Pete Mackanin's spring twist: Now he's manager
It was a dark day for Pete Mackanin. The Phillies had just finished a disappointing season with a .500 record, ending a run of five straight National League East titles.
It was a dark day for Pete Mackanin. The Phillies had just finished a disappointing season with a .500 record, ending a run of five straight National League East titles.
The misguided initial blame for the fantastic fall was placed on hitting coach Greg Gross, first base coach Sam Perlozzo and Mackanin, who was Charlie Manuel's bench coach that season. All three were immediately fired after the final game of the 2012 season in Washington.
"It was disappointing, but I had been fired before for what I felt like was no good reason," Mackanin said last month during a Phillies winter banquet stop in Lakewood, N.J.
Stick around baseball for 48 years and you are bound to be fired a time or two for no good reason. It is highly unlikely, on the other hand, that you'll become the manager of that same team less than three years later, and Mackanin realizes that, too.
"You kind of learn to roll with the punches," he said. "Obviously, I didn't burn any bridges, but . . . I do bring it up when I'm having some drinks with my friends. I'll say, 'What kind of industry am I in where three years ago I got fired by the organization as a coach and now I'm the manager?' It is an odd industry."
Equally strange is the fact that this season will mark Mackanin's 48th trip to spring training but his first as a big-league manager.
"It is new to me," he said. "For 48 years, my entire adult life, I've been going to spring training, so in that respect it is business as usual. But it's kind of interesting because I will have a final say about how we're going to go about doing things and what we're going to zero in on to try to make a difference."
More about that in minute.
After being away from the team for just one season, Mackanin rejoined the Phillies as manager Ryne Sandberg's third-base coach in 2014. He became the interim manager in the middle of last season when Sandberg resigned, but it seemed improbable that he'd be anything more after Andy MacPhail became the team's president in waiting late last June.
Mackanin, 64, had no previous connection to MacPhail, an established front-office man who had opted for a much sterner, high-profile manager when he hired Buck Showalter during his previous executive stop in Baltimore.
Mackanin was not going to manage to win MacPhail's approval.
"I never wanted to do it so I would be the guy he would hire," he said. "I was going to be myself. If I was 45 years old I would probably be more in tune with that. 'What does he like? Does he like to fly-fish?' I wasn't doing that. I decided if they like what I do, great. If they don't like what I do, well, I'm not going to be phony. I was going to be the type of manager that I've always been."
It ended up being the type of manager MacPhail wanted to keep around even though Mackanin's approach is far different from what Showalter did with the Orioles.
"They have one key common denominator," MacPhail said. "They want the player to be as good as they possibly can be. They want to introduce that player to a place where he has the best chance to excel."
Mackanin, by all accounts, was a master at communicating with the players.
"He had a great rapport with everybody," Phillies bench coach Larry Bowa said. "That was true with guys who played and even the ones who didn't play. He talked to them all. It does help that he speaks Spanish. He let guys know that he played and he understands how hard the game can be. Here's an example: Cesar [Hernandez] missed first base and was called out and when he came back to the dugout, Pete looks at him and says in Spanish, 'Hey, Cesar, that's what the bags are there for.' "
Mackanin believes that managing the players is more important than managing the game, which is something he admired about Manuel. The Phillies manager also believes the game should be played properly and he has some unique opinions about how to achieve improvement.
"I'm going to bombard weaknesses rather than checking the normal things off the list," he said.
He felt one of the team's weaknesses last season was baserunning and he has hired former Phillies second baseman Mickey Morandini to focus on that aspect of the game. Once the games begin, the Phillies will spend an inordinate amount of time on it.
The motivation for a more narrow focus came from an experiment Mackanin conducted as the Montreal Expos' outfield coach in 2000.
"I only played a handful of games in my career as an outfielder, so I decided I had to come up with a way to teach that aspect of the game," he said. "So I picked two areas to focus on. One was cutoff plays and the other was fielding balls hit close to the wall and off the wall. I zeroed in on those two areas and we vastly improved. We led all of major league baseball in assists . . . and Vladimir Guerrero's error total went from 19 the year before to nine. And then I got fired at the end of the year."
Stick around long enough and it is bound to happen for no good reason in this peculiar game of baseball.
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