Stubbornly, baseball always has insisted to Don Zimmer that he was a manager. Zimmer kept believing it was true, his conviction causing lasting regret in such outposts as Boston, Texas and Chicago, especially Boston, the one place that has firmly refused to adore him.
Giving Zimmer a baseball team to run is like handing the emergency room to a witch doctor. Medicine should never interfere with magic, and a hunch is as good as a hit and run.
Zimmer is my favorite baseball person of all time.
When I saw Zimmer in spring training, he initially mixed me up with a Boston columnist. Thorns from his past must all look alike. When I reminded him that I was the Chicago quibbler, he got it sorted out.
“You weren’t as tough as Boston,” he said.
Sometime in the next couple of weeks, Zimmer is going to be leaving baseball, for the second and probably the last time. He had thought it might be as early as Friday. He told the Yankees as much, thinking Joe Torre would be taking over again.
Recalling how Zimmer left Chicago, for no good reason other than his own obstinance–he wanted to be appreciated as much as he wanted security and got the door instead–a bum right knee and a sense of it being time seem reasonable justifications.
“Sandy Koufax retired,” Zimmer has said. “Nobody is going to miss a .235 hitter like me.”
Whenever Torre returns to manage, the Yankees will not be worse for having Zimmer as temporary cartoon in charge. He has managed not to ruin the Yankees in the short time he has had his chubby hands around their throats. He has, in fact, managed the Yankees as well as anybody ever.
The irony should not be lost on the fans of the ’78 Red Sox or the ’89 Cubs. Zimmer is going out managing at .700.
“This team,” he said of the Yankees, “is going to be easy to manage. They’re calling it the greatest team in history. How can I possibly mess this up?”
The day we chatted Zimmer had just agreed to take over during Torre’s recovery from prostate cancer surgery. Zimmer’s own right knee was aching and he was anxiously waiting out a scare on a stomach disorder, which subsequently proved to be nothing. He had been practically pried out of his own sick bed by George Steinbrenner to stand in for Torre.
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At 68, Zimmer gave baseball and the Yankees one last scrap of himself, a piece of their spring in his own autumn. They and we should be grateful for every shared moment.
Zimmer quit baseball briefly in the middle of the ’95 season, leaving Colorado for his home near St. Petersburg, Fla., ready to be a grandfather, he told himself. He collected $1,000 in Social Security, the only money in 51 years he has ever made outside of baseball.
And then Torre called him to Yankee Stadium just to sit on the bench, to be a sort of a dugout companion, more than a gesture, a novel strategy.
“I consider myself very lucky,” Zimmer told me. “I went from Social Security to two World Series and a playoff.”
Zimmer may be the final piece of pure joy in baseball, the last link to baggy pants and bus rides, a kid who started in Brooklyn and finished in the Bronx, stopping in Elmira to get married to his high school sweetheart at the ballpark before a game.
Every player should have been around him, and many were, just to soak up from Zimmer the privilege of being in the game. We saw some of what Zimmer represents in Sammy Sosa last season and that is what captivated the world as much as the home runs.
Baseball had to be seen again as Zimmer always saw it, fresh and new daily, through the eyes of wonder, not for sponsors or agents or statistics or salaries or egos. A simple game, to be played hard and with heart.
What would Zimmer have made of the White Sox taking it upon themselves to ban their own cell phones? Cell phones? Zimmer never got used to hair dryers.
Zimmer still considered the division title he won with the Cubs to be his greatest achievement as a manager and I still consider him directly responsible for blowing the playoffs to the Giants. Every seat-of-his-pants decision Zimmer made during that season 10 years ago went right for the Cubs and every one went against the Cubs in the playoffs. Live by the gut, die by the gut, and as I recall Zimmer was dieting that summer.
We talked about that too, and he said he would have done nothing different, including leaving pitcher Mike Bielecki in the game.
I then went off and wrote a column about Chris Chelios abandoning Chicago for Detroit, got caught up in Final Four obligations and left Zimmer parked in a notebook.
He was right. I’m not as tough as Boston.