It says something about Jeff Torborg that Billy Martin never really liked him.
By most accounts, the late Yankees manager couldn`t figure him out. After all, Torborg, a coach during four Martin eras in New York, didn`t smoke, didn`t drink, didn`t chew and certainly didn`t carouse. And to Martin, that had to mean one thing. ”He thought I had to be a pipeline to (George)
Steinbrenner,” Torborg said.
Twice they almost came to blows, once in the clubhouse, once on the team plane. Then, in Martin`s last year as the Yankees` manager, they reached a truce. ”By `88, he finally seemed to understand why I didn`t go out drinking with him,” Torborg said. ”Alcohol was in my family`s backround and I was not going to do that for him or for anyone else. And if he was going to construe that as loyal or disloyal, so be it.”
Eventually, Martin came to see that Torborg was sincere. ”A mutual friend of ours told me recently that Billy said I was the only one who called him the last time he got fired,” Torborg said. ”That made me feel good, knowing he mentioned that.”
If it took Martin a long time to get to know Torborg, he was neither the first nor the last. An early favorite as American League Manager of the Year, Torborg, much like the White Sox team he has guided through this improbable season, is an enigma to the general public. Soft-spoken to the press and fans, looking like a financial analyst dressed up in a baseball uniform, he is managing the second-winningest team in the majors. And yet, you get the feeling he could walk down Michigan Avenue in his civvies and hardly draw a second glance.
Some things you should know about Jeff Torborg:
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– He cries easily-at family events, sad movies. ”As a player, they used to take what we called greenies (amphetamines),” he said. ”I never needed any. I`m an emotional person anyway.”
– When he`s particularly frazzled, say, for example, in the late innings of a close game, he will instinctively get down in his catcher`s crouch. Watch him sometime. He bites his nails and chomps his gum pretty good, too. ”He`s not as cool and collected as he looks,” said Sox bullpen coach Dave LaRoche.
– Torborg is happiest in the company of his family, wife Suzie and sons Doug, Greg and Dale. Give him a handful of popcorn or a bowlful of ice cream and forget baseball. The man is in heaven.
Observing him now, it is difficult to imagine that as a player – 10 years with the Los Angeles Dodgers, three with the California Angels – Torborg was, depending on who you listen to: a) fiery; b) a pepper pot; and c) a jackass. That, in order, according to Suzie Torborg, Don Drysdale and the subject himself.
”He certainly wasn`t the one sitting in the corner at the dance,” said Drysdale, a Dodger teammate. ”If you made a mistake or threw a couple pitches you weren`t supposed to, he`d let out a yell. Then he`d walk out to the mound and yell at you some more.”
Torborg was a guy who made his presence known, sort of the Steve Lyons of his day, only no one called Torborg ”Psycho” and to anyone`s
recollection, he never dropped his pants on the field.
”After I was named manager (in Cleveland, June of 1977), I wrote a letter to (former Dodgers manager) Walt Alston apologizing for being such a pain in the rear,” Torborg said. ”I wasn`t real patient, and he put up with a lot of nonsense. But Walt said, `Hey, if you were a cancer in the clubhouse or vicious, that would have been different. But all you wanted to do was play. I could put up with that.` ”
Torborg was a player with limited ability as a hitter (.214 lifetime average) and unlimited intensity as a catcher. ”His socks were just right, his hair was just right. He was never a beer-drinking, tobacco-spitting guy, and that was what was so funny,” said LaRoche, who playd with Torborg in the Angels organization, was a minor-league coach with the Yankees and named his eldest son after him. ”Here was this blond, very intelligent, classy guy from Rutgers, but you better never try to score on him at home plate because I`ll tell you what, he`d just as soon sacrifice his body to prevent you from scoring. He loved that.
”You just don`t expect that from certain-looking people.”
No one ever seemed to read Torborg correctly at first. Not his teammates, who grew close to him despite the fact that he was a college boy when that wasn`t such a popular thing; and not his wife, who first met him in the 7th grade. ”I remember him being very natural, very easy to talk to, a good person, a fine person who treated everyone nicely,” Suzie Torborg said. ”At the same time, most people do not really know him.”
Under Torborg`s high school yearbook picture are the words `happy-go-lucky` and `easy going.`
”But that really was not Jeff,” said Suzie. ”He`s very intense, a perfectionist, very caring to the point where he wants to do everything to the utmost. But he`s not happy-go-lucky and easygoing. It wasn`t true in high school, and it isn`t true now.”
The ”nice-guy” tag is an easy one to pin on Torborg, and would have been a convenient criticism if he went nowhere with the White Sox. But it infuriates Larry Himes, the man who hired him. ”It`s silly and stupid,” said the general manager who selected Torborg from a group of seven candidates, including Art Howe and Jim Lefebvre. ”I wasn`t looking for a `yes-man,` and I don`t think I got a `yes-man.` ”
What Himes was looking for, he said, was a person who could bridge the gap between younger players who made up the bulk of the team, and the veterans. At 48, he had a man who had learned from parts of three seasons as manager of the Cleveland Indians, a man who was ready to finally come into his own as manager of the White Sox. ”The first time I was manager, I had never made out a lineup card,” said Torborg, who received his Masters in athletic administration from Montclair (N.J.) State at 33. ”I really didn`t know what was me. Nothing came naturally. But this time around, I look through the eyes of a former manager.
”I worked with a whole gamut-Frank (Robinson), Dick Howser, Bob Lemon, Yogi (Berra), Lou Piniella, Gene Michael. I can relate those to who I remember playing for, from Walt Alston to Bobby Winkles. I know what I liked, and I try to incorporate that into my personality as manager. But I can`t be someone else. I can`t be a phony.”
Torborg`s players praise his consistency. ”Everyone in here respects him,” said Sox outfielder Ivan Calderon. ”He was the same guy last year when we were losing as he is this year. If we lose, he just says, `Let`s go get `em tomorrow. There`s no reason to panic.` ”
”When he first came in, I was like, `Who is this guy?` ” said shortstop Ozzie Guillen, ”but he has shown me a lot of respect. He`s always the same;
he`s never crazy. And you can ask him about anything in life, not just baseball. He`s not like other managers, where you need an appointment to sit in his office. You can talk to him.”
Torborg isn`t normally a yeller, but he can be. The fastest way a player can make him angry? Being late, lying or showing him up. ”When someone makes an error,” Torborg said, ”who feels worse than that guy? But if someone dogs it on the field, if someone doesn`t give me 100 percent effort within the framework of our team, that really enrages me.”
Although no one will ever witness it other than the player and Torborg, he is more than capable, say his fellow coaches, of getting in that someone`s face. ”You can be a nice guy, but the thing every manager needs to have is some volatility,” said Sox coach Joe Nossek, who also served with Torborg in Cleveland. ”Jeff can air people out when he has to.”
”I`ll go one-on-one,” Torborg said. ”And if it turns out that someone wants to take a swing, well, I don`t think that`s a very mature way of handling things, but I`ve been there.”
Sox coach Barry Foote, who played and coached for the Yankees during Torborg`s tenure in New York, said relating to players is ”the biggest thing I`ve learned from Jeff.”
”He can be hard-nosed,” Foote said, ”but he can also take a kid and put his arm around him when sometimes you want to put your hand around their throat.”
The intensity that burned through Torborg as a player is still there. It`s just held in check. ”I think as I`ve gotten older I`ve mellowed a bit, but patience is a funny thing,” Torborg said. ”It`s like, you can be patient with someone else`s children and the same is true when you`re trying to lead a ballclub.”
He often injects familial comparisons into conversation because if there is anything that defines Jeff Torborg, if there`s anything you should know about the man, it is his unswerving devotion to his wife and sons. He has missed two Sox games this season, once for middle son Greg`s graduation from Columbia University and once for youngest son Dale`s high school commencement. But talk to Torborg about it, and he`ll only tell you how guilty he feels about missing Greg`s graduation from junior high nine years ago.
”I was supposed to make a speech because I was the salutatorian,”
recalled Greg, who will attend law school at Fordham in the fall and, like brother Dale, has spent the summer helping out his father. ”My dad called and he felt so badly about it. I told him it was OK, but it didn`t seem to matter. I told him, `It`s just nice to know you want to be there. It would be much worse to have a father who didn`t care.` We always knew he did. But to this day, it still bothers him.”
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Torborg`s 10 years coaching in the Yankees organization, beginning in
`79, translated into a concerted effort to work near home during his children`s formative years. During that period, he turned down a head coaching position at Princeton and several inquiries regarding front office jobs. Yet he refuses to call those years a sacrifice to his career, and still isn`t satisfied that working near New Jersey made him the perfect father.
”I always felt guilty about not being around like other fathers,”
Torborg said. ”I missed a lot of their games, family barbecues. I remember one time racing home from Yankee Stadium for one of the kids` games, and as soon as I got there, they took him out.”
Soon, a system was developed so Jeff wouldn`t feel like he was missing anything. ”If the VCR light was on when I came home at night,” Torborg said, ”that meant Suzie had taped their game, and I`d get a bowl of ice cream and watch.”
Unlike most major-league clubs, the White Sox, at Torborg`s behest, encourage players to bring their wives on the road and also set aside several ”family” trips each season where children are welcome as well.
It`s that simple with Torborg. Family. Team. A sense of honesty, loyalty. He won`t accept one without the other.
Seattle wanted to interview him for its managing job during his tenure in New York, but the Yankees would not grant him permission. ”Seattle wanted me to fight it, but I said no,” said Torborg, who had an unprecedented seven-year contract as Yankees coach. ”Mr. Steinbrenner had been good to me, and to me, there was no sense fighting it.”
Later, Torborg turned down the Cleveland offer five times out of a sense of respect to the recently fired Frank Robinson. ”It sums up Jeff Torborg because he cares,” Robinson said. ”He goes out of his way not to hurt someone`s feelings. He`s loyal to a fault.”
They are qualities Billy Martin could not have known about Jeff Torborg the first time they met. Or the first time they fought. But you have to assume that eventually, like all the others, Martin figured it out.
At least you hope he did.