If an opposing hitter swung late on a fastball, the Wisconsin Rapids manager would start crooning an old jazz standard from the dugout - "Don't Get Around Much Anymore."

This was 1983, long before that bench-jockeying manager won a World Series and now has the Phillies back in the Series looking to repeat. Charlie Manuel's first managerial job was for a single-A club in a Wisconsin paper-mill town.

"I could fish at night when the game was over," Manuel said Friday when asked about his season managing the Wisconsin Rapids Twins. "I could walk right outside the locker room, there was a river about a block away. I'd walk down there and have . . . a Grain Belt beer, or Old Style. I used to say Old Style was my lucky beer."

If all that sounds like Charlie, understand this was a 39-year-old version. Known as a patient type now, he rarely held back in those days - once challenging his entire team to a fistfight.

But among the losing streaks, interminable bus rides, and squabbles with umpires, team owners and his own players, Manuel learned some of the lessons that helped him mature into a stabilizing influence in the Phillies' dugout.

"To tell you the truth, when I first started managing, I didn't know nothing about the game," Manuel said. "I mean that. About the only thing I knew how to do was play right field, and I played some first base, and I thought I could hit."

In charge of a team of guys all younger than 25, Manuel was all by himself - no coaches - traveling the Midwest League in a beaten-up "jalopy" of a bus. Manuel rarely let on about any game-management ignorance to his young players.

"He was old-school baseball," said Ken Klump, one of his pitchers.

Even if Manuel hadn't gone on to a bigger stage and far more fame, none of his players from that first season would have forgotten their time with Charlie.

"I see him on TV - 'Holy cow, he's so calm.' That was not him that first year," said Kiel Higgins, a pitcher that year, now a police officer in Albuquerque, N.M.

"He did not lack for confidence."

Charlie's rules

Manuel didn't have a lot of rules, his players said. No shorts on the road. Don't be late - that was a big one, even then.

Another of his rules is time-honored in baseball: Don't drink in the same bar as the manager. (Since this was the Midwest League, the rule was waived when the Twins rolled into a town with only one bar.)

"He had a specific way that he wanted his players to play the game - that's 110 percent, all the time - and if he didn't see that, he could get on you," said Paul Mancuso, his closer. "At the same time, he let you get out and play."

After he had retired as a player, Manuel had been a cross-checking scout and roving hitting instructor. He'd work with Twins minor-league hitters for a week, he said, then come back a few weeks later and "they'd be doing the opposite."

To him, that meant the manager was giving opposite hitting instruction. So when Manuel was offered a chance to manage, he liked the idea.

"It was giving me a chance to be around my team, be around the same guys every day," he said.

Manuel had made good money as a home-run slugger in Japan, and he'd tell his players that he didn't need any guff from them, that he was a millionaire and probably the only manager in the minors driving a Cadillac.

But in Wisconsin Rapids, it wasn't a millionaire's life. He had no coaches, no groundskeepers.