On the noisy '93 Phillies, a quiet man was unforgettable

In the middle of the night during the late 1990s, long after the crowds and vendors and cleanup crews had vacated Veterans Stadium, security guards started to get reports of a tiny old man in white wandering like a specter through the empty corridors.

Pasquale "Pete" Cera, a loyal and devoted Phillies employee since the 1940s, was nearing 80 then and in the early stages of dementia. He resided in a rented room in South Philadelphia during the season and each winter moved in with his single brothers in Hazleton.  So when the disease began to jumble his familiar world, he clung to the place he knew best, the warren of rooms in the old stadium's bowels.

"He always got there at dawn and stayed after midnight," Michael Cera, his nephew, recalled recently. "He loved it there. He would have slept there if he could. But then he started walking around the Vet in the middle of the night and he wouldn't go home. The security people called us and that's how we realized what was going on."

Darren Daulton's death last week refocused the spotlight on the 1993 Phillies. That roster was loaded with personalities, players whose quirks, tics, and personal failings were as prominent as their mullets.

As the Inquirer's beat writer, I profiled most of them during the wild eight months from spring training to Joe Carter's home run. But if I have one lingering regret, it's that I never got around to Cera, who died at age 86 in 2004.

How could I have missed what might have been the clubhouse's most obvious feature story? It was Cera, after all, who had to scrub the clay and tobacco juice from the dirty uniforms that earned those Phillies a national reputation.

"I've never seen anybody dirty a uniform like [Lenny] Dykstra," he once told me.

Cera was easy to miss. Not much more than 5-feet tall, dressed in white from head to toe, he was perfectly content in the shadows. After games, he moved inconspicuously through the clubhouse, pushing his basket filled with dirty socks and jocks through clusters of players and sportswriters.

The son of Italian immigrants, he led a remarkably simple life. Unmarried, he had no house, no car, not even a driver's license. A devout Catholic, Cera attended Mass several mornings a week. His life was his work and he worked tirelessly in baseball for 58 years, most of them in the Phillies organization. Through the years, he served as the team's trainer, traveling secretary, groundskeeper, equipment manager, gofer, launderer.

In his final decades, tasked with duties many would find demeaning, he performed them with an impressive devotion. The players, at least those who bothered to notice him at all, loved him.  To them, former Inquirer columnist Frank Dolson once wrote, Cera was "a combination mother, father and favorite uncle."

The roly-poly clubhouse attendant was also an unofficial mascot, and when players were feeling frisky, he was often their target. Cera once got hog-tied to his airplane seat. On another occasion, Bobby Wine glued his shoes to the floor.

But he gave it right back. He constantly threatened to tell Larry Bowa's mother about her son's salty language. And once, after he struck out four times in a game, Dick Allen asked Cera why he hadn't come for his uniform.

"Why bother," Cera answered, "you didn't even break a sweat."

Allen was particularly close. In the early 1960s, he'd been a pioneering black player in segregated Little Rock and Cera the minor-league team's trainer. On a road trip to Alabama, Cera stood up to a cop who was threatening Allen and some black teammates.

"This little, wee, tiny man shook them up like he was 6-foot-5," Allen recalled in 2004. "He didn't back off one iota."

Others felt the same way. In his 1995 Hall of Fame Induction speech, Mike Schmidt thanked him.  Former Phils manager Frank Lucchesi said Philadelphia should remember Cera as "the greatest guy in baseball history." Richie Ashburn, who called him one of the nicest people he'd met in a long baseball career, was one of hundreds of Phillies who annually got Christmas cards from Cera.

He always got a full share of Phillies postseason money and proudly wore a 1980 world-championship ring. But he would have done whatever the team asked him without the promise of extra rewards.

"He didn't care what he had to do, whether it was washing the uniforms, picking up equipment, whatever," Michael Cera said from his home near Hazleton. "He just really loved what he did."

Cera was so without ego that you sometimes got the impression he would have preferred to be invisible. When family members tried to persuade  him to sit in the dugout during games so they could see him on TV, he refused.

"He didn't like being in the limelight," Michael Cera said. "He was too busy working."

For me, the moment that best captured Cera came late on the night of Oct. 13, 1993, just minutes after the Phillies had beaten the Atlanta Braves in Game 6 of the National League Championship Series.

Stepping momentarily out of range of the incessant champagne barrage, I found myself in the hallway that led to Cera's laundry-room lair.  As the adjacent clubhouse exploded with joy, I watched as he continued to stuff uniforms into a washing machine, seemingly oblivious to it all.

After a while, he slammed shut the washer door and moved slowly to the doorway. There, like a child spying on his parents' noisy party, he poked his head outside and glanced briefly at the celebration.

Pete Cera smiled. And got back to work.