Charlie Manuel on fishing, making the majors and managing

Long past nightfall, the man they called "Meat" back in Cleveland grips a baseball bat while standing over a home-decor magazine that he has designated home plate. Meat's lefty stance is a product of the Swing God, aligning perfectly the holy Baseball Chakras - head, shoulders, elbows, torso, thighs, knees and feet to achieve optimum balance.

He is lecturing on how you need to shrink the zone when you're ahead in the count 2-0 because you've earned that right, man. You're in control. Why give in to the stinking pitcher? Now . . . you could be sitting breaking ball. Depends on the stinking pitcher. Sometimes a 2-0 fastball is as obvious as a boy's advance on the girl he likes. You need to study, man. Know what that pitcher likes to throw when he's in deep kimchi.

If there were a real stinking pitcher and this weren't Meat's living room with the light fixture perilously close, he'd look for the ball belt-high on the inside part of the Belle magazine and hack away. Meat demonstrates in slow motion. It's hard to believe Meat's pushing 70. The years melt off him. Swinging a bat is drinking from the fountain of youth.

Even in slow motion, Meat's lefty swing is sweet. Straight out of a manual.

Memory sweeps through Meat. He's been here before. Back in '69, inside the lobby bar at the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C., with the Swing God himself. Ted Williams, then the Washington Senators' manager, dropped a magazine to the floor, stood over it with his fists bridged and began lecturing. The strapping young ballplayer drank it down like a smooth whiskey. Even the part when a woman dug her high heel on the magazine, and Swing God angrily pushed her aside and sniped, "Get off our plate. Can't you see? We're talking hitting here."

Now the teacher, Meat had summoned his Missy a moment earlier. Long past nightfall, Meat's longtime fiancée was in the bedroom. "Where's my bat?" he calls out. "Missy! I need my bat!"

Charlie Manuel needs his bat. He has wisdom to share.

10:57 a.m.

The threat of rain has chased away most of the action from Cypresswood Golf & Country Club in Winter Haven, Fla. So the amiable man at the guard shack by the visitor's entrance to the links' adjacent community perked up for the brief company.

"You're here to see Charlie Manuel?" he asks. "Go right ahead. Have fun!"

It would be dishonest to suggest any other expectation for the day, although our original plans of fishing for crappies fell casualty to the weather. A visit to Charlie's house is a visit to Wonka's factory, with beer.

At 19, Manuel reported to the Appalachian League for rookie ball. That was 50 springs ago. You know, if you count Winter Ball in the Dominican and Puerto Rico, he has either played or managed in 11 leagues. Every line on his face is born from a sunned field at some level in the game and bears an accompanying story. He is a firsthand witness to everything in the modern game. Baseball's St. Peter.

But that's not entirely it. He makes you feel good in a familial way, his soul sprinkled with pop-pop dust. Raul Ibanez once told me, "When Charlie walks into the clubhouse, a player will strain to get into his plane of vision so he'll stop and shoot the breeze with them."

The truth about Charlie is that he could get a teenager to spill his inner thoughts, but perhaps the bigger feat is how he'll get him - and anyone else - to listen. Peter knew how to tell a good story, and Charlie could give Peter a run in that department.

When I arrive, he is seated at the dining-room table reading a story written by Ty Cobb in 1952 for Life magazine. In the piece titled, "They Don't Play Baseball, Anymore," Cobb takes a hatchet to the modern player, saying "They don't belong in the same breath with the old-time greats." He cites their insatiable appetite for the long ball as the primary reason. Charlie laughs, and says, "Let Missy show you around the place, then you gotta read this."

It's more like South Beach than central Florida, the three bedrooms more than enough room for just two of them. Newly remodeled, with Missy's vision, the decor is modern minimalist, with cathedral ceilings, monochromatic walls and clean lines. The kitchen employs a white backsplash and spills into the living room. The result is an attractive, open space that pushes the eye toward a wall of glass doors that lead to the lovely patio and pool. Off to the side is an outdoor kitchen with a custom grill.

Charlie interrupts the tour. "Check out my fryer. Holds 12 gallons of oil. Can have one hell of a fish fry with that thing."

11:48 We retreat to the add-on room to the right of the kitchen - Charlie's "man" room. Two lush leather recliners face a wall of bookshelves and a large flat-screen television tuned to the MLB Network. Missy kindly delivers us a tray of pita and hummus, Fritos and crab dip, and two beers poured into frosted glasses, which apparently were quite expensive and a gift from Jayson Werth after he signed that fat contract with the Nationals.

Cheers, Chalooch. Here's to a different result next fall.

He'd still like to shoot that Rally Squirrel. Make Rally Squirrel stew. We are more than four months removed from that run-less, ruinous Game 5 against the Cardinals . . . one bloody nil . . . and he still expects a different result when he plays the series back in his mind. If it were a Friday night in August, instead of one in October, the ball [Chase] Utley hit is gone. Utley hit that thing on the damn screws, you know? Deepest part of the yard. And how 'bout Raul's ball? Missed it by a fishing wire. Just got under it and the ball caught too much air.

I love the way he says Raul. Sounds like Rah-ooh.

"I thought Raul was going to bail us out there," he laments. "We were tight at the plate that whole series. Remember Game 3? Ben Francisco saved us with that home run. [Chris] Carpenter was much better in Game 5 than he was in Game 2, but we helped him out. I felt like we were afraid to get to two strikes."

Yes, the Cardinals were hot - and, yes, he noticed them that last week of the season making a desperate push for the wild card. Entering the regular-season finale, he knew the situation between the Cardinals and the Braves. But no way was he going to have his team throw one in Atlanta.

Champions never lay down.

Says so right there in that booklet on the shelf. Looks like a term paper. Twenty-two pages inside a clear plastic covering. Charlie's Manual. He wrote it, Missy typed it. He's about to re-read it, because pitchers and catchers report in less than a week and he re-reads it before every spring training and molds it into a speech before the first full-squad workout.

You know, the name used to be spelled like that . . . MANUAL . . . back when his great-great-grandfather fought in the Civil War. The "e" slipped in somewhere between then and when his father and four uncles fought in World War II. His dad, Charles Fuqua Sr., then fought in Korea and then fought Ezzard Charles in the Golden Gloves in New York City and then became a Pentecostal preacher and moved his large family to rural western Virginia. He was so strict that if Charlie wasn't home by 8 o'clock, he would begin the whippings, which made it difficult when Charlie had a football game 50 miles down the road.

"You know, I still know all of my high- school football plays," he says. "Learned the game from my sister Brenda. We'd watch and she'd tell me who moved on a false start."

Brenda came just after Charlie, who came just after Janet and Vicky, and before Sue, Teresa, Roger, Bob, Steve, Darryl and Press. By the spring of his senior year in high school, Charlie had married Wanda and was becoming a father; his father had just killed himself at the family home in April 1963, and directed Charlie through a suicide note to mind the entire family.

The Twins outbid the Yankees and made him a bonus baby. The $12,000 was a godsend, and he earned another $8,000 that was designated for scholarship money when he bypassed going to college and reported straight to rookie ball.

His first assignment, in the Appalachian League, was in Wytheville, Va., nearby where Uncle Preston and Aunt Dean lived. He stayed with them, earning his keep by pulling weeds and tending to the garden, and helping Preston smoke and cure meats. Pork shoulder was his specialty.

Throughout his playing days, Charlie worked various offseason jobs. There was the carpet factory, where he had the 3-to-11 p.m. shift and made $1.65 an hour. He regularly picked up the 11 p.m.-to-7 a.m. shift through the night, and once worked 26 straight doubles until he was so tired his boss told him to go home. "And you know what?" he says proudly. "He paid me for that shift."

He also worked in a saw mill, and later sold cars in Minnesota. He turned the later into a side business of making offers on fleet and leased cars, and earned a 2 percent commission on the cars that were sold. When gas prices had reached $1 a gallon, there was a run on Pintos and Mavericks and he did well, and the extra money helped since he was making only $800 a month playing Triple A ball in Albuquerque.

In '69, at age 25, he had a monster spring. With Twins star Tony Oliva holding out, Manuel made the team. At the end of the May, he was hitting .311 but then injured his ankle. He wound ending the season with an 0-for-36 slump. . He played the next three seasons with a limp, got lost on the roster in a numbers game before being traded to the Dodgers' organization in '73. In the middle of September the following season, he was called up before a big game against the Reds and stroked a clutch RBI single. "It was a Jack Billingham breakin' ball," he says, "and I got a standing ovation."

2:30 p.m.

Funny how he says it. That he'd "looked for nine" anywhere. Good ball in the Dominican Republic. Got caught in a conflict in Santiago, D.R., once. They were shooting from the Bell Tower, and so everyone bunkered down in the cellar of the Hotel Matum. Played cards and got drunk.

At the end one season, he had a double-hernia, the kind that leaves intestines protruding through the abdominal wall, much worse than, say, Placido Polanco's sports hernia last year. The story is not meant to be a slight on Polanco but merely the quest to "play nine" somewhere, anywhere. So he had surgery at a hospital in St. Paul, Minn., one morning at 5:30 a.m. and left the following morning, flew to Puerto Rico by way of Atlanta, played rightfield that night with stitches on both sides of his groin and won the game with a base hit in the ninth inning off Dennis Leonard.

The morning he left the hospital, the phone rang in his room.

"How are you feeling?" a man asked.

"Good. I'll be fine."

"We are glad that your operation was a success," the man said. "We would like you to come to Japan to play baseball."

When he deplanes in Tokyo, they usher him into a room at the airport. It's filled with media and he's wondering who generating all the fuss. After the press conference, his interpreter, Luigi, escorts him to a disco and his eyes grow wide. He had never seen a place like it. The crowd of people. Strobe lights and loud music and never-ending trays of food. An emperor's bounty.

And then he returns to his hotel room and there is a futon propped up on cinderblocks and plywood, a crude attempt to replicate a Western bed. The closets are busting with sweatsuits and baseball equipment.

"Better get some sleep," Luigi told him. "You have a long day tomorrow."

Luigi returned at 5:30 in the morning. A minivan painted with the Yakult Swallows' team colors - pink and Carolina blue - waited outside the hotel to take Charlie about 120 miles from Tokyo. He peered out of the window at the rugged Japanese countryside. They were heading east toward the active volcano in the distance, but direction meant little to the man from rural Virginia. He had no idea where he was. He became even more confused when the van stopped at the base of a mountain.

The rest of the Yakult players were running up the side of the mountain. He was told there were 169 steps to the top. He made 39 before his wind started to give out. He trudged the rest to find three baseball fields carved out of the mountain. There were tents and a makeshift clubhouse. Now the workouts would begin. First, a run in military formation around the mountain, then dead-man drags and belly-crawling under fences. Mercifully, they broke for lunch and Charlie was handed a bowl of sloppy-looking noodles with a half-cooked egg on top. When they resumed workouts, baseball finally appeared on the agenda, beginning with batting practice. The rest of the team gawked as the American crushed towering fly balls that got lost in the clouds.

The ball carried very well in Japan. "This is going to be fun," Charlie said to himself.

That day, he was never so sore, and Luigi took him for a soak in a traditional Japanese bath house. He plopped on a stool and rinsed off with hot water from a pan before entering the 3-foot pool of scalding sulfur water.

"The water was so hot, it felt like my skin was peeling off," he recalled. "But I was too tired to move. I'm over in the corner nodding off when I see 50 women enter the room and take their clothes off. The women had just gotten off of work, and it's Japanese custom to go to the baths. I think I'm dreaming. They enter the water and waddle toward me. They're completely nude. I'm thinking, 'Is this real?' They begin touching my face and my hair and feeling my arm. Nothing happened. I was too tired to do anything even if they wanted to."

The American country boy with a limp found a home in Japan. They called him Aka-Oni.

The Red Devil.

"In Japan, they play all this music, beating on the drums," he recalls. "Little girls are running around. They got a couple of mascots. It's entertaining, like a big party. When you do something good, they'll applaud you. When you don't, they liked to throw things at you. Like sake bottles out of the stands. You always had to wear a helmet. But I loved it."

4:14 p.m.

I must pause for a moment and take you north, and back in time a few months.

You see, midmorning on a Tuesday grays the inside of a diner, kind of like bingo night at a church. A shift worker in his 30s lingered at the counter over a half-eaten Danish and a cup of coffee. A booth of three young, cleanshaven South Jersey cops dined on omelets, but the place was overrun by retirees and seniors. And so the man who shuffled through the tinted-glass doors beneath the grand stone façade of Ponzio's Diner in Cherry Hill blended in like another cheesecake inside the bakery window.

He was tall and sturdily built, with a heavy-footed walk. Wisps of white hair peeked out from his Titleist ballcap. A few customers paused with faint recognition. Did they know him from the club? Another full-time hacker? Shrugging, they went back to their newspapers. Indeed, it was a spectacular September day to own.

And then, folded into his booth in a backroom, a bowl of oatmeal in front of him, Charlie Manuel suddenly became besieged by well-wishers. Word had spread of his presence. Now it wasn't odd that he was there. His other home is nearby, and he's always been a guy who patronizes diners. Something about the hominess. But his presence became a big deal as a throng clawed for his attention and signature.

I remind him of that morning.

"I never pictured myself as much of a rock star," he says, smiling, "but at the same time, I kind of enjoy it. When I used to play baseball in Japan, I was considered a good player, a big player. I was popular. Then when I retired and quit playing, I went home and nobody knew me. I kind of felt that. Attention is something you might not always think you like or enjoy, but you know, I've come to see it as a really nice thing."

You can barely remember the time when they slung insults at him in Philadelphia. The era of goodwill and winning dulls his first days here. The hick barbs seem charming now. He heard them all, especially how he couldn't master the

National League double-switch. "The minute you become a manager, you become dumb," he says. "When I was the hitting coach in Cleveland, I was actually smart. I was here when the Phillies lost their 10,000th game, and they wanted to blame me for all 10,000."

Seriously, after all of those years in the game, do you really think the double-switch was hard math to him? Seriously, after all of those encounters with people like Billy Martin, who used to quiz him in the Twins dugout about moves? "Billy demanded that you be in the game," he says. "That you watched the game. Sometimes his back would be to the field and he'd say, 'What do you think, Manuel? What would you do?' And if you stuttered, he'd say sharply, 'Answer me! What do you think? Hit-and-run?' "

Seriously, after being a minor-league hitting coach, a major-league hitting coach, a minor-league manager, a major- league manager, a crosschecker, a free- agent scout, an advanced scout, you think he doesn't know the basics?

The genesis of the double-switch canard occurred early in his tenure with the Phillies. Twice, in one week, he was ejected, and both times the double-switch came into play, and there were communication problems with him lurking back in the tunnel. "Listen, there are times when I'm just not going to do it," he explains. "There were times when it was the sixth inning and I wanted to get another at-bat for Pat Burrell."

We talk about the Cardinals series . . . One bloody nil.

"I know I should have played [Wilson] Valdez over Polanco," he shrugs, sarcastically. "I've heard all of the second-guessing. I got news for you. I wouldn't have been able to sleep at night knowing I played Valdez over Polanco. Thinking I didn't give my team the best possible shot at winning because I did something desperate. I know Polanco was hurting, but I'd rather take the chance of Polanco blooping one into right and knowing he'll play good defense at third than to play a backup player who's a borderline major- leaguer, and that's not meant to disparage [Valdez]."

Every decision he makes has reasoning behind it. Like the time the Phillies were playing in Arizona. Pat Burrell was 1-for-16 with 12 strikeouts lifetime against Randy Johnson and Charlie had him in the starting lineup. Then-bench coach Jimy Williams sidled up to him before the game.

"Burrell? You see his numbers against Johnson?" Williams asked.

"I saw 'em."

Well, Manuel explains, the day before Burrell had hit three balls real hard. They resulted in outs, but the swing and the approach were there. Burrell had three hits, including a homer, that day against Johnson.

Everything Charlie does, he reiterates, is calculated, even if it's a subtle word to Shane Victorino before a game, "What a beautiful day. It's hitting season. Don't want to be left out."

Hell, he says: "I've gotten thrown out to get my team up. Depends on what happens on the field and how we're playing. I think it's important. It's a timing thing. When you're sitting there and it seems like the team's dead, I think it's OK to go out there. Sometimes the umpire will miss a call and they know they missed it. They'll admit it and say, 'All right, Charlie, I probably did miss it.' And I'll tell them, 'I'm not going back there. I'm embarrassed. I'm embarrassed for my team. You gonna ring me up or am I gonna stand here forever?' I'll tell them a few other things, too. I got all the magic words. The best game for me to manage is when I do nothing. That means we're playing well. The worst thing a manager can do is to try to do something to help your team win the game. Just keep your cool."

That's one of the axioms in Charlie's Manual. So is building a bond with your players.

"You have to let them know you're pulling for them," he says. "You need to let them know you care. And you sugarcoat nothing. I'll tell you that we need Jimmy Rollins to be healthy and in the lineup and that I'd like to see my guys take more batting practice and that Shane needs to be consistent in his approach every day. There's nothing I will say to you that I wouldn't say to my players' faces."

6:09 p.m.

"You hungry?" he asks. "Feel like ribs?"

Missy drives, and she tells a story how Charlie never wears his second-place rings, and Charlie says he has plenty of those: from Japan, Cleveland (twice), the Phillies, and there are still probably some others. But what does it matter? Second place doesn't deserve distinction, and that includes a silver medal. "That's why we gotta win it this year," he says. "No foolin' around. We need to win the World Series."

Peebles Barbecue is a 25-minute drive from the house, and it's nestled in the middle of a cluster of homes, easy to miss if not for all of the cars lining the grass parking lot.

There are only a few items on the menu. Pork ribs, pulled pork, beef brisket, cole slaw and potato salad, and there's no alcohol. Just sweet tea and soda. And there is no coffee or cake at the end of the meal. You simply collect all of those used napkins dripping with barbecue sauce, push your plate to the middle of the table and pay the tab at the counter. The screen door squeals open and the night air feels cool and country-washed as we dally back to the truck. Charlie shuffles by unnoticed. You wonder if they would care to recognize anyone down here.

8:10 p.m.

We stop for a brief visit with Missy's son, who's a baseball coach for a local small-college team and lives in the same Cypresswood community. Rain has postponed his ballgame. Later, I ask Charlie if his stepson had big-league aspirations, and he said that with a young family of his own, he prefers the college route. Too many roadblocks and too little pay in the minors, and then there's all of the moving around.

Charlie's first job as skipper was for the Class A Wisconsin Rapids of the Midwest League in 1983. When he arrived in the town of 14,000, it was 15 degrees and his team couldn't practice for a week because of snow. When it finally could, he had to rake the field and mow the grass, and put in home plate and the pitching rubber, which he inserted incorrectly. There were 22 players, no assistant coaches and one shower, and if you flushed the urinal, the water turned ice-cold. "I had just come from Japan, where I was making some good money. I took that job, and it paid $15,000," he muses. "At times, I thought to myself, 'Why am I doing this?' But I loved working with the players. Money didn't matter to me. I wanted to teach. I wanted to work with the hitters and teach people how to play baseball."

The Rapids began the season 9-39 and finished it four games over .500. "I thought, like a lot of people, that I knew everything about baseball," he says. "The only thing I knew was a little bit about playing rightfield and hitting. I knew nothing about the rest of the game. I finally got a pitching coach when Chicago fired Dave Sylvester, and we took off. You know who the trainer was? Me. I taped ankles in a figure eight. Our medicine cabinet was in a tackle box. We had aspirin and tape . . . tough skin. No ice."

A year later, he moved to Orlando for two seasons of Double A ball and then on to Triple A Toledo and Portland. Beginning in '88, he spent two seasons as hitting coach of Indians, but when manager Doc Edwards got fired, Charlie found himself back in Triple A. He served three seasons in Colorado Springs and one more in Charlotte before returning to Cleveland to again instruct hitting.

Of all his stops, Cleveland is the only one that makes him grow wistful. For a man this deep into life, with his accomplishments in a sport that often wanders too far into nostalgia, Charlie resides in the present. For all the yarn he likes to spin, rarely does he romanticize the old days to denigrate the current ones. Cleveland is as close as it gets. "We could be down five, six runs and then in the seventh, eighth, sometimes ninth inning, we would mount a rally," he says. "Albert Belle would say to me, 'Relax, Meat, we got this.' And sure enough, he'd go and knock in some runs. Didn't matter who was on the mound. [Rick] Aguilera. Lee Smith. [Mariano] Rivera. Man, my Indians team . . . I'd throw 4 hours of BP sometimes. Never less than an hour. My guys would come get me if I wasn't already out there."

8:58 p.m.

Back at the house, the pool is lit up, casting a metallic-blue glow against the backdrop of the moonless Florida night. Inside the wall of glass doors, the magazine serves as home plate on the tile floor and Meat has his bat. The perfect digestif.

See how his top hand is relaxed? It's there to guide your swing. You know when a guy is squeezing the bat. You can see tension in the knuckles. Control yourself. Control the adrenaline. Don't stride too quickly.

Meat pauses. "We have to be more patient," he says. "We need to have more plate discipline. When you have doubt or fear, you don't follow the ball or stay on the ball, and that's not recognizing the pitch. The whole secret of hitting is getting a good ball to hit.

"I would like to see Ryan [Howard] stay on the ball, and bat straight through the ball. If you're early, you hit ground balls. If you're late, you hit fly balls. Howard is a big, strong power hitter. He's not the kind of guy who chokes up on the bat. I call that being able to handle the bat. I think Ryan is a left-center, right-centerfield hitter. That's where his strength lies. To me, he's hitting the ball well when he hits it up the middle."

He points the bat to a ball that's not there. He likes to hit off the top of the ball. This way, the bat plane will go through the sweet spot. Mike Schmidt was palm up, palm down when he hit the ball. He had a quick, short swing, and a powerful swing. He felt like he swung down on the ball, but if you get a tape

you'll see he was hitting right through it. People say that Swing God uppercut the ball. But Ted Williams told Meat, "I carry my hands low, but they never beat me high."

And if you really want to be a top-flight hitter, you see the spin on the ball and the depth perception. You can read when to hit. There's a dot caused by the seams on the ball. The better the breaking ball, the tighter the spot on the ball. Small dot equals sharp breaking ball. A fastball has no dot.

OK, now hard throwers. Let them supply the power. Start your swing earlier. Make it shorter and more compact.

If the stinking pitcher is a sidewinder, what he is looking for?

Release point.

Meat pulls his ballcap down. "Right," he says. "So I'm gonna pull it right down here, by the eyebrows. I wanna cut him off and not see the delivery. Then I'm gonna cut off anything high. I'm looking for the ball down and in."

11:05 p.m.

Meat is walking me to my car, and he suddenly turns around.

"You know," he says, "I can walk with my back to the cage and tell you where the ball is hit. I can close my eyes and listen to the ball. If it's a quick sound, the ball is hit into the ground and it's a ground ball. If it's a hollow sound, it's in the air."

That's a neat trick.

Meat gives me a knowing look. Under the floodlights that line the house, his face is the color of cotton candy, and it tells many stories. But there are more to collect.