Posted on Fri, Oct. 30, 2009
NEW YORK - For a second, Charlie Manuel was lost.
He was sitting in the visitors' dugout at Yankee Stadium before last night's game. Oblivious to the helicopters hovering or the dozens and dozens of cameras anchored nearby, Manuel sat and chatted with a couple of reporters about his days as a kid.
He brought up the name of Rich
Reese, Manuel's former teammate when they were in Minnesota. "A big kid. First baseman. Hit .322 one year in the major leagues," Manuel rattled off. "He went on to become president of the Jim Beam liquor company. Of course, he's retired now."
Manuel talked about working as a public-relations assistant in 1967 for the Minnesota-based Hamm's brewery while he was fighting his way up the Twins' minor league ranks as a player. "It was a great job," he said. "I was making 10-grand as a player and 50-grand doing that, which was a lot of money in those days."
As the 'copters fluttered and the cameras whirled, he continued to recall managerial stops on dusty fields in Wisconsin, Ohio and Colorado Springs. He laughed when he remembered the 96 games his Portland club lost in 1987.
Manuel, 65, can still be that 23-year-old kid who hit for the triple crown in A-ball in the summer and worked for a beer company in the winter. So what if batting practice for the World Series at Yankee Stadium was about to begin? Is this guy relaxed or what?
"Whoa," he said, realizing time had gotten away. "We're getting ready to hit. I gotta watch us hit."
Name 'em
What this Phillies team needs - almost more than a righthanded bat off the bench - is a nickname. Something that in years to come will capture how this collection of ballplayers brought sports glory to this city not seen since the Broad Street Bullies. Now that was a nickname.
The Giants won the 1933 World Series and the Tigers won it in 1935, but they are merely lines in a record book compared to the 1934 Cardinals' Gas House Gang. The Steel Curtain defense led the Steelers to four championships in the 1970s and Michigan's freshman Fab Five sparked an unlikely and amazing Final Four run in 1992.
So here are just a few nominees for a tag for this collection of Phillies:
* The Red Army
* The Bigger Red Machine
* Charlie's Devils
* Philly Pops
* Just wait'll Cole gets right
Feel free to vote on any of these or submit others to the e-mail below or via fax to 215-854-5524. Keep 'em clean.
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