It seems like almost everyone in West Tampa, Fla., between the ages of 62 and 90 has a story about Lou Piniella when he was growing up.
Tales of tirades and temper tantrums, of amazing athletic ability, of impish boyhood rascality have been retold to the point of renown.
There’s this one from 1961, when Piniella’s team was playing in the Colt League World Series in California:
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“We’d taken a trip up to one of the mountains and we were walking along a ledge toward a waterfall,” Paul Ferlita, a boyhood friend, recalled a few years ago for the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times. “He and [Tony] La Russa rolled a log down the side and my father held them back from the group and lectured them while the rest of us walked ahead.
“They tried to catch up and ran along the edge of the mountain and Lou fell and tumbled for quite a while before he hit a big boulder. It was the only thing between him and a 2,000-foot drop. If he hadn’t hit the boulder, he’d probably have been killed.”
Yes, it was “that” La Russa, another tough kid from the hard-working, blue-collar, bilingual West Tampa neighborhood of immigrants, where being second was not tolerated.
Piniella and La Russa, teammates and rivals growing up, are now major-league managers. Piniella, who will be introduced Tuesday as the Cubs’ skipper, will be managing his fifth team; La Russa, who began with the White Sox, is managing his third team in St. Louis.
They still remain friends. Not “best” friends, but their boyhood bond has fostered a mutual respect for where they have been and what they have achieved. Between them, they have won six manager-of-the-year awards (four for La Russa).
“I met him when I was 10 and have known him ever since,” La Russa said.
Boyhood bond
And what was Piniella like during those years when they were Colt League and American Legion teammates and rivals at Jesuit and Jefferson high schools?
“He was really a hot-tempered, great athlete,” La Russa said. “He was a great basketball player, a great baseball player. He was a really good, competitive player, I thought, a terrific winning player, and he carries that into his managing.”
But hot-headed?
“Oh, yeah,” La Russa replied. “Even when he signed as a minor-leaguer, some of the things he did were on the crazy side. And he had that in high school.
“But he’s a very smart man, and over time, I think he understood that to be successful, he had to tone it down a little without losing his competitive desire. His mellowing-out may be just turning it down a little bit to where he wasn’t going crazy.”
That could mean Cubs fans won’t be seeing the legendary base-throwing, dirt-kicking, hat-stomping madman who tormented umpires and fired up fans during stops with the Yankees, Reds, Mariners and Devil Rays.
But they also won’t be seeing a pacifist preacher of protocol. Piniella, 63, remains volatile, a dormant volcano capable of eruption after a year away from the dugout.
Ejection collection
Piniella will change the atmosphere at Wrigley Field, if not the culture.
Unlike the departed Dusty Baker, he is not afraid to criticize his players, never reluctant to speak his mind. Nor does he shirk from arguing arbitrarily.
He is, admittedly, a disciple of his former Yankees manager Billy Martin, as down-and-dirty old-school as they come. A believer in doing things the right way and making no excuses when they go wrong.
He has been ejected, as a player and manager, about 75 times, which is believed to rank second among active managers to Atlanta’s Bobby Cox, who is approaching 120.
Once, when asked how he feels about being thrown out, Piniella replied: “I always feel contrite. I feel like, `Why did I do that?’ When I was younger, it was a pretty good rush. Now I don’t get excited as much.”
Fourteen of those ejections came as a player during his “Bronx Zoo” days with the Yankees.
`Always on edge’
Beginning with his Colt League days, Piniella’s baseball life has been volatile.
“Let’s put it this way, he was always on edge,” said Mets manager Willie Randolph, a Yankees teammate for 10 years and one of Piniella’s players for three after he became manager. “He hated failure. He just loved to compete.
“He was one of the most fiery and competitive players you’d ever want to be with. He was a total team player and his attitude and will to win rubbed off on a team.
“People get on him about his temper and stuff, but it’s not about temper. He just loves to beat you and to be accountable for what he does, and that does rub off on other players. He didn’t want you to get him out. He made sure if you got him out, you were going to battle him tooth and nail.”
And yet, to those who know him, there is also a twinkle-in-the-eye part of Piniella. Some even claim to have seen his soft side, although it was surely out of the public eye.
A playful side
He enjoys a camaraderie with reporters and is open with his opinions. But at times, he has a little kid’s mischievousness, too, as surprisingly quick with a smile as he is with a one-liner.
In the 2000 American League playoffs, when he was managing the Mariners against the White Sox, Piniella called time and trotted out to first base, where he whispered something in Mike Cameron’s ear. The rest is sad history for White Sox fans.
“I told him the NASDAQ was down 113 points today and that Cisco was a hell of a buy,” Piniella said afterward.
“Lou was able to separate that competitive spirit on the field with a very good-natured, needling camaraderie in the clubhouse,” Randolph said. “Nowadays, you don’t see that as much.
“Back in his [playing] days, we had some of the best needlers in baseball and Lou was at the helm. He could take it and dish it out. So he would have fun. But on the field he would try to cut your heart out.”
It was just the way things were done in the West Tampa neighborhood where Al Lopez, the famous “El Senor” manager of the White Sox and Indians in the ’50s and ’60s, was so revered.
A natural athlete
Unlike the light-hitting La Russa, Piniella was a natural athlete. In high school, he was an All-America basketball player who averaged 30 points and once scored 57 in a game.
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But a broken ankle, suffered in Colt League, limited him to baseball and he became an NCAA College Division All-American in his one season as a University of Tampa outfielder.
In June 9, 1962, he signed with the Cleveland Indians. In the 1963 expansion draft he went to Washington, which traded him to Baltimore in 1964. He was traded back to Cleveland in 1966.
Piniella spent three seasons at Triple-A Portland, finally marrying his Tampa girlfriend, Anita Garcia, while he was there. They will celebrate their 40th anniversary in 2007.
His minor-league odyssey continued–some say his frequent moves were because of his ever-growing reputation as an unmanageable hot head–when the Seattle Pilots picked him in the 1968 expansion draft, but the Pilots traded him a year later to Kansas City.
That was his big break, or at least his first one.
In 1969, Piniella collected his first major-league hit and scored the first run in Royals history. He went on to win the AL Rookie of the Year Award.
Yankee connection
His real fame, though, came after his 1973 trade to the Yankees, where he fit right in with owner George Steinbrenner’s free-wheeling style.
Steinbrenner took a liking to the feisty kid, later naming him manager, then general manager (1987), interim manager (1988) and finally announcer/adviser (1989).
The two remain friends. They sometimes meet in Tampa–where they both live–at Malios Restaurant, a well-known hangout for local figures large and small.
“The two biggest things we have in common,” Piniella once said of Steinbrenner, “is we both like to win and we’re both very sore losers.”
In 1990, his second year as the Reds’ manager, Cincinnati swept to the World Series title in an astonishing upset of the Oakland A’s, managed by La Russa.
Their paths have intertwined since, including head-to-head competition when La Russa managed the A’s and Piniella the Mariners.
Mistakes intolerable
So what kind of manager is Piniella?
He certainly doesn’t have the “cerebral” reputation of La Russa. His strength is emotional preparation more than in-game strategy. He has very little patience for pitchers who don’t throw strikes, or with lethargy or a lack of fundamentals.
When he became manager of the inept Devil Rays in 2003, his first priority in spring training was to make sure they played the game correctly.
“Making mistakes is not tolerable,” Piniella’s pitching coach, Chris Bosio, said at the time.
“That’s one thing Lou is very big on, minimizing mistakes. If you do it wrong [in drills], you will do it again until you get it right. There are no exceptions. He wants it done right.”
What does Piniella bring to a team?
“Presence, intensity, trying ultimately to have the perfect game,” Bosio said.
Getting there is what is important to Piniella, not the means. In 1991, the Major League Umpires Association filed a $5 million defamation suit against him when he claimed umpires were biased against his Reds. The suit went nowhere, but it helped lead to Piniella’s exit as manager.
Still a showman
He wound up in Seattle, where, on May 17, 1994, he was ejected for the first time, using 16 kicks and four hand scoops of dirt while trying to cover up home plate.
In 1996, he was ejected three times during a 10-game span. And in 1998, Piniella kicked his cap five times after being ejected, finally flinging it into the stands–where it was tossed back onto the field by a fan.
Players were seen trying to suppress smiles.
“I don’t know how anybody can think of that many things to yell,” then-Indians manager Mike Hargrove said.
They say Piniella is mellower now, that the fiery spirit that pushes him has been tempered with time.
But if it sometimes seems Piniella has fallen over an emotional cliff, remember, when he was younger he almost fell off a real one.
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