine was the shit, this guy was a giant to me.

[Frayed Knot]

Sparky hair wasn't just going 'salt & pepper' before he was 40 but was virtually snow white.
That plus some too much time in the Florida sun lines on his face always screwed up the age perception thing as he was only slightly older than the Rose/Morgan/Perez bunch he was managing.

[Guest LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr]

This is him in his mid-30s.

He was barely 50 with the Tigers.

[Guest attgig]

RIP

[TransMonk]

RIP Sparky.

[dgwphotography]

LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr wrote: This is him in his mid-30s. He was barely 50 with the Tigers.

That has to be Walter Iooss' work.

RIP Sparky

[Willets Point]

Sparky is definitely in my earliest baseball memories. He was manager of the winning team in the first World Series I ever watched in 1984. Didn't know about his Reds career until much later in my life.

RIP, Sparky.

[DocTee]

Took great pride in being the first (and only?) HoFer from South Dakota.

Saw a TV segment years ago that painted him as having severe learning disabilities.

Still recall his Tigers getting off to that 35-5 start in 1984.

[Guest themetfairy]

RIP Sparky

[ashie62]

RIP Sparky, you will be missed.

[smg58]

Willets Point wrote: Sparky is definitely in my earliest baseball memories. He was manager of the winning team in the first World Series I ever watched in 1984. Didn't know about his Reds career until much later in my life. RIP, Sparky.

He was the manager off the first WS winner I ever watched, but that was 1976.

He piloted some great teams. The Reds didn't really need his help, but the Tigers were a textbook case on how to play to matchups.

RIP.

[G-Fafif]

Steve Rushin penned a memorable profile in SI in 1993 dubbing Sparky the heir to the linguistic tango begun by Casey Stengel.

To apply an old line to an old manager, Sparky Anderson doesn't have to be naked to count to 21. We know this because just the other day he mentioned the importance of mathematics. "You have to know your math," he said. "In school, I used to be finished with my math so early, I'd go to the bathroom, come back, and they'd still be workin' on it. Now, when a contractor's throwin' numbers together, I know if they add up." Sparky looks you square in the eye and taps his right index linger to a snow-white temple. "But English?" he continues. "What's the difference? If you're a writer, yeah, you gotta put it all in there or you'll get letters from teachers. But I see now they're even puttin' ain't in the dictionary, so I'm good, man." Sparky beams. "I'm covered." He is a learned man. Sparky frequently precedes his serpentine sentences with the phrase "There's one thing I've learned." There's one thing he's learned...and that one thing is something different every time. "There's one thing I've learned," says Sparky. "Live today the way today's lived. Every father walked through snowstorms to get to school. That's not today. Things change, so change with 'em."

Ron Fimrite also wrote one that sticks in my mind, from the Tigers' magical 1984 season. This passage always got me:

He may have lived most of his life in Southern California, but his roots are in the Midwest and his speech is heartland plain and peppered with ungrammatical homilies. Although he's capable of a certain eloquence. Sparky leads both leagues in double negatives. His politics are solidly Republican, founded on his father's as yet unproven economic theory that "the more millionaires there are, the better it is for us." In baseball, of course, Sparky finds himself bossing millionaires every day.

The Captain Hook thing was perfect. He didn't necessarily have the horses to go nine, so he didn't fool around. It wasn't bullpen wizardry for the sake of innovation. He had to win games. Think about an all-time dynasty built on mostly medicore starting pitching: Billingham, Norman, Gullett (good but always battling injuries), Nolan (who never quite seemed to blossom)...Pat Zachry later...Jim McGlothlin and Jim Merritt earlier (winning 20 games with an ERA over 4.00, which was unheard of in 1970). Wayne Simpson was a comer lost to arm miseries. But what a way to mix and match with the bullpen before anybody else was doing it as regularly or effectively.

I also loved that he had one set of rules for 21 Reds and individual sets of rules for Rose, Perez, Morgan and Bench. Why kid around? he asked -- they're our stars.

And, of course, that he gave Les Nessman an autographed ball.

[G-Fafif]

Though he was quite nasty about New Yorkers in the wake of the 1973 pennant clinching (animals, I believe he called us), I appreciated that three years later that in praising Johnny Bench he was seen as trashing as Thurman Munson.

We should also appreciate his giving up early on Howard Johnson.

[Guest The Second Spitter]

I first read the subject header as "Sandy Alderson died".

[batmagadanleadoff]

I know who my suspect would've been:

[MFS62]

I first heard his name when he came up to the majors as an infielder. (Maybe the Phillies?)
Not the greatest ability, but from the beginning, was described as a "smart" ballplayer.
In his acceptance speech when elected to the Hall of Fame, he said (I paraphrase) "I was lucky to manage a lot of great players. I just got out of their way and let them play."
A lot of other managers have probably done that over the years, but he smilingly admitted it.
He was more than a smart player. Sounds like he was a smart person, too.
RIP, Sparky.
We'll miss you.

Later

[G-Fafif]

Keith Olbermann revisits an admirable episode from late in Sparky's career.

There wasn't a lot of principle flying around in the winter of 1994-95. The owners had pushed the players into threatening to call a stupid strike. The players misjudged the owners and the public mood and struck anyway. The owners stonewalled, cancelled the rest of the season and the playoffs. All but one of the owners recruited "replacement teams" filled with minor leaguers (some of them virtually blackmailed into it) and long-retired players (some in their late 40s) and trotted them out on the field for Spring Training of 1995. And Sparky Anderson said no. The Hall of Fame manager of the Reds and Tigers passed away Thursday, and his successes with both franchises were worthy of all the accolades he's receiving posthumously. But not prominent in these recollections is what Sparky Anderson did when the proverbial rubber met the road in that dark March of 1995, when the owners were ready to put a guy who was on Anderson's first Cincinnati team in 1970 on the mound a quarter century later and pretend it was still the Major Leagues. Sparky Anderson said he didn't want to pick sides in a labor dispute, that his only interest was the integrity of the game, but he just couldn't participate in the "replacement" season. So, much to the horror of his management and the game's, he took an unpaid leave of absence as manager of the Detroit Tigers. When a court ruling forced a settlement on the owners and the "replacements" vanished, Sparky came back for a troubled year in which ownership looked at him suspiciously and even some fans took out on him their frustrations about the strike. It would be his last season managing.

[G-Fafif]

Who else but Joe Posnanski to contemplate George and Sparky?

Some played for his approval. Some played to spite him. Some played to live up to the ludicrous expectations he had placed on them.* Some played to prove him wrong. Before spring training in 1975, he gathered his team together and told them that there were four stars on the team � Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench, Tony Perez � and the rest of them were turds. That was the word he used. Turds. The stars played like stars. The others had T-shirts made with �Turds� on the front and, most of them, they also played like stars. And the Reds won 108 games and probably the greatest World Series ever played. *Examples: 1. �Don Gullett is going to the Hall of Fame.� 2. �Kirk Gibson is the next Mickey Mantle.� 3. �Chris Pittaro is going to be a great ballplayer, and that�s etched in cement.� 4. �Barbaro Garbey is another Roberto Clemente.� 5. �Mike Laga will make you forget every power hitter that ever lived.� 6. �We�ve got some great hitters in Cincinnati, and Dan Driessen might be the best of them all.� Sparky had his baseball ideas, of course. He didn�t care much for the bunt. He preferred speed to power, though he liked having players who could provide both. He believed as a young man that pitchers were disposable, that if they weren�t getting outs, then it was his job as manager to find someone who would. In 1975, he went 45 straight games without allowing a pitcher to complete a game, a record in those days � the nightly hooks were so shocking that people in Cincinnati booed Sparky even though the Reds were leading the division by 10 games. �If you want to stay in the game, it�s like dance steps, boys,� Sparky would say. �You need to play the song in your head like a waltz � one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three. Play it like that, and I�ll just sit right here in the dugout and enjoy it. But you start going one-two-three � four � five � well, we�ll see you later.� Funny thing: As an older manager, Sparky�s Detroit Tigers led the league in complete games once and were among the leaders several other times. His explanation wasn�t that he had changed philosophies. His explanation was that his starting pitchers were better. �I always believed Sparky hated pitchers,� his pitcher Gary Nolan said, repeating the theory often proposed by Anderson�s pitchers, �because he couldn�t hit them.� Yes, Sparky had his baseball ideas. He had his life ideas, too � he believed that ballplayers should have short hair and shiny shoes and they should wear jackets and ties when away from the ballpark. The hardest defeat he suffered � he would tell friends � was when the Reds lost to the 1972 Oakland A�s. It wasn�t because the A�s weren�t great � they would go on to win three straight World Series teams. It was because the A�s wore their hair long. He could not believe that his Reds � HIS REDS � lost to a team of hippies. Most of all, Sparky Anderson�s success was built out of the bond he created with his players. He became famous for some of his quirky sayings like �Pain don�t hurt� and �You don�t invent winning� and �I got my faults but living in the past is not one of them � there�s no future in it.� But so much of what made Sparky Anderson a successful manager was unspoken. �I don�t know why we did the things we did for Sparky,� Pete Rose said. �But we all did. All of us. Johnny. Joe. Me. All of us.� In 1975, middle of the year, Sparky Anderson asked Pete Rose to move from the outfield to third base, a position he had not played in 10 years (and had hated when he did play there briefly). And Pete Rose moved. �We wanted to win for Sparky,� Rose said. �He just had this way about him.�

Players wanting to win for a manager. Imagine that. Anyway, read the whole thing. It's worth your time.

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

"If you don't like Dave Rucker, then you don't like ice cream."
--Madden's column today

[Benjamin Grimm]

Strange to think that he spent so much more time in Detroit than in Cincinnati. I primarily think of him as the manager of the Big Red Machine.

[Guest Edgy DC]

How can you not? His Tigers never played the Mets and his Tigers never achieved dynastic status.

I grew up thiinking (and the Mets TV booth helped me in this regard) that the Reds had a Hall of Famer at seven of eight positions. If you told me that they'd eventually only have three, and one of those (Perez) largely criticized, I'd've not believed you.